Up

by Ben Fogle

  I have a love–hate relationship with the camera. On the one hand, it is my profession, it is essential to my livelihood and it’s my day-to-day workmate, but on the other hand it also has the power to dominate. Let’s be clear, I owe my entire career to the camera. It is the TV lens that has opened the world to me, but I suppose, like anything in life, it can become a little overwhelming. The camera can be empowering, but it can also do the reverse. At times, I find it has the power to soak up everything in its lens. Great for the viewer, but not so great for the subject.

  This happens in a number of ways. Sometimes people reserve and conserve all their energy for the camera – they literally switch themselves on and off – which can be deeply confusing for the people they’re working with.

  The camera can also become the unintentional ‘leader’, particularly where a team is involved. People still seem to have a slightly unhealthy reverence for the film camera. I see it all the time. They get star-struck and go all strange whenever a TV crew is about.

  When we filmed Castaway for the BBC, it was decided that to ensure a more honest, real film, we would film most of the year ourselves. The act of observing will always affect those that are being observed. It is a well-documented truth of psychology, which is why I’d argue that much of modern ‘reality’ TV is no longer real. It is inhabited by a cast of subjects who are painfully aware of the cameras, often modifying their behaviour for the lens. They simply become caricatures of themselves while they play up for the cameras.

  So, after nearly 20 years in front of the camera, I was looking for a break from its prying lens. I saw Everest as a very personal goal and ambition and one I was happy to undertake without the interruption of a camera, because one of the strange side effects of working in front of the lens for so many years is that any type of camera always feels like work, even a stills camera. I know it sounds daft, but I find myself almost allergic to any kind of camera when I’m not working.

  But about two weeks before we were due to depart, I had an email from CNN. They knew about our climb and wanted to know if we would make a film. I am very easily swayed, and besides, I thought, it would be a beautiful record of our climb for my children and grandchildren. Agreeing to make a film of the expedition is one thing; making it happen is another. Above all, we had to find a cameraman who was capable of climbing Everest at such short notice. There were only two candidates.

  The first was Ed Wardle, a brilliant Scottish cameraman who has climbed Everest with a camera multiple times as well as making his own Channel 4 TV series, Alone in the Wild, in which he had spent 12 weeks alone, foraging in the Yukon. Most recently, he had filmed a re-creation of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s open boat journey with the explorer Tim Jarvis. In short, Ed was hard as nails and easily up to the task.

  The other candidate was more of a wild card. Mark Fisher, a former mountaineering guide from the USA, had filmed with Kenton Cool on a number of climbs. Although he had never climbed Everest, he had filmed at over 8,000 metres and Kenton was sure he was up for the job.

  I sent e-mails to both. Ed was busy, but Mark was available and within days he had been signed up as our fourth teammate. Looking back, it was quite a big gamble. I had never met him before. I had no idea what he was like as a person. I didn’t know his filming style. Nothing. It was all based on trusting Kenton’s references.

  A few weeks later, here we were at the airport, with all of Mark’s equipment adding height and bulk to Victoria and Kenton’s luggage mountain. Slowly, we moved through the bustling airport and soon we were on a little transfer bus that ferried us across the airfield, past the wreck of the recently crashed US-Bangla plane, to our own small airplane.

  Flying in the Nepalese Himalayas is not for the faint-hearted. When I’d been out here in January, I’d found myself sitting on the flight out from the UK next to a team of air accident investigators that was on its way to investigate a recent crash on this exact route.

  ‘We come out half a dozen times a year,’ one of them smiled.

  The first time I flew in the Nepalese mountains was in 2002. I was on Yeti Air and it was without doubt one of the scariest flights of my life.

  I was in Nepal with the World Wildlife Fund to cover their work down in Chitwan and Bardia national parks where they were relocating Asian rhino from one park to the other. It was a beautiful experience and while we were out there we flew to the mountains for a couple of days.

