The Girl Who Climbed Everest

by Sue Williams

  ‘We talked about what happened on Base Camp, with the earthquake, and she talked about how single-minded we both are,’ Alyssa says. ‘We both have goals that we’re determined to achieve, and she said sometimes that makes life difficult. She said she knew I’d be thinking of going back, and that it was good to be so passionate about life. That was great, talking like that. It really helped, and all over again, I knew I needed to get back to Everest.’

  At the same time, she knows an eagerness to return, a readiness to train physically hard for it and being mentally and emotionally prepared for another assault, is only a fraction of what’s needed. The biggest barrier, as ever, is financial.

  Her biggest sponsor of her 2015 trip, Acquire Learning, is not able to help fund another climb in 2016, and Alyssa knows others of her past sponsors might blanch at the thought of forking out again after the failure of two previous attempts. They might even rethink how dangerous it is, especially for a teenager coming up to her nineteenth birthday, and not want to be seen to be encouraging such a potentially treacherous venture. She’d already cheated death twice in the foothills of Everest. To be helping send her up further a third time could be considered almost reckless.

  Her old sponsor, Mountain Designs, comes forward, however, and invites her to help promote their new range of clothing, ominously named White Limbo after one of the most dangerous routes up Everest along the north-west ridge, which has a 50 per cent fatality rate. They’d like her to do the first testing of their gear on Everest – although obviously not on that approach. She happily agrees and, as well as providing so much of the gear she’ll need, they also throw in $5000 for expenses.

  Every little bit helps and Alyssa works hard at pushing former sponsors and possible future sponsors to come on board. With the help of her agents, Ensemble, she and Glenn set up a new Summit Club, asking twenty companies each to contribute a modest sum and become part of the venture. In return, Alyssa will speak at functions for them and offer free tickets for any other functions at which she’s presenting. It sparks fresh interest, and a number, including Steve Keil from Laser Plumbing and Electrical, make a commitment to come on board.

  ‘I think the hardest thing was that there was a lot of doubt now about whether I could actually make it a third time,’ Alyssa says. ‘The last two years had shown everyone that anything can happen up there. You never know, and you can’t control circumstances. The mountain’s in charge. But I had faith in myself, I knew I could do it. And the whole of Nepal wanted climbers to succeed in 2016, too. They needed the season to work out.

  ‘Of course it was at the back of my mind that there was a chance something could go wrong, but I couldn’t afford to have any doubts. I could only imagine how tough it would be if I didn’t go and I was forced to sit at home hearing about other people summitting and reading all about it on the internet. I knew I had to put everything I’d got on the line. And in the meantime I had to work at keeping my fitness up so I’d be ready to go if we could pull it off. I wouldn’t be able to afford to climb any more mountains in the interim, so I vowed instead to be the fittest and strongest I’d ever been to make up for it.’

  She also takes a job as a waitress in a local Chinese restaurant to help contribute money towards the trip. She’d never actually got around to finishing her schooling at home and is now starting to regret not working to pursue her HSC as, without it, she doesn’t have too many choices of work. She hates waitressing, but tries to view it simply as another challenge. She’s awkward with customers, impatient with their orders and finds it strange to be spending time with the other restaurant staff, young people her own age, which is something she hasn’t experienced since leaving school so many years ago.

  In addition, some of the customers recognise her and want to ask her about Everest, which she finds hard. There’s fresh interest in the mountain after the release of the hit British-American movie Everest in Australia in September 2015, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Debicki. The film is about the 1996 disaster on Everest, when a blizzard struck climbers both ascending to the summit and trying to get down, killing eight people. Alyssa steadfastly avoids it. She’s seen enough death on Everest for real; she doesn’t want to see a Hollywood version, however accurate it might be. Besides, she is totally focused on experiencing the summit herself, rather than watching it in a movie. So every time a customer brings up the subject, she fixes a smile on her face, answers politely and reminds herself that every cent she can earn will get her closer to her goal. Glenn, watching on, silently applauds his daughter.

