by Ben Fogle
In the harsh glow of full daylight, under the glaring sun, the exposure of the summit suddenly became dizzying. Kenton had warned me to keep away from the edge on the ascent, but it was only now that I could see this small fin of wind-blown ice was all that separated me from the 3,000-metre drop to Tibet below.
Vertiginous drops on either side suddenly transformed what had been a slog coming up, into a terrifying obstacle course.
As I approached each climber coming up the narrow ledge, there would invariably be a hesitation. Surprisingly, there are no hard and fast rules on the mountain. No right of way or even mountain etiquette. I decided to use confidence.
Leaving the ascending mountaineer fully clipped to the mountain rope, I would grab their hand or harness with my hand while sliding past them and re-clipping on the other side.
It sometimes necessitated a somewhat exposed and vulnerable manoeuvre, which meant more haste but also more safety, as I was in control of the situation.
I became pretty efficient at passing both those ascending and descending. If there was one thing I had learned on the mountain in the previous few months, it was to never languish behind the slower climbers.
The heat by now was starting to build and I found myself removing layer upon layer until I was in just a thin wool thermal. It seemed incredible that I was way above 8,700 metres in the death zone, where plenty of people have perished from exposure over the years, and yet I was wearing little more than a T-shirt.
While I had been looking forward to the comparative ‘ease’ of the descent, what you gain in gravity, you lose in stability. The slowness of the ascent was more conducive to careful control. The haste and fatigue of the descent has often led to tragedy on the mountain.
One misplaced foot or mis-clipped carabiner could be fatal.
My legs were like jelly. I had already lost a tremendous amount of muscle mass in the weeks on the mountain, and now the weight of my backpack together with the exhaustion of nearly two days in the death zone were beginning to take their toll.
We would break our descent into two stages. First, we would make our way down to Camp 4 where we would take a rehydrated meal and melt some snow before descending past Camp 3 to Camp 2. The whole thing could take us up to 12 hours. One hell of a day.
At the bottom of the south summit, Mark and I took a break near a wall of rock. The route was bustling with new arrivals. By now, the fin of ice appeared to be one long line of climbers. It was a slightly surreal sight. I was glad to be out of the melee.
We could see Kenton descending against the flow of those heading towards the summit. We waited for him to reach us and then together we began the long climb down.
We didn’t stop until we reached the Balcony. I sat down as the sun beat down on me and looked out at the astonishing view beyond. A handful of other climbers were also resting. We all sat there in silence. Defeated by exhaustion.
From here we retraced our steps down the sheer slope on which we had spent five hours on the ascent stuck behind the group of Chinese climbers. What a difference a few hours made. It was unrecognisable in the sunshine of the day. It was also a great deal steeper than I remembered.
For two hours we descended the perilous slope. My knees burnt with the effort. My toes bruised as they were hammered into the front of my boots. I could feel toenails being ripped from my toes by the pressure and weight of my steps.
Without warning, my foot slipped. I lost control and balance and my body lurched downwards. I flailed out with my ice axe, but my foot kept slipping. Why wasn’t my crampon holding? I looked down to see a bare boot and no sign of a crampon.
Something as simple as a lost crampon can be the difference between life and death. Above 8,000 metres, everything matters, every little detail counts and losing a crampon could have a defining impact on the rest of the journey.
In fact, the loss of a crampon would make a descent almost impossible. I still had one crampon and I had seen sherpas climbing with just one, but in the icy conditions of the descent, I needed all the grip and leverage I could get.
I panicked as my eyes scanned the slope for my missing crampon. A couple of metres away, reflecting in the harsh sunlight, was the missing piece of kit. My heart leapt. Salvation.
It never ceased to amaze me the peaks and troughs between drama and euphoria each day. The altitude seemed to have a powerful effect on the brain and the combination led to high anxiety, tension and emotion.
I let myself slide down the hill until I reached the missing crampon. Carefully I reached out with my gloved hand and scooped it up. Having been reunited, I now had to somehow fit it back onto my boot.