  I can still remember sitting in the ancient Yeti Airlines plane wondering how safe it was. The windows were tinted yellow and the overall feeling was that I was sitting in a very old airplane. We flew into a massive storm with thunder and lightning. The plane was thrown from side to side, up and down. It lurched, my heart raced and lightning illuminated those yellow windows. I have never been so grateful to land. It remains one of the scariest flights I have ever been on and is the reason I started crossing my fingers on take-off and landing, something I still do to this day.

  As testimony to the dangers of Himalayan air travel, it was only a few years later that the WWF team I had been travelling with were all tragically killed when their helicopter crashed in the same area. It still haunts me to this day.

  Now, here I was again, 16 years later, making my way to a little plane that would take us to Lukla, which is often described as the most dangerous airport in the world. The reasons for the description aren’t hard to work out: it is built into the side of a mountain with a very short runway at the end of which is a very large brick wall. Like I said, flying to the Himalayas is not for the faint of heart.

  We all boarded the flight. I crossed my fingers and we began the short journey to the beginning of the biggest challenge of my life.

  We flew past soaring white peaks that seemed to tower over the landscape. ‘How high is that one?’ I asked Kenton, pointing to a mountain that was bigger than anything I had ever seen in my life.

  ‘About 7,000 metres,’ he replied.

  ‘And that one?’

  ‘That’s 7,200 metres.’

  My stomach lurched. These were tiny by comparison. Everest had another mile on some of these peaks. How were we going to do it?

  Lukla airport loomed into view on the far mountain. There was no need to descend, the plane would literally fly at the same altitude straight into, or more hopefully, onto the mountain.

  We skimmed over a high gorge below. I swear the trees at the summit must have been less than 50 feet from the belly of the plane. My stomach lurched again and a bead of sweat formed on my brow.

  Seated at the back of the plane, I had a clear view directly up the aisle and through the pilot’s window. It was like being in a simulator, only this was for real, and that near-horizontal, tiny runway directly ahead was our only landing strip.

  The mountain raced towards us, or more accurately, we raced towards the mountain, and the pilot slammed our little plane on the runway with such force that I felt sure the landing gear would collapse or the tyres would burst.

  There was a loud roar of engines as the pilot threw on the brakes as the plane careered up the runway towards the wall. Then suddenly, silence.

  We had made it. There was applause and relief as we descended the steps into the cool Himalayan air.

  To speed up our expedition, Kenton had made the decision to bypass the first two days’ trekking, because he felt it wouldn’t be particularly beneficial to our acclimatisation. Instead, we would take a short helicopter journey to Namche Bazaar, the home of the Sherpa.

  When I say short, I mean ridiculously short. It took less than five minutes to soar across the valleys and onto the small helicopter landing pad.

  We stepped off from the chopper. The next time we would go high into the sky would be on our own two legs. It seemed incredible that we would be venturing to an altitude so high that helicopters cannot fly there – and the same height that commercial airlines fly.

  Namche Bazaar is a tourist hub. This whole region of Nepal is built on trekking, mountaineering and t
ourism, and the small town is built around the visitors with dozens of small shops selling outdoor clothes and restaurants catering to Western taste buds. We were staying in a little hotel on the outskirts of town adjacent to the Sherpa Culture Museum and the location for Hillary’s 1953 expedition.

  In the late afternoon, I decided to explore the town a little. I descended the steep steps past dozens of breathless tourists, all bent double over their walking sticks. They were all dressed in trekking trousers with big boots and woolly hats. I must have looked odd in my white shorts and linen shirt that I had worn since leaving Sri Lanka. Luckily, my blood is pretty warm and I hadn’t yet felt the need for many more clothes.

  I found a little café and ordered a coffee and a brownie. I started having flashbacks, to 2009 when I crossed Antarctica, where we had a mantra that ‘eating is training’. The idea was to bulk up to try and counteract the massive weight loss that would come with the effort of walking 1,000 kilometres to the South Pole.