  ‘I think it was very, very hard for her, on so many levels,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t playing to her skillset at all! She’d just come back from a huge adventure and seen life and death in its rawest form on Everest, and here she was getting hell from people when the kitchen muddled up orders or brought dishes out at different times, or they felt their coffee wasn’t hot enough. I’m sure at times she found it was hard to take too seriously, but she tried hard at it, and I was proud of her for giving it a go. I thought it was good for her, and I know she found it quite humbling.’

  Glenn works out how much he can afford to pay from his Adventure Professionals trekking business, and starts thinking about approaching banks for a loan to cover any shortfall.

  Towards the end of 2015, he also makes the decision to move from Toowoomba to Brisbane. His company is going so well, but he’s having to commute to Brisbane two to three days every week for meetings. It would be easier, really, to set himself up there and just travel back to Toowoomba to see the family instead. Alyssa stays at her mum’s during the move and prepares to join him in Brisbane once he’s settled. Accordingly, she quits her restaurant job with a sigh of relief, but then finds another job in a cafe at a shopping centre in Brisbane.

  Life in Brisbane gradually assumes its own routine. Work takes up a lot of Alyssa’s time, learning to drive and fitness training even more. She also spends time looking after her brother Christian or youngest sister Samantha, who come to stay with her and Glenn for weekends. Christian, now twelve, still doesn’t really understand the concept of Everest, but seems to realise his sister loves climbing mountains and asks her when she’ll be off again. Samantha, eight, is fascinated by Everest and really excited by the prospect of Alyssa one day reaching the top. She does a project on it at school and often talks proudly about her big sister to her teachers and classmates.

  By the end of February 2016, things are starting to look up. Glenn’s business is going great guns now he’s at the heart of the action in Brisbane, and he finds he can afford to contribute more to another Everest expedition. Another movie comes out about Everest that month, the British-Australian documentary Sherpa, about the 2014 deaths on the Khumbu Icefall, and he goes to see it without Alyssa. He talks to her about it, though. He finds that watching the horror as it unfolded on Everest and the disputes between the Sherpas and foreign-owned expedition companies who wanted to continue their climbs regardless, brings his daughter’s experience that year into stark relief. It’s good for her to have someone so close who understands, but she still resists going to see it herself.

  Glenn also talks to the banks, in earnest, about loans, showing them his business plans and projections of future earnings as equity. In the back of his mind, he formulates a Plan B, too. If he’s turned down, he knows a few friends who’d be willing to help him out. He also suggests Alyssa give up her job and get back to training harder and for longer hours every day to make sure she’s ready if all the pieces of the puzzle do suddenly fall into place.

  She does two big sessions of training a day, with running, endurance sessions in the gym, kettle bells and weights, squat training, tyre-dragging, push-ups, rope climbing, everything, and mostly with a pack on her back and wearing her elevation training mask to strengthen her lungs. Her oxygen tent is by now worn out, so she just steps up use of the mask. She becomes a familiar figure in Brisbane, wearing it to run laps around Taylor Range and up and down
its highest peak, Mount Coot-tha.

  Alyssa then embarks on a special nutrition program written for her by Scott Evennett, a former special-ops soldier turned fitness trainer and life coach. It consists of lots of lean protein and vegetables, bringing in more good carbs as it heads towards the time when she’d depart for the Himalaya, if she does end up going. It also introduces more lentils, rice and the other kinds of food she’ll eat on the mountain, so her body will be ready for the change in diet when she gets there. She then travels down to Sydney for some sessions of mind and body training with him.

  ‘Alyssa’s ability to know her own physical strength and emotional intelligence became very apparent to me early on,’ says Evennett. ‘She has the ability to see anything that comes to her as a problem or an issue instead as a challenge, and then take it on. That’s her real strength. She doesn’t waste any energy on emotions.’