The gradient was nearly 70 per cent. I couldn’t sit without slipping, let alone gain enough purchase with the sole of my crampon-less boot. I dug away at the snow with my boot to make a little ledge on which I would be able to put pressure on the crampon on the steep slope.
The problem was that each time I pushed, the soft snow and ice gave way until I slipped further down the mountain. Fortunately, I was still clipped to the rope which prevented me plunging hundreds of metres down the flanks of Everest.
I could feel panic and anxiety bubbling up from within. It felt like I was losing control of the situation. It is amazing how the smallest of errors can steal your confidence.
From the elation of standing on the summit, I had been reduced to a panicking wreck on the side of the mountain and all because I was struggling to re-attach my crampon.
Eventually, Kenton and Mark arrived to help. Kenton told me to use my jumar to take my weight off the rope, to give me more mobility in my leg. It was so obvious and so simple, but in my confused exhaustion it had become an unsolvable puzzle.
That descent seemed to go on forever. How I longed for it to end. My mouth was parched. I hadn’t drunk anything since my water bottle had frozen solid, which had been about an hour after leaving Camp 4 the previous night.
We could see Camp 4, long before we reached her tattered tents. For almost the entire climb up the mountain, I had been dreaming about the time we would be going down, but now, in the midst of it, I couldn’t wait for it to end. The pain from my toes and knees was unforgiving.
A couple of hours after leaving the summit, I slumped into our three-man tent. I lay there. Comatose. Unable to move. I stared at the top of the tent. I was done. Spent. I had used up all the spares I had.
I was too tired to eat or drink. My back was aching from my heavy pack, which had picked up weight after Ang Thindu and Ming Dorjee had given us their oxygen and returned to Camp 4.
I didn’t want to move. The problem was that we had already spent longer than we had wanted above 8,000 metres. The death zone, as its name suggests, is not somewhere to hang out. We had already been in the death zone for more than two days and if we stayed it would be a further day.
Despite our lethargy and exhaustion, Kenton suggested we carry on to the comparative safety of Camp 2 where we would have food and more oxygen.
Weird things can happen on a mountain. As a child, I was obsessed with the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman as he is known locally. It was during the descent that something very strange happened. I had been on my feet for nearly 20 hours. I had sustained myself on a sip of water and a couple of Jelly Babies and was close to collapsing with exhaustion.
I was halfway between Camp 4 and Camp 3 and the weather had turned. A strong wind had enveloped the mountain and visibility had been reduced to just a few metres.
Tired and consumed with fatigue, I had become slovenly with my safety. Occasionally, I would check down at my safety harness only to realise that I had forgotten to clip it to the line.
To speed up my descent, I would often wrap the rope around my arm and use it as a brake as I lowered myself down the steep icy slope. We had spread out a little – Mark and Kenton were a little behind me, higher up the mountain and out of sight – and I was alone for the moment.
As I descended, I noticed something ahead of me. I saw the silhouet
te of someone walking towards me, a little more than 20 metres down the slope. Something was wrong though. Their head was oversized. Ridiculously oversized, like a giant balloon. It must be someone carrying something on their head, I thought to myself, as I continued to stare at this strange vision. As it came closer to me, I could make out a shaggy mop of hair on its massive head and its massive hands also covered in fur.
I was dumbfounded. Even in my state of exhaustion, I could make out the figure quite clearly. It looked like one of the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are. It was so clear. I stared at it. Not with fear but confusion. As the beast got closer to me, I could make out its teeth and huge, oversized eyes.
I stood there rooted to the spot. I pulled my sunglasses off and rubbed my eyes. I looked again and there in front of me, just a few metres away, was a slightly startled climber. He was perfectly normal in size, with a large pack on his back.
We nodded at one another as I passed him on the rope.
It had been a hallucination. My first and last on Everest. It had been so powerfully realistic that I couldn’t help but wonder if some of the Yeti sightings over the years had been imagined by equally exhausted mountaineers. Was this a final parting shot from the mountain in the battle of minds and bodies?