  ‘This is all very civilised,’ I thought, as I sat back in my chair and shovelled homemade brownie into my mouth.

  ‘Everest has claimed hundreds of lives …’ boomed the solemn voice over on the large TV screen at the back of the café.

  ‘Most of those bodies still litter the mountain,’ it continued.

  They were showing an afternoon special of one of the many documentaries about Everest. I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and burble manically to avoid listening.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love these documentaries. I must have watched most of them. I’ve read all the books and seen all the films, but ever since I’d decided to climb the mountain myself, I’d chosen, rather reasonably, I think you’ll agree, to abstain from the mawkishness of them.

  But here I was in a café in the Himalayas, my eyes and ears drawn to the film like a moth to a light. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. I found myself watching it with an intensity that I hadn’t done before. I found myself analysing each footstep. What were they wearing? What were they eating? It felt a little like sneakily watching a competitor practising before a sports match or event.

  Two hours later, I emerged onto the street, my eyes on stalks. It had been a slightly untimely reminder of the dangers ahead. Breathlessly, I worked my way back up the steep steps towards our hotel. Along the way I passed several sherpas, wheezing and coughing uncontrollably. My heart skipped a beat and I wondered, not for the last time, if I had made a huge mistake.

  Early the next day, I watched while the rest of the team packed their bags. Still wearing the same shorts, shirt and underwear, I set off clutching just a water bottle and my hat.

  There was something rather unremarkable about the first steps on our way to Everest. Back in the 1950s, this would have been an unbelievable task. The route to Base Camp is now one of the most popular treks in the world and before long the route was awash with trekkers of every shape, size and ability and from almost every nation imaginable.

  It seems a far cry from the romance and mysticism of those early expeditions when the pioneering mountaineers would have needed to carve out routes between the tiny isolated mountain hamlets. Nowadays, it’s estimated that more than 100,000 people descend onto this route every year, and today it felt like they had all come at once.

  I had decided to send my father-in-law ahead of us with Sherpa Deepan. I was still worried about how Jonathan would cope with the ever-increasing altitude and the distances we had to cover.

  As soon as we hit the trail, Mark, like a mountain goat, kept racing ahead to set the camera up on a tripod, in order to capture some epic walking shots. Naturally, it began to slow us down and it wasn’t long before Kenton’s smile turned to a frown.

  ‘We can’t do this on the mountain,’ he harrumphed, ‘we need to keep a consistent speed. We can’t keep stopping and starting like this.’

  It was the first awkward conversation we’d had and was a reminder of the complexities of sharing any journey with a camera. Expedition film-making is very different, especially with a mountain like Everest. The key is not to let the film-making get in the way of the expedition. And now here we were, in the middle of the Himalayas, and Mark was already annoying Kenton. At least it’s not me, I thought, as we carried on along the trail.

  Nepal is a deeply spiritual place and all along the trail there were little prayer walls, temples, bells and flags. I found myself hypnotically drawn to the multi-coloured, sun-bleached flags as they fluttered in the stiff mountain breeze. Victoria and I found ourselves visiting each and every one of them. It seems a little strange now, but for some reason we felt spiritually compelled. It was like an unstoppable force was drawing us in towards these monuments.

  The rough path trailed around the steep mountain that rose on our left; on the right, the valley dropped away dramatically into a deep ravine at the bottom of which we could see the white water of a river as it cascaded over boulders and rocks.

  As we rounded another bend of the trail, my eyes were rooted to the path underfoot. I didn’t want to trip on one of the roots or rocks. A twisted ankle at this stage would almost certainly end any summit hopes.

  ‘Look up,’ smiled Kenton.

  My eyes lifted to the horizon and the unmistakable snowy outline of Everest.