  His training involves both hard physical work, and playing with the mindset. He gives Alyssa one of his favourites: running 10 km, but stopping every five minutes for seventy-five squats. The slower she runs, the more squats she has to do. The faster she can cover the course, the fewer. Knowing how much that kind of work is going to hurt before you actually start tests someone’s strength of purpose like little else.

  ‘It’s about creating a mountain in her mind and testing that she’ll be able to get over it, just like the real mountain she hopes to face next time,’ he says. ‘But by the end of our two sessions, I was definitely very impressed by her. Her mind and her determination are her greatest assets. They’re unwavering, and that’s very rare for someone her age. I think she’s grown up in a certain environment with both her mother and father ex-military, and that can sort of set you up. She’s been sharpening those early tools all her life.’

  Still, everything continues to be very much up in the air when she declares on her Facebook page that she’s definitely returning to Everest and receives a slew of publicity as a result. In truth, she knows it’s more wishful thinking than anything else, it’s still touch and go. But no one gets anywhere without taking a punt here and there.

  ‘But it was extremely stressful,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know if I was going, but all the time I was trying to pretend that I was. Things changed every day. And I knew that even if it did come off, it was going to be a pretty last-minute thing. But I was training to be ready, and telling myself that I was ready, too.’

  Finally, in the second week of March, Glenn has a rush of bookings for a couple of his trips, and is contacted by one of the banks he’s approached to say his application for a substantial loan has been successful. Suddenly, the trip has become a reality. Alyssa is thrilled – and very, very grateful to her dad. Always her biggest supporter, he’s managed to come through yet again.

  ‘Learning I was going to be able to go back to Everest was incredible,’ she says. ‘When it actually happened, I could hardly believe it. I’ve always really appreciated everything Dad’s done for me. He told me I’d have to pay back the loan, but that’s fine. I’m very happy to do that. It just felt incredible to think I’d have another chance at my dream.’

  CHAPTER 30

  Cyclone Alert

  ‘Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.’

  – GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, IRISH PLAYWRIGHT AND CRITIC

  Walking along the gangway to the plane at Brisbane Airport on 3 April 2016, Glenn’s last words ring in Alyssa’s ears. With a schedule to reach the summit of Everest on 19 May, he hugged her hard and said, ‘Now, I don’t want to see you until June!’ She smiles to herself. The last two times, with her climbs cut short, she’d been back home by the end of April. This time, she is even more determined than ever to make it through.

  ‘You just can’t afford to have any doubts,’ she says. ‘If you do, it’s easy for them to take over. You have to have absolute belief and faith in yourself. I really wanted this, and I knew Nepal really wanted a successful climbing season too. After two years of disasters, everyone was going onto the mountain very, very keen to summit.’

  Glenn, who’s off to lead five consecutive expeditions walking the Kokoda Track during the time his daughter is on the mountain, feels wary. In 2015, he was absolutely convinced she’d make it to the top, and while he’s just as confident about her abilities and training this time, he knows that anything could happen to stop her. He consciously scales his expectations down to ‘cautiously optimistic’.

  Therese warned Alyssa to be careful but wished her well, while Christian hugged her goodbye. He still doesn’t understand the idea of Everest, but he knows she’s going away on another climb. Samantha, meanwhile, can barely contain her excitement. She’ll be plotting her big sister’s progress every day, she told Alyssa proudly, just before she left for the airport.

  Alyssa’s signed up this time with a different expedition company from her previous two attempts. This one is the Sherpa-owned Asian Trekking, started in 1982 by Ang Tshering Sherpa, one of the first graduates of the school started in the Nepalese Himalaya by Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s a company that’s been twice in the news over the past ten years, and both for the wrong reasons.

