Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Ben Fogle 2018

Ben Fogle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover images © Mark Fisher

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008319229

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008319205

Version: 2019-02-19

Dedication

To the Sherpa people,

the real heroes of the mountain

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

TIMELINE

AN END AND A BEGINNING

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: FAMILY

Marina – Home

CHAPTER TWO: PREPARATION

CHAPTER THREE: RESPONSIBILITY

Marina – Saying goodbye

Marina – Am I worried? Not yet

CHAPTER FOUR: BAGGAGE

CHAPTER FIVE: LOSS

CHAPTER SIX: COLLABORATION

Marina – The media

CHAPTER SEVEN: FEAR

CHAPTER EIGHT: RISK

Marina – The icefall

Marina – Risk

CHAPTER NINE: DIFFERENT ENDINGS

CHAPTER TEN: Positivity

Marina – Summit fever

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ADVERSITY

Marina – Breaking radio silence

CHAPTER TWELVE: SUMMIT

Marina – The summit

Marina – Life after Everest

THE END

EPILOGUE

PICTURE SECTION

OUR CHARITIES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Also by Ben Fogle

About the Authors

About the Publisher

Timeline

13/4/18 – ARRIVAL KATHMANDU

14/4 – LUKLA (2,800 metres)

15/4 – NAMCHE BAZAAR (3,400 metres)

16/4 – TRAIL TO PANGBOCHE (4,100 metres)

17/4 – PUJA CEREMONY, PANGBOCHE MONASTERY (with Lama Nawang Pal)

18/4 – TRAINING CLIMB (to 5,000 metres)

19/4 – CLIMBERS’ MEMORIAL, LOBUCHE (4,950 metres)

20/4 – KHUMBU VALLEY

21/4 – BASE CAMP

26/4 – RETURN TO BASE CAMP AFTER ASCENT TO LHOTSE FACE ABOVE CAMP 2 (6,400 metres)

30/4–3/5 – ROTATION TO CAMP 3 (7,200 metres)

4/5 – VIC LEAVES

7/5 – TRAINING HIKE

8/5 – SCHOOL ASSEMBLY SATELLITE CALL

16/5 – 7.30 AM EVEREST SUMMIT (8,800 metres)

18/5 – LEAVE BASE CAMP FOR HOME

An End and a Beginning

Dear Ludo and Iona,

Life is about the journey not the destination.

Live it brightly. Live it brilliantly and live it wisely. Don’t waste it. Not one single day.

Add life to your days not days to your life.

Dream.

Dare.

Do.

Live for the now, not the then.

Be spontaneous.

Smile.

Go with your heart. Instinct is often right.

Take criticism on the chin and use it usefully.

Life is there to complete, not to compete. Although it will sometimes feel like a competition, don’t get swept up by it. It’s not a race.

Be magnanimous in victory and graceful in defeat.

Be humble and try not to grumble.

Confide. Don’t divide.

Reach don’t preach.

Be caring and considerate.

Be principled but open-minded enough to be pragmatic.

Try and be the shepherd not the sheep.

Remember, you aren’t just a face in the crowd. You’re unique.

Despite a planet of seven billion. There is no one else like you.

Your personality will be shaped and moulded by the company you keep and the experiences you have.

Be comfortable with who you are. Don’t try and be what others want or expect you to be.

Listen, be curious and learn.

Wealth is all about how YOU interpret it. Money will not buy you happiness nor love.

Experiences WILL make you richer.

Travel will broaden your mind.

People will judge you, but don’t let that judgement define you.

Don’t let failure defeat you.

Insecurity will creep up on you throughout life, try not to listen to it.

Be confident, never arrogant.

Give.

Share.

People will be outrageous and provocative. Try not to be outraged or provoked.

Don’t live life through a screen. Live it for bikes and hikes, not likes and swipes.

Routine is far more dangerous than risk.

Some days you will feel a little down. The highs and lows are human nature.

Your life should be filled with light and shade, it is these ups and downs that remind us what is important in life.

Fortune really does favour the brave.

Be brave.

Take risks.

Live your life.

Smile.

And don’t forget to look UP.

