by Ben Fogle
The vividness of that experience will haunt me forever. It was like taking drugs. My senses were heightened and I had moments of intense lucidity. The contradiction between hyper reality and numbness was even more surreal. I placed my rucksack on the ground and removed my oxygen mask from my face to give me more freedom to take in the magnitude of the place.
The sky was crystal clear. There was very little wind and the sun was beating down on us. It felt so safe and benign. It was calm and surreal. This was not the image I had in my mind of the exposed summit.
I looked around in a daze. Confused and overwhelmed. No experience had ever had this impact. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t armed to cope with the situation. I felt powerless and rudderless and yet … And yet it was like my epiphany. It was like a direct shaft of light from high above was shining onto me. Empowering me.
By now, more and more climbers from the south had started to arrive at the summit, and in the distance I could make out Kenton making even slower progress than I had.
The summit itself is a pretty small area with precipitous drops all around. Unclipped as I was, I was pretty vulnerable as we all jostled for space. The calm, good weather and the gathering crowd created a carnival-like feeling. For some strange reason, I had the image of the fairground scene from Mary Poppins, the one in which they leap through the chalk drawing.
Finally, Kenton emerged from the slope. Three paces and he was there, with us on the summit. Kenton, Mark and I all hugged. It was a profoundly moving experience. I had shared this most intense experience with these two men. They had been my guides and my companions, my friends and my protectors. In those final metres, Kenton had risked his own life to save mine in the ultimate act of selfless heroism.
For Kenton, it was his 13th summit. Unlucky for some. I knew this one had been bugging him. He missed out on a summit the previous year, and like me, there had been so many moments on this climb when he thought we were doomed.
For Mark, it was his first Everest summit. He had done it so effortlessly, always with a smile on his face. Never complaining, never fearful, never compromising. He had been one of the best mountain companions I could ever have asked for. Not only had he climbed Everest with ease, but he had done so with camera in hand.
I loved these guys. We had done this together. I thought of Victoria. Where was she now? I wished she was here with us, on the summit of the tallest mountain on earth. So many lives, almost 300, have been lost in the pursuit of this tiny little place. So many families torn apart and lives shattered. All of that just to stand, fleetingly, in this haunting, otherworldly spot. Why had I made it? Why had I been allowed to stand here, on this little patch of snow that had defied so many before me?
Some say Everest is easy. It’s certainly a whole lot easier and safer now than it was for those early pioneering climbers who were confronted with a virgin mountain. It is only because of their heroics that people like me stand a chance of summiting. But it is not easy. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
It may not be technical. We may rely on the vital help of the sherpas. There may be a rope to follow all the way to the top. Easier, maybe. Not easy.
I think that part of my reticence to celebrate was that we were only really halfway. What goes up must come down and we still had the long, dangerous descent to Base Camp. Kenton had recommended preserving 25 to 30 per cent of my energy to get back. To be honest, I probably had a little less than that. The exhaustion of the climb combined with the terror of the exploding oxygen bottles had drained me physically and mentally.
Many climbers before me have failed to allow for the descent. So focused and obsessed with the summit, they become blinded to what has to follow. Normally sensible becomes crazily irrational, and up here in the death zone, the results are invariably death. More people have died on the descent of Everest than during the climb to the top.
I had promised Marina that I would put common sense and self-preservation before any ego-obsessed desire to summit. One of my favourite quotes is from Sir Ernest Shackleton who turned back just a hundred miles from the South Pole. Unlike his contemporary Captain Scott, Shackleton knew that if he carried on in vainglory to the Pole, he would run out of supplies for the return journey.
Upon returning to Britain, his wife asked him why he turned back when so close to the South Pole. ‘Better a live donkey than a dead lion,’ he replied.
There are many dead lions on Everest and I wasn’t prepared to be one of them.
I wanted to call Marina from the summit. I had a satellite phone with me and I was desperate to share this moment with her. Although she was thousands of miles away with my family, she was as much a part of this journey as I was. I might have put in the physical effort, but Marina had the mental fortitude, willing me on and keeping the family together.
I wasn’t sure if it was bad karma to call her. After all, I still had many days of climbing ahead of me. But I decided I needed to hear her voice.
‘I’m here,’ I whispered hoarsely down the phone. ‘I’m on the summit.’
Even in my slightly brain-frazzled state, it seemed incredible that I was talking to my wife. It was 3 am in the UK and she would be tucked up in bed. It felt utterly surreal to be speaking to her from atop Everest.
‘It was really hard,’ I added before breaking into uncontrollable sobs. The emotion was overwhelming. I wished my whole family could see this moment. To feel it. To experience it.
It felt life changing and life affirming at the same time, but then a huge part of it was the circumstances. Every person who summits Everest will experience powerfully unique sentiments, often products of their own unique lives.
Marina – The summit
They say no news is good news, but when your husband is scaling Everest, I’m just not sure this is the case. Ben’s Instagram feed had been full of photos of his preparation. He’d used the extraordinary scenery and his time for reflection to post pictures that gripped his followers’ attention. I’d got used to seeing three or four posts every day, the long words that accompanied them betraying the time he had to gather his thoughts. Because of the electrical storm that had hit Base Camp on his last day, he hadn’t told his followers that he was off, and so his family and his followers, on the edge of their seats, were plunged into an unanticipated silence.