Marina – Life after Everest
One thing I was unprepared for was how quickly Ben would descend from the summit and be back home. In the early hours on Wednesday he was speaking to me from the roof of the world and three days later he was back in our arms, feet firmly at sea-level in London.
While the world sat in front of their televisions to watch Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tie the knot, I drove our little family to Heathrow, our car stuffed with signs that the children had lovingly made in anticipation of their father’s return. The spring sun shone fiercely, showing our green and pleasant land off in all her glory, verdant green clashing with Union Jack bunting fluttering in the gentle breeze. It was one of those days that makes you joyful to be alive and I couldn’t wait to finally hold the man I’d missed and worried about and so needed over the past few months.
Buzzing with excitement, the children skipped into the airport, clutching their ‘Welcome Home Daddy’ placards. We gathered with a good view of the arrivals door and kept a fierce eye on the weary travellers pushing their trolleys towards us. And then I finally saw a gait I recognised, blond hair, a tan that you can only get at altitude and a smile so wide it threatened to break his face.
Like shots from a start gun, Ludo and Iona raced towards him, our Labrador Storm bouncing at their heels, her lead dragging behind her. They dodged the bemused travellers who preceded Ben and leapt into his arms, clinging to their battle-worn father like limpets in a storm.
I held back, not wanting to interfere as my beloved children breathed their father in, touching his beard and examining his face. He put them down and enveloped me into a bear hug, his shaggy beard bristling my face. I scrutinised him closely. His skin was a nut brown, a dark patch of windburn blotting his cheek, his beard greyer than I remembered but his tear-filled brown eyes bore the hallmarks of the man who had missed us as much as we’d missed him.
Having been married 12 years, we should be good at reunions, but I’ve learned over the last few years that the anticipation, the hope and excitement that you experience in the build-up, puts a lot of pressure on the time you spend together to be perfect, and most of the time perfect is exactly what it’s not. What I’ve learned over the two decades we’ve been together is to let go of this quest for perfection, to take it slowly and give yourself the time to reconnect.
When someone has experienced such an adventure, when you’ve not been able to have a conversation for the best part of two months, it’s hard to know where to start. And while we wanted to hear all about his adventure, he was also thirsty for what had been going on at home.
While the relative excitement of poetry competitions and the summer fair might seem to pale into insignificance in comparison to climbing Everest, these everyday events make up the rich patchwork of the life that Ben missed so much while he was away. And so we chatted about home life on the way home in the car. Ben heard how Ludo had won a certificate for excellence in swimming and how Iona had been to a party at KidZania, how our naughty dog Storm had eaten my niece’s Christening cake and had to go to the vet to have a vomiting injection and that they’d just started watching a new series of Operation Ouch! I knew Everest would be a dialogue that would dominate our conversation for years to come, but it was a story that needed to be told slowly, and in Ben’s time.
Returning to royal wedding hysteria having lived a simple and utterly detached life for so long would be weird for anyone, but adding to that the fact that he’d descended nearly 9,000 metres in three days and had yet to sleep in a proper bed must have been quite an extraordinary experience for Ben.
We joined some friends to watch the wedding, drinking rosé and eating pizza in a garden adorned with bunting. Ludo and Iona had continued to cling to their father, as if he might up and leave again should they let go. They inspected his face, felt his beard and drank in his smell, pinching themselves that he was really there.
The next few days were a bit of a blur, the experiences from the roof of the world slowly emerging. I learned a lot of things that Ben had hidden from me: the drama of the exploding oxygen canisters and how sick Victoria had become. Slowly as the weekend unfurled and we lay peacefully in the garden or reading to the children before bed, I started to understand the rawness and visceral beauty of Everest in a way that the mountain of books I’d read before had never really conveyed. I loved being around the Everest oracle, my bearded adventurer who could answer every question I had about the mountain that had dominated my childhood dreams. ‘Do you have to go through a gate the marks the beginning of the icefall and thus an Everest climb?’ I asked while we loaded the dishwasher.