Love Daddy

Ring ring … ring ring … ring ring …

It’s 4 am and I’m in a hotel room in Toronto, Canada. I’m here for my grandmother’s 100th birthday. Her 100th birthday! I still marvel at that. I cancelled everything to be here for this, including leaving my family in Austria.

I hate calls in the night. They make me nervous. They are almost always bad. No one calls with good news at 4 am. Maybe it’s a wrong number. My heart is pounding.

‘It’s Dad,’ says the voice on the line. He’s in the room next door. Why is he calling me?

‘Marina has lost the baby.’

I struggle to comprehend what he is telling me. I only left Marina yesterday, eight months pregnant and healthy, while I flew to Canada.

And why is he telling me this? I look at my mobile. It’s switched off.

‘It’s not good, she might not make it either, you’ve got to get back.’

My world imploded. It’s funny how we never realise how happy and lucky we are until it’s gone. I had the perfect, happy life and in that single phone call I saw the happiness disappear. It was like a little bomb going off in my life.

Not only had I lost a baby that I had been longing to meet, but I also faced the reality of losing my beloved wife, Marina. My soul mate, my best friend and the mother to my children.

I wasn’t ready to become a widower.

The next 12 hours are a bit of a blur. By the time I had thrown on some clothes, Dad had booked me a plane ticket to London. I raced to the airport and was on a flight by 6 am.

It was the worst flight of my life. And I’ve had some bad flights.

For eight long hours, I would have no contact with the outside world. I sat in my seat and imagined what was happening. My sister-in-law, Chiara, warned me in a call before my flight that Marina was bleeding so profusely that she might not make it. Please God, don’t take her from me. I am not a religious person, but here I was, 30,000 feet up, calling on the heavens to hear my prayers.

I sat there with tears streaming down my face. How could I cope? I couldn’t imagine life without Marina, the lynchpin of our family. The fun and the happiness. The glue. She was the family. We would be lost without her. The children, what about the children? What did they know? Ludo was four and Iona three. How would I tell them? How could I tell them?

My happy life flashed before my eyes during that endless flight. Our wedding in Portugal, the honeymoon in the Outer Hebrides, the family holidays, dancing in the kitchen. How could life ever be happy again? How could I go up from here?

As the plane touched down at Heathrow, I turned on my phone. How I was dreading this moment. Rain drizzled down the oval plane window as I called Chiara, who was still a further 1,000 miles away in Austria.

‘She’s still in intensive care … but they have stopped the bleeding … she’s going to live.’

I burst into tears and jumped into a taxi to Luton where I caught a flight to Salzburg in Austria. Those 12 hours were like a foggy nightmare. It was like I was living someone else’s life. This was the kind of thing that only happened to other people, not us.

In Salzburg, I can remember the shafts of bright light streaming through the hospital windows as I walked up the white corridor. I walked into a large room bathed in Alpine summer sunshine, net curtains blowing in the gentle breeze from the open windows. I could just make out the mountains in the distance. It was ethereal. Beautiful and calming.

In the middle of the room was a bed surrounded by nurses in starched white uniforms, their smiles dazzling. White. Bright. Warm.

I walked over to the bed. Marina’s blonde hair spilt over the pillow, her face was drained of colour. Everything was white. Clinical, but calm and soothing.

I held her hand and she opened her eyes. She smiled. I love her smile, it’s so beautiful. It’s infectious. Tears rolled down my cheeks. She looked at me and squeezed my hand.

‘Do you want to meet him?’

Him. My baby was a boy. We had deliberately not found out his sex. Marina wanted to have a surprise, something to look forward to at the end of labour. A boy, another little boy. A son.

Wait. What does she mean, meet him? I knew he had been stillborn.

‘I think we should meet him to say goodbye.’

I like to think of myself as a pretty stable, well-prepared individual, little surprises me and I am rarely flummoxed. ‘Expect the unexpected’ has always been my mantra; but now, here, in this faraway hospital in a strange land, I was being invited to meet and to hold my dead son.

One of the nurses appeared with a baby blanket. She held it in her arms gently and walked through the shafts of sunlight. My heart raced. Nothing, I mean nothing in my life had prepared me for this.