I held my breath over the weekend, filling every idle moment with podcasts so my mind had less opportunity to wander. While out running, I pushed myself harder than I ever had before. However exhausted my well-nourished body seemed, it was nothing compared to what my husband was enduring.
Sunday night came and I knew that if they summited on Monday morning, I would probably get a call around 3 am my time. I set up the GoPro that CNN had given me, checked my phone was not on silent and tried to go to sleep. I tossed and turned, fluctuating between sleeplessness and nightmares. In an attempt to stop my mind from whirring, I put on an audiobook. The only one I had was Fire and Fury, the account of Trump’s election victory and first few months in the White House. Incorporating an orange-hued comedy character in charge of the Western world, my nightmares took on an even darker theme. That was not going to work.
I awoke at 6 am, the realisation that there had been no phone call hitting me like a bullet in the stomach. Did that mean he didn’t get there, did it mean they’d had an accident? I dropped the children at school, my smile rigid and insincere as I breezed that, no, I hadn’t heard anything yet.
That afternoon, Tamara, Ben’s sister, dropped by to see how I was doing. My smile was still pasted rigidly to my face. My phone pinged, it was from a sat-phone. ‘Safely at C4. A bit windy. Gonna rest an extra day here before summit bid. Love you xxxx.’ I read it about 10 times. That initial rush of relief was soon replaced by the nagging feeling that something was wrong. I knew enough about Everest to understand that you didn’t have a rest day at Camp 4. At 8,000 metres, it was in the death zone, where the body starts to deteriorate rapidly, the brain and body shutting down due
to the lack of oxygen. One of the things that had reassured me most was that weather prediction was now a lot more reliable, meaning that storms that hit out of the blue, like the one in 1996 which claimed eight lives on one night, should no longer happen. If bad weather had hit, why on earth were they even up there?
I couldn’t get the message out of my head. I’d responded immediately, but there had been no further contact. ‘Gonna rest an extra day’ did not sound like Ben. In the nearly 15 years we’d known each other, I’d never heard him say, let alone write, ‘gonna’. Was it even him texting?
My biggest fear was obviously that he’d be injured or die on that mountain. But I had another real and persistent worry, that he’d fail. It takes great courage to embark on an expedition of this magnitude, one in which luck plays a huge role. But it takes even more guts to attempt something like this when many millions are following you.
Ben has always been wise when it comes to failure. ‘Mistakes are only negative when you don’t learn from them’ is a mantra often repeated in our household. We embrace them, thankful that nature has a great way of making damn sure you don’t make the same mistake twice.
On holiday in Sri Lanka, we’d talked a lot about the concept of failure. Our children love the stories of the old explorers and so Ben told them all about Shackleton and Scott. They learned about the race to the South Pole, to be the first to stand on the ice-hewn most southern point of our planet. About Shackleton, who early on realised that his dream was not going to come true and instead focused on getting his team back safely. And Scott, who in blind determination persevered and did finally get to the Pole, but having sacrificed his and much of his team’s lives. We asked them who they felt the real hero was among these polar pioneers.
Ludo and Iona were resolutely on Shackleton’s side. We used this to illustrate that turning around, making what is often a difficult decision, is often braver and more courageous than to continue blindly. I said that we’d celebrate Ben’s return as gleefully regardless of whether he got to the summit or not. And while I was good at articulating what in principle I believed to be true, I feared what returning without having summited would do to Ben.
The pressure intensified when Ben realised a few weeks before he left that his film crew would not be the only one on the mountain. Ant Middleton would be there too, making a documentary for Channel 4. At first, I dismissed this as idle gossip. There was nothing on his frequently updated social media channels. Why, if he was planning such an exciting expedition, did he not share this with his army of followers?
It turned out that they were not only sharing an ambition, but a camp as well. I could sense Ben’s frustration that within a handful of tents perched at the end of Base Camp, two film crews were jostling for attention. Having a competitor at your heels might well inspire resolve, bravery and persistence, but it might also spur Ben on to make foolish decisions. I cursed bloody Ant Middleton for being there.
That summit week, with virtually no cohesive communication, no way of knowing where the team were, what their plans were and what the weather was doing, were some of the hardest days of my life. Why hadn’t Ben worn a tracker so I could at least find out where he was on the mountain? I had no contact at Base Camp, no way of knowing what on earth was happening to my husband. By Tuesday, they’d been up on the mountain for six days. I knew that most summit bids took around five days but could often be done a lot quicker. Kenton had summited and got down to Base Camp in one day. Ben had been at Camp 2 on Friday. Why the hell hadn’t he summited yet?
As resolute that my decision not to google was, I still listened to the radio where I learned that Xia Boyu, a 69-year-old Chinese double amputee, had summited on Monday. What the hell was Ben doing faffing around at Camp 4 while a pensioner with no legs managed to climb it, I thought ungraciously.