In those early days, Ben was definitely not quite all there. He slept a lot but in spite of my best efforts filling the fridge with things I knew he loved, he ate sparingly, as if his tummy was adjusting to a West London diet. But it was more than that; he spoke more slowly, as if his brain took longer to compute and hesitated before answering questions. For a man who speaks, loudly and clearly for a living, the change was extraordinary.
Right from the start, one of the things I was most afraid of was lasting brain damage, which can be caused by time spent at extreme altitude. My father had told me how people cope differently, some acclimatising well and some really bearing the brunt of time spent above 8,000 metres. They’d worked out that there was a genetic indicator that could predict your tolerance and the lasting effect altitude might have on you. He’d recommended Ben take the test before Everest, an idea that Ben quickly pooh-poohed. ‘If I’m going to climb Everest, I need to believe I can do it,’ he argued, ‘I’ve got no time for negativity.’ I quickly realised that my argument that it would be better not to do it at all if you were predisposed to suffer and risk brain damage was not one he wanted to hear, and it was something that haunted me all the time he was up on the mountain.
On my way up to start university aged 18 and shortly after reading Into Thin Air, I met the boyfriend of a woman who’d been on the mountain in 1996 when the storm hit and was one of the very few to have survived a night in the open air in the death zone. Two years later, he told me that she was never quite the same and that even though she had descended alive, her ability to engage, to articulate her feelings and to empathise was slightly different. Coming back with a pulse was all very well, but at what cost was a question never far from my mind.
But slowly he has returned, he’s adjusted back into the rhythm that our chaotic life ticks along to. Never particularly organised, his forgetfulness still catches him out on a regular basis. We’ve had to change our front door lock a handful of times and luckily he has two passports. For weeks he sat down to write this book and produced nothing. His tenth book, writing is surely a skill he has by now honed, but the w
ords just wouldn’t come out.
I’m not one for apathy, it’s all about seizing the moment. ‘I’m not sure I can do it,’ he moaned one morning. ‘I just don’t have the words to write this book,’ he grumbled. But I couldn’t just let him give up and so I told him why he had to document his experiences. I told him how I didn’t care about book sales or his advance, how another book on the Ben Fogle shelf of books would mean very little to me. As much as I respected the commitment he’d made to his publishers, I was quite confident there were plenty of other books they’d publish that year. I told him that he owed it to us, not just me and the children, but to the grandchildren I hope will one day fill our lives with joy.
We sacrificed him for two months, but it wasn’t just that he wasn’t there to be the husband and father that we so desperately rely on. It was the Sunday nights alone, the empty seat beside me at the class assembly, the not knowing when … or if … he’d be back. What do you say to a tearful seven-year-old who between sobs gulps ‘… but I just miss Daddy so much’?
But, more than that we endured worry and anguish, dark thoughts and heart palpitations. Many a long night I spent tossing and turning, trying to brush away the hellish scenarios that infested my head like a horde of maggots so persistent they depended on me for life. The agonisingly long radio silences while he was up on the mountain, with my friends worrying so much that they hadn’t the heart to ask me whether or not I’d heard from him.
What Ben experienced is something that few people have the strength, time, money or resolve to do. But I feel quite strongly that those who are privileged enough to test themselves in the way that Ben did, to push their boundaries to see what is humanly possible and to be forced to reflect on life and what each part, person or experience means to us, have an obligation to share it. Ludo and Iona are small and while they lived and breathed Everest as much as their little lungs could, Lego Ninjago is still as interesting. But one day, they’ll read something and realise that not everyone’s daddy does that. And maybe one of their children, our grandchildren, will do the same and feel a rush of pride that their grandfather had achieved such a remarkable feat. Stories come alive in the detail but our minds, ever more fragile as we get older, lose that all-important detail. And so that morning, as lines of frustration showed on Ben’s mountain-ravaged face, the look of defeat in his eyes, I told him why I refused to let him give up. I will put up with a lot of things, but I won’t put up with a book defeating him when the highest mountain on earth hadn’t managed that.