She handed me the little bundle. I cupped him in my arms and peered at his little face. He was so beautiful. He looked like he was asleep.

‘What shall we call him?’ Marina smiled.

‘I think we should call him Willem.’ Tears splashed onto his little cheeks.

Here was a little boy I had longed to meet but would never get to know. For eight months, I had imagined a complete family of five. Suddenly, those dreams had been shattered.

It can be difficult for those who haven’t experienced this unique form of bereavement to understand how painful it can be, to lose someone you never knew, but I felt like I was suffocating.

I stared at little Willem and made a resolution there and then that I would live the rest of my life for the two of us, that I would relish every day. I would always smile. I would live it to its full. For little Willem, I would live my life even more brightly, seizing the moments and the opportunities and pursuing my dreams.

Little did I know it, but in that dreadful moment of tragedy and disappointment was the germ of a journey that would turn my life around and lead me up to the top of the world.

Up.

‘Always look Up,’ my late grandmother used to say. It was good advice. It is too easy to go through life looking down.

It is almost a symptom of modern society, to look down, both physically and metaphorically. Travel on the commuter train, bus or tube each morning and they are full of people looking down. Down at their phones, their newspapers, their feet, anywhere but up, for fear of making eye contact. Walk along most streets and they are full of people looking down at their phones, their feet, the pavement.

It is like we have evolved into a downward-looking species.

I remember once on a visit to New York, a taxi driver pointed out that he could always spot a tourist because they were the ones looking up. That observation is so symbolic. You see, to New Yorkers, those magnificent vertiginous skyscrapers were just another part of their landscape. Complacency meant they never looked up and admired the city that others flocked to.

Can you imagine how much we miss out on by looking down? Those chance encounters, opportunities and sights. To my mind, we have become an increasingly pessimistic, negative and angry society. We have become suspicious of success. Social media and the press will often pick on the negative, downward-facing stories and opinions.

Where is the Up? The positivity, the optimism and the celebration? I’m sure if more people looked up and smiled, we would be in a happier world.

If there is one thing I encourage my children to do, it is to smile. Not in a needless, fake kind of way, but in a positive karma kind of way. A smile has a natural way of lightening and lifting the head.

Take a look around you. Downward-facing frowns? Lift your head and smile.

Introduction

It was a hot summer’s afternoon in 2016 and I was in a crowded tent at Goodwood House in Sussex. My wife Marina and I had been invited by Cartier to join them for lunch at the Festival of Speed. I made my way to our table and peered at the name card next to me.

Victoria Gardner.

I’d never heard of her, which was just as well, as she wasn’t there.

Thirty minutes passed and, after I’d finished my starter, a young girl appeared, apologised profusely for her lateness and sat in the chair next to me.

I recognised her instantly: Victoria Pendleton, the heroine of British cycling. Two-time Olympic gold medallist and umpteen-time world champion. I was dizzy with excitement. I had followed her career closely and admired her ability to excel at sport while not becoming a slave to it. I had always liked the way she spoke her mind and appeared to ruffle feathers by breaking convention. I admired her individuality in a sport with a reputation for unquestioning conformity.

I had long thought that Victoria would make a great adventuring companion if ever I met her. For several hours, we chatted. I told her that if ever she wanted to embark on an expedition or an adventure, I would love to explore some ideas. Without hesitation, she accepted, and in the inauspicious and unlikely surroundings of that marquee, we hatched a plan that would take us to one of the wildest, most dangerous places on earth, on a journey that would change our lives forever.

For several years, I had been travelling the world to spend time with people who had abandoned the conformity of society and followed their dreams into the wilderness. Each one had inspired me to do more with my own life, but each time I found myself returning home and plugging back into our ‘vanilla’ society. Safe. Risk averse. Conforming. Restricting. Angry.

I have always wanted more. I have always wanted to shake the manacles of expectation. Over the years, I have dipped in and out of it, but I have always returned to the safety of home and complacency.

I had been looking for something to shake my foundations and reconnect me with the wilderness.

The modern world is a complex one. Aged 44, I sometimes worry I can’t keep up with it. Technology and communication have advanced at breakneck speed. Never have we been bombarded with so much information. Never has society been held up to such scrutiny.