On Tuesday, Ben’s agent called me to say that she’d had an unconfirmed report that Ant had made it. And still no word from Ben. My fear that he hadn’t made it was consuming me by now. And with it I anticipated the disappointment that would inevitably consume Ben on his return. The more I thought about it, the more I battled with how unfair that would be.
I thought about sending Ben an e-mail. I wanted him to know that we would be equally proud of him whether or not he summited. Any disappointment he felt would not be felt by us. I wanted to confirm that I wanted to add a caveat into my agreement to let him climb Everest. That he return home positive, triumphant and grateful for the opportunity, no matter what the outcome. ‘I can endure the weeks you spend away from us, the time we’re apart, the school plays, assemblies and parents evenings I only ever go to on my own. I can deal with lonely weekends, with Sunday nights spent persuading over-tired children to go to sleep before packing uniform, PE kit and swimming gear for the week ahead with no help, the evenings with no one to chat about my day with, or concerns about the kids. I can deal with the ever-growing collection of coats, crampons and summit suits that are invading our house. I can deal with the sleepless nights, the feigned cheerfulness when all I want to do is sob hot tears of worry. I can even deal with the Daily Mail calling me up with passive-aggressive suggestions that my husband is furtively having a steamy affair with his climbing partner as they share a tent together. But what I can’t deal with, is if the man whose return we’ve been anticipating, dreaming of, for the last two months, is tinged with self-induced disappointment. If the joy felt by us as we hug the person we’ve missed with every inch of our beating hearts, is not reciprocated; if the celebration of your return is in any way soured by the fact that you didn’t reach the summit, you will have let us all down. So, when we see you, whatever the outcome, we need a smile and for you to wholeheartedly discard any disappointment that you might feel.’
I never pressed send, but writing it, released a great deal of anxiety I’d been harbouring. If it didn’t go to plan, at least I had a plan and could warn him that he’d better bloody have a smile on his face.
By the end of the Tuesday, dizzy with tiredness I collapsed into bed, falling asleep with my book on my chest, Storm, my faithful bed companion, lying at my feet. I awoke abruptly to the sound of my phone ringing. Ben’s sat-phone. I scrambled to answer it. ‘Hello?’ I asked cautiously. The line crackled and then, choked with emotion, I heard Ben’s voice. ‘We did it, my darling, we did it.’ Between sobs Ben told me how this was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He tried to describe the beauty of the world set out in front of him, his voice breaking with the emotion of having achieved something he doubted he’d be able to do.
We spoke for a few minutes. While I didn’t want to rush him, I also knew how important it was not to spend too much time at the summit, before the descent, arguably more perilous than the ascent. He said that they were planning to get back to Camp 2 that day and he’d try and call me when he got there.
I put my phone down, relief flooded through me and hot tears of gratitude cascaded down my cheeks.
The one thing I felt guilty about was that I hadn’t managed to record the phone call. I’m not great with technology at the best of times, but awoken suddenly at 3 am with a phone call that represented one of the biggest tipping points in my life, I’d failed to work the goddamn camera. I hadn’t though told the children, who slept peacefully upstairs. The stress had impacted them and I didn’t feel I could interrupt their much-needed sleep. The news could wait until the morning.
We’re early risers in our house – school starts at 8 am and since breakfast usually takes an hour, we have no choice. Getting the children out of bed though is getting harder and harder. It’s often impossible to get them to leave their cosy cocoons to get dressed and get to school. On this day though, it would be different.
As I opened their shutters, I whispered that I had some exciting news for them. ‘Come downstairs to my bedroom and I’ll tell you,’ I urged. They needed no encouragement, racing down and leaping onto my bed, their faces flushed with anticipation.
‘So, I had a call from Daddy at 3
o’clock in the morning,’ I told them, ‘and guess where he was?’ ‘The top of Everest?’ they asked. I nodded as they yelped with joy. This time I’d managed to press record and when Ben returned to Base Camp and the internet, he saw the video of the moment his children learned of their Daddy’s achievement.
For an hour we stood, stared, took pictures, hugged and cried. Just before we began our long journey back down the mountain, I dipped into my rucksack and fished out the squeaky carrot and the panda bear known as Pandear which Ludo and Iona had chosen to accompany me up the mountain. I held them aloft as Mark took a photo for my children.
Despite the solitude, I had never really been alone. Willem, my little boy lost, had always been there. I looked up at the sky and whispered a thank you, the words disappearing into the ether.
By now, the summit was getting really crowded. Soon they would all be beginning their own slow descents. We didn’t want to get stuck behind another long line of people. The sun was already heating up and we only had a limited supply of oxygen.
Kenton had managed to borrow a spare bottle and mask from a fellow climber.
For the first time in a week, we were finally descending. There was a slight euphoria in the knowledge that at least we would be going with gravity, but now we had the added difficulty of a busier route and soft snow and ice.
A long line of climbers were working their way along the narrow fin of ice from the south summit up to the north summit. This is often a bottleneck and requires ruthless confidence, if you want to avoid being stuck for hours.