  In 2006, one of their clients, experienced British mountaineer David Sharp, froze to death on the north-east slope of Everest as around forty trekkers passed him on their way to the top. His death proved enormously controversial but, say observers, he had elected to be on an ‘unguided’ climb, where the company’s services end at Base Camp, and the client chooses to continue on with no support, no radio and no Sherpa. He died crouched under an overhang beside the corpse of a climber who’d died six years earlier, and just days before Dan Mazur’s dramatic rescue of Lincoln Hall. Six years later, in 2012, four more climbers with Asian Trekking also perished on their descent from Everest while taking part in an ‘eco expedition’ to help with a clean-up on the slopes, collecting some of the debris littering the site from several decades of climbers. They were four of the eleven Everest deaths that year. Back then, it had been the worst disaster on Everest since 2004.

  But Alyssa has climbed with Asian Trekking before, on her attempt on Manaslu in 2013, and has found them to be a company very well organised, logistically. She’s set to meet up with everyone on her expedition the next day, in Kathmandu. The leader is also the expedition doctor, Dr Nima Namgyal Sherpa, and the main guide organiser is an experienced guide himself, Nanga Dorje Sherpa. The other expedition members are from all corners of the earth, and most of them have tried to climb Everest before in either 2014 or 2015. A couple had, like Alyssa, been driven back both years.

  When she arrives, Alyssa notices Kathmandu looks battered as a result of the earthquake, with many of the buildings cracked, and others flattened or just starting to be rebuilt. But the warmth of the Sherpas’ welcome is unmistakeable. Climbers returning to Nepal means a much-needed injection of funds into both the local economy and Sherpas’ lives.

  The group flies into Lukla on 6 April and start the now-familiar trek to Base Camp. All along the way, Alyssa’s sobered by the sight of many of the beloved monuments that have been damaged, and the locals’ houses in some spots that have been completely destroyed. ‘But we were greeted everywhere as fresh hope for the country,’ she says. ‘You could feel the pain of suffering, but people were very glad we were there.’

  By the time Base Camp heaves into view, Alyssa feels at home again, among the mountains, but she won’t allow herself to think about summitting. That will be for later, when the time comes. For now, she just wants to enjoy being in the foothills and the hiking they do as part of the long acclimatisation process.

  On their second day there, she’s surprised to discover they’re going to start climbing the Khumbu Icefall as their first rotation. The doctor wants them to get a feel as early as possible for the 2.6-km climb 610 metres upwards across the moving glacier, and sees it as a great way to acclimatise early. The Sherpas set up ropes and everyone’s woken at 3 a.m. to eat as much as they can for breakfast an
d be ready to put their crampons on their boots and start climbing by 4 a.m. – to avoid being on the slope after the sun rises and starts melting the ice. They trudge an hour up the sleep rise and then encounter their first gaping crevasse, where they step carefully over the rungs of aluminium ladders slung across.

  Alyssa knows this is usually the most treacherous part of the climb, with more people falling to their deaths here than any other section on the south side. Above them, she can see the massive seracs hanging down, glittering threateningly. Any one of those could shear off at any moment and come crashing down. But everyone makes it safely to the top inside the allotted six hours, and then they part scramble, part abseil back down. Alyssa’s thrilled. She has sat at Base Camp and gazed up at the icefall so many times now, it feels almost unreal to have been finally setting foot on it, and climbing up.

  The group spend a couple of days back at Base Camp, resting. Then it’s time for the second rotation, climbing up to Camp I at 5943 metres high, staying the night there, then moving the two to three hours on to Camp II before returning to Base Camp. That morning, they start climbing at 3 a.m., back up through the ice-fall and along ever steeper stretches of ice and across more ladders before finally hitting the flat snow bank that marks the way to the first camp.

  ‘It was all just so amazing,’ says Alyssa. ‘To get to the top of the icefall felt so incredible. From there I could see the Western Cwm – the glacial valley basin they’ve also nicknamed the Valley of Silence – and the route I’d be following up Everest. It just felt fantastic!’

  That night, Alyssa shares her tent with a young woman from India, and is too excited to sleep much. Besides, the wind builds up during the night and the tent walls bang constantly. She doesn’t mind a bit.