What’s more, we have become increasingly polarised. World politics is the manifestation of our fractured society. You are either in or out. For or against. Yes or no. Up or down.

Negativity is a blight on society. It might just be the rose-tinted retrospective reflection of my childhood, but I’m sure when I was younger everything was more positive. Negativity was the realm of Eeyore, the donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh. Eeyore was in the minority with his pessimism and gloom.

Today, there seems to be a bubbling undertone of resentment and anger that is contagious. It seems to manifest itself in this fast-paced, downward-looking burden. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can live your life Up.

I have always tried to look Up. That doesn’t mean I haven’t looked back, far from it, we can all learn a great deal from our past. From the highs and lows, the good decisions and the bad. The successes and the mistakes.

You see, looking Up has become something bordering on the spiritual. I am not religious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t look up.

‘Do you believe in God?’ asked my son Ludo one morning.

‘I don’t know,’ came the answer that surprised me. I’d probably describe myself as an atheist. I’m open-minded. I’ve been into the various churches of God over the years. I don’t have a particular calling to a specific ‘god’ per se, but that is not to say I don’t believe in a higher calling.

It’s just that mine is a little wilder. The wilderness is my religion. Nature. The flora and fauna. It is my church. I feel the same connection to a higher being when in the wilderness as many do in a church. My god is not specific. It’s the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the waterfalls. The wilderness heals; it soothes and calms.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get too philosophical here, but it is important to understand my calling, because the wilderness in all her cloaks has a powerful spirituality. Of course, there are plenty of cultures who have long revered the sun and the moon and the power they have over us, and there are many pagans who also have a deep connection to the land and the earth.

Mine is less structured. It’s difficult to define, but I find the wilderness has an almost magnetic pull over me and perhaps it is the reason for this story. The call of the wild has helped mould and shape me into the man I am today. My relationship with the wilderness has never been one of battle or war. It has never been Man versus nature, but Man with nature. I’ve tried to find the careful balance of harmony, of mutual respect, of collaboration.

We have such a complex relationship with nature. In some ways, we have tried to tame it and control it: look at our cities and townscapes. We have beaten nature into submission, sanitised it and suppressed it. It’s almost as if we are terrified of it. Scared of its power over us.

I have never been fearful of the wilderness. Respectfully wary, and often humbled by it, but I’ve always loved being close to mother nature. She has a way of simplifying life.

Nature has the power to strip us back to our basic instincts. It’s no wonder there are movements around the world for rehabilitation and therapy in the wilderness, to use the forests and the woods as a way of treating ill health.

Forest schools are increasing in popularity and many nations, from Japan to Norway, have become popular destinations for forest bathing, in which people lie on the forest floor and stare up at the canopy above.

There is already scientific evidence of the healing virtues of the flora and fauna around us. It has always been perfectly obvious to me that we have a closer affinity to water, trees and mountains than we do to skyscrapers, roads and cars.

It feels like we have the very basics of our existence upside down. Rather than living in the concrete, grey cityscape and ‘escaping’ to the countryside for holidays or breaks, we should live closer to nature and ‘visit’ the cityscapes.

Of course, cities hold the key to work and opportunity, but once again we seem to have our principles and priorities slightly skewed. Do we work to live, or live to work?

I have always been attracted to a hand-to-mouth existence. A small-scale subsistence lifestyle has always seemed more compelling than the intensity of the materialistic, commercialised culture in which most of us in the Western world have chosen to live. Connected to the grid, we are slaves to money. We must pay taxes, mortgages and fees. The governments rely on a working society to generate income and therefore tax.

For the last six years, I’ve been working on a TV series about people who have dropped out of society and started a new life disconnected from the state. They have cut themselves off from ‘the grid’, severed their connection to electricity, water, gas, phone and in some cases money.

For me, expeditions have been my own, short-term opportunity to live off the grid. Expeditions have given me a chance to test my resolve and pique my resourcefulness. When I’m back at home, a cultural lethargy envelops me. When something goes wrong with the electrics or the car or the drainage, I will, by default, call in someone else to help.

The fully functioning circular economy relies on everyone having a