  Everest. The mountain of my childhood dreams. A mountain that has haunted me my whole life. A mountain I have seen hundreds of times in photographs and films but never in real life. As a child, I used to imagine you would be able to see the tallest mountain on earth from almost everywhere. I soon discovered this was not the case, but I felt sure it would at least dominate Nepal.

  The incredible thing about Everest was that this was the first and last time I would see her until our final summit bid from Camp 4 in two months’ time.

  How can a mountain that is so unspeakably tall, remain so hidden? It still doesn’t make sense. But then that is the beauty of mountains. Nothing makes sense. They break all the rules and defy reality.

  The sky was clear and the sun reflected off her snowy peaks. A stiff wind whipped snow into curling tongues along her flanks. She looked angry. I stared at her, so familiar and yet so alien. It would be the start of a journey of contradictions.

  My eyes scoured her slopes in the far distance. She looked like she was hundreds of kilometres away. To be honest, I was struggling with the notion of reaching her base let alone her summit.

  Crowds of trekkers along the route had stopped to take photographs of the distant mountain. I wondered how many of those around me were going higher. In a way, it was the beginning of the psychological battle.

  Mountains really are in the mind. As the great Sir Edmund Hillary once said, ‘It is not the mountains that we conquer but ourselves.’ How true that is. It’s like a constant battle of will over sense.

  Looking at that mighty mountain, I was overwhelmed with the magnitude of what lay ahead. It probably didn’t help that it was only Day 1, we’d already had an argument over filming and I was still wearing my shorts and shirt from Sri Lanka.

  I suddenly felt a chill. Both physical and metaphorical. ‘Can I borrow a fleece?’ I asked Mark. ‘Sure thing,’ he said, handing me a top. I felt well and truly out of my depth, but there was no stopping us now. Onwards and upwards.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Loss

  For six long hours we trekked along the trail to Everest Base Camp. Apart from a few short climbs, it was pretty simple.

  It was the start of what would become pretty repetitive over the following week, as we worked our way up the Khumbu Valley towards Base Camp. As we marched onwards towards Pangboche at 4,100 metres, we passed dozens of stupas, Buddhist shrines and places of meditation, and mani prayer wheels. We would meticulously rotate each one clockwise for good karma.

  One of the more unusual aspects of life in the public eye is being recognised out of context. In Britain, I have grown used to the notion that if I pop out to the corner shop, more often than not, I will stop to share a selfie o
r scribble a signature. At home, I anticipate it, plan for it and accept it. But in this internet ready world, where connectivity has no borders or barriers, TV shows tend to travel a little more than they used to. And this leads to some surprising encounters – like being stopped on the streets of Ulan Bator by a Mongolian who thanks me for my shows and asks for a selfie. Now that is what I call recognition out of context. Let’s be honest, I’m not a global A-list superstar, so it still surprises me when I am in a foreign land and this happens.

  It seems that here in Nepal, my shows themselves are yet to hit the TV screens, but among the multinational trekkers and hikers along the trail, word had spread that Victoria and I were there.

  To be fair, the ‘word had spread’ was slightly self-induced, by the use of social media.

  Like most of us, I love social media and I hate it. I love it for its instantaneous connectivity. It is the first place I search for news, often erroneously, and therein lies the reason I hate it. It has the power to manipulate and exaggerate. But it also has the power to take an expedition like ours straight into people’s palms.

  Ahead of Everest, in order to enhance the profile of the expedition and to create a way for people to follow our progress, I decided to use Instagram as a medium for sharing the journey. It was a simple way, even with our limited data, to post a picture each day with a small caption explaining what had happened.

  Naturally, many others on the route to Base Camp, and in some cases beyond, were following our progress and it meant ‘mountain fame’. If I’m honest, I loved it. I have never been someone to ‘need’ fame; it’s not the oxygen of my existence. That’s not to say I don’t respect it. Indeed, I credit it for most of the opportunities that have come my way. I’m not sure I would be on my way to summit Everest were it not for the public nature of my work.