Up

by Ben Fogle

  Today, society expects a reasonable and, preferably, worthy cause. After all, Everest has been climbed many times. And people justifiably have questions. ‘What are you adding?’ ‘What makes your climb unique?’ A lot of the time your answers to these questions are greeted with a dismissive, ‘So what?’

  Well, I disagree. I think every adventure, every journey, every challenge is unique to the individual.

  The challenges, the adversity, the fear, the dangers, the pain, the dreams, the elation are all uniquely different. Every climb of Everest is different and personal.

  Every climber has their own reasons for being there. You don’t have to be the first, or the fastest, or the youngest, or the tallest, or the oldest. You just need to dream. And achieving a dream is never without risk.

  Risk is all about perception. The risk scale varies greatly, from walking down the street with the risk of falling over, through to being hit by a car or being mugged, to the extreme of full hand-to-hand combat in a war zone. But why take risks in the first place? For me, it’s the only way to grow or make progress. If we stick within the safety parameters of our comfort zone, then how can we ever improve? The greater the risk, the bigger the return.

  So what do we stand to gain? For a start, it invariably opens up new opportunities. Taking risks empowers you to stretch the boundaries of what you know and are comfortable with. It empowers you to think bigger and be bolder; it allows you to achieve higher goals.

  Risks encourage quick thinking, creativity and resourcefulness. I’m a strong believer in the power of the mind: a positive attitude will invariably help create a positive outcome. It’s impossible to plan every step in your life. When you take a risk, you are more likely to try harder and give it your best.

  Taking risks helps you to clearly define what you really want. Calculated risks are taken with careful thought. Yet the fact that you are taking a risk pushes you to make things work. Surely you will first have to determine if the reward is something you want enough to take the chance. If it is, then move ahead and don’t look back.

  Once you have become desensitised and accustomed to taking risks, you break free from the manacles of society and expectation. You become braver and bolder; self-confidence and self-esteem grow and create a stronger mindset.

  Taking the first step is always the hardest. I think humans are instinctively risk averse. We like habit and consistency. If we strip it back to the very bare, basic needs in life, these are shelter, food and water. In some ways, these are all we need.

  For the past five years, I have travelled the globe meeting risk takers who have abandoned the conventions of society and broken free from the shackles of the material world to embrace a brave new life in the wild, living off-grid. Effectively, each of these individuals has decided to make a conscious decision to shun conventional society for what is arguably a simpler, though riskier life. By embracing a world where their only needs are food, water and shelter, they have certainly simplified their life needs, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easier.

  During that time, I have met so many different people who have adopted this new life: from a Miami taxi driver who moved to a palm hut in the Philippines, to the modern white tribe of ‘freetarians’ who live off the food left in rubbish bins in the Appalachian Mountains of North America. Each one is unique and different; the one unifying characteristic was their happiness, often in the face of adversity.

  In the city, for most people access to food, shelter and water is relatively easy. Even those who are struggling financially can have access to foodbanks, homeless shelters and water, but in the wilderness these can often be the difference between life and death. You only need to look at the story of Christopher McCandless, the ideological law student who quit his Ivy League education in pursuit of a simpler life off-grid in Alaska. I don’t want to be the spoiler for those who haven’t read the book but … he ate some poisoned berries and died. Death of course is the worst-case scenario for any risk taker.

  It was Ernest Hemingway who once wrote that the only real sports were motor racing, bull fighting and mountaineering. It’s an interesting observation. He was implying that they were more ‘heroic’ as the risk of death was greater than that of, say, football or tennis.

  I have always been fascinated by ‘perceived’ risk. My wife will sometimes obsess over something seemingly risk free. Before heading to Everest, on our family holiday in Sri Lanka, she would always worry about me running along the road each day for my exercise. For those who have been to Sri Lanka, it is a fair worry, but to mitigate that risk, I would always run against the traffic so that I controlled the situation. I could watch the cars, buses and lorries from a distance and was always ready to jump into a ditch or a hedge.

  What surprised me more was my wife’s worry. I have done far riskier things, but in Marina’s eyes, this was pretty dangerous. Surprisingly, she never made a fuss when I went scuba diving with crocodiles, which I think is quite high on the risk scale.

  The crocodile example is quite an interesting one. It came shortly after I became a father for the second time. Iona had just been born and Ludo was a little over a year old. Being a father is my greatest responsibility. I would honestly drop everything for my children. The realisation in the middle of the Okavango Delta of my vulnerability underwater, with no protection, just a few inches from one of Africa’s apex predators, was profound and certainly led to a period of soul-searching. I found it particularly hard, because this was the kind of risk on which I thrived.

  I am really not a very brave person. There are plenty of things I would be far too scared to try. I have never bungee jumped, and I never will, but this is why risk is so nuanced. For some people, risk is a financial thing; for others risk is about pride. There is risk of rejection; risk of financial loss; risk of humiliation; risk of failure; risk of fear. The list goes on and on.

  My point is that without risk we cannot grow. We cannot improve. We cannot learn. We cannot experience. Without some form of risk, we are in danger of never really living. Can we ever really be ourselves if we don’t take risks?

  Without risk I wouldn’t be the person I am today – it’s a big part of me. As a boy I was incredibly shy, and I mean ‘couldn’t look anyone in the eyes’ kind of shy. I lacked confidence and self-esteem. I hated my shyness. Inside was the extrovert, the son of an actress, but outside was a shy little boy uncomfortable in his own skin. It probably didn’t help that I wasn’t much good at anything. Hopeless at sport and unacademic, I didn’t really know where to channel the person within.

  One day I woke up and decided to do an assembly on my own in front of the whole school. Now just take a moment to think about this. Me, the shy quiet boy who was embarrassed in front of my own reflection in the mirror, had decided to do an assembly in front of 700 pupils and staff, most of them many years older than me.

  I was 15 and decided to do a comedy routine. I am blushing just thinking about it. I even learned a song. I honestly have no idea where the bravery to do that assembly came from. The risks were huge. I risked humiliation in front of the whole school.

  On my current risk scale, I would put it at 9/10. Despite my job, I am not an extrovert. I never have been and never will be, so the risk of becoming a laughing stock in front of my friends with whom I would be spending the next three years was a pretty big one.

  But I did it. On reflection, it was probably my first step towards Everest. I can still remember the nerves, the fear, the trepidation. It was the first time I had knowingly stepped out of my comfort zone into the unknown. I don’t remember much of it, but I will never forget the applause at the end. It was so empowering. Like I say, the bigger the risk, the bigger the gain. The thing is, society wants the gains without the risks.

  Type ‘risk’ into an online search engine and you will be provided with dozens of pages about risk management and risk mitigation. Society has become risk averse. We often try to eradicate risk entirely.

  We could put this down to
the increasingly litigious ‘blame culture’ world where you are only a ‘trip on the pavement’ away from suing or being sued; or maybe it is the mollycoddled world in which we wrap our children to shield them from risk.

  Whatever the cause, we are increasingly risk averse. Perhaps it is one of the reasons we marvel at racing drivers or the derring-do of adventurers. We worship those who take risks because we are too fearful to take them ourselves.

  What’s more, society has become increasingly pessimistic. News seems to be skewed towards negativity. The result is often that people will look at the worst-case scenario first. If we flipped this attitude, I feel sure people would feel more empowered to take more risks. For most of us, risk is simply the unknown, and that, in my mind, is what makes it so exciting.

  As a father, I now have to juggle my own approach to risk while also balancing my children’s. On the one hand, I want to nurture and protect them, but on the other hand I also want to encourage them to push themselves out of their comfort zone. As parents, whether we like it or not, we are role models to our children. We lead by example.

  If we always take the easy option, where is the challenge? It was this epiphany in which the Everest project was born.

  Marina – Risk

  The trouble with big expeditions is that they take a long time to organise. I spent most of 2017 saying in answer to questions about whether I was worried, ‘I’m sure I will be, when the time comes.’ While Ben started training expeditions and our house slowly filled up with high-altitude mountain kit, I still regarded the expedition as too far in the future to worry about.

  And then I overheard a conversation between my son Ludo and his friend. Ben announced his expedition and from then that’s all everyone wanted to talk about. ‘You know your Daddy will probably die on Everest,’ piped up an eight-year-old classmate who had recently watched the film, Everest, where (in this boy’s defence) most of them did die. Before I could intervene, Ludo responded cheerily, ‘No, don’t worry, my Daddy definitely won’t die.’ I realised it was time to have a frank chat with our children.

  Ben and I have always been on the same page when it comes to risk. We are both fierce believers that a life with no risk is a life not worth living. You do what you can to make sure your life is long enough to benefit from the richness that this world brings, but you don’t become so risk averse that it stops allowing you to have any fun.

  Parents in the 21st century are consumed with worry. It starts with pregnancy, the conflicting advice about what you can and can’t eat, the scaremongering articles in the media about terrible things that happen to babies and children – the mother’s kiss that killed her baby (a cold sore), the toxic paint on the cot. We bring our children into a world where they have to sit in a car seat until they are 14, of sterilisers and where we ‘baby proof’ our houses and disinfect every surface. We are catapulted into a world in which risk is considered bad.

  The problem is that it’s not real life. Children are constantly exploring, touching, feeling, licking. They are pushing their boundaries to see where those boundaries are. If they hurt themselves, it’s a surefire way of teaching them never to make the same mistake again. But if we don’t let them make mistakes, we’re robbing them of the opportunity to learn.

  Which is why Ben and I are happy for our children to climb trees and sometimes fall out of them. Our children’s knees are etched with an ever-evolving catalogue of scratches and grazes. There’s often a bruise or two somewhere, but they’re also careful and respectful of their environment.

  In this context it makes it easier to justify their Daddy’s expedition. One car journey, we talked to them about how exciting climbing Everest was going to be. They needed no convincing. ‘I just can’t wait for you to climb Everest,’ Ludo enthused. But we also talked about the risks. We told them that it was dangerous, that many people have died trying to climb the mountain and that everyone who goes risks their lives. But we also talked about what you can do to mitigate those risks and likened it to everyday life.

  We’d recently returned from a blissful skiing holiday which encapsulated the idea perfectly. I reminded them how much fun it was to ski off piste, racing through the powder, in between the trees, following my sister (a ski instructor) like a trail of adrenaline-fuelled ducklings, but I also reminded them how wearing a helmet to do this was non-negotiable.

  The trouble is that life, whatever stage you’re at, without risk is not worth living. Having lost a baby before he got to experience the richness of our world, I feel that if we are lucky enough to get a go at life on this planet, it is our duty to enjoy it. And that involves taking risk.

  The writer, William Arthur Ward sums this up perfectly. ‘To love is to risk not being loved in return, to live is to risk dying, to hope is to risk despair, to try is to risk failure. But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.’

  While our opinions differ on many occasions, when it comes to risk, Ben’s and my perspectives are perfectly aligned. We live life to the full, taking opportunities and the inevitable risks that a life full of adventure presents. We feel that if our children have a similar attitude, seizing opportunity, pushing themselves out of their comfort zone and reaping the buzz, the joy and the excitement that come with that, then we’ve done a good job as parents.

  Victoria lay in the tent trembling from the cold. Her whole body was shaking violently in her sleeping bag. I could hear her laboured breathing and her lips were a light shade of blue.

  ‘Are you okay, Vic?’

  I looked around and could see fear on Kenton’s face. The gravity of the situation became obvious. I didn’t sleep that night. I lay awake next to Victoria listening for any change in her breathing. I was terrified she would stop breathing or suffer some sort of seizure. The morning couldn’t come soon enough.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Different Endings

  At daybreak we began the descent. By now Victoria was on her feet again, and with the help of several bottles of oxygen, she had bounced back. To the untrained eye she looked completely normal, but Kenton and I knew it was the supplementary oxygen and the medicine speaking. It was both unsustainable and dangerous to carry on. We knew it, but Victoria was in denial as to the severity of the situation and was convinced that all she needed was a short recovery before she carried on.

  From high up in Camp 2, we began the long journey to Base Camp. For nearly an hour, we yomped through the tents that were scattered across Camp 2 until we reached the long valley to Camp 1 and the top of the icefall.

  Descending, the trek was easy. It seemed hard to believe; on the ascent, this had felt like a never-ending slope. The gentle elevation had felt like purgatory. I had been surprised by how demoralising it had felt.

  We wound our way past yawning crevasses until we reached the vertical 20-metre wall of ice that had caused such a bottleneck on the way up. I clipped on my figure of eight and gently lowered myself down that sheer cliff of ice. Soon we were back at Camp 1 and it was time to descend back through the unstable labyrinth of snow and ice.

  ‘There was a huge ice collapse last night,’ warned a climber coming up through the maze. ‘Three sherpas fell into a crevasse,’ another explained. ‘The whole route has shifted.’

  ‘It’s pretty scary,’ an experienced climber added helpfully.

  My heart sank. Three sherpas … It soon transpired that they had been rescued and had already been helicoptered off the mountain, their injuries unknown. At least they had survived. But now we had to climb through the volatile icefall that had nearly taken their lives and navigate through the recently collapsed fall. As if the climb hadn’t been daunting enough, I now felt a renewed sense of doom as we clambered beneath the teetering seracs that threatened to collapse at any moment.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ Kenton urged looking concerned, ‘don’t even clip onto the rope unless you have to.’

  While con
troversial, his advice made sense to me. Haste here was more important than being clipped on. Of course, I would make sure my safety harness was tethered when crossing ladders and for the more exposed parts of the descent, but for much of it, I used common sense … and speed.

  It wasn’t long before we reached the icefall. Half a dozen empty packs, left by the sherpas who had been involved in the collapse and subsequent rescue, had been tied to the rope. They were a haunting reminder of our mortality. I couldn’t help but imagine the fear and terror they must have felt on this very spot just a couple of hours before.

  A new series of ladders had already been installed by the Icefall Doctors, to bridge the gaping new holes and crevasses that had formed. One section was creating a bottleneck. A steep descent led to a horizontal ladder that led onto a vertical ladder that bridged a gap at a steep angle. Beyond this was a roped section up a vertiginous fin of ice. In the middle was the rubble from the ice collapse. It was a pretty terrifying clamber.

  Victoria and Kenton went first, followed by Mark and me. Mark remained on the high cliff to film me as I scaled the impressive fin of ice. As scary as it was, it was also quite dramatic and spectacular. Just below me, at the bottom of the fin, I could see Kenton and Victoria.

  I clipped my ascender onto the rope and just as I took my first step, I heard a mighty boom, like thunder followed by a long low grumble. I looked at Mark who had his back turned to me. He was facing the mountain and a wall of snow and ice that was tumbling down and cascading towards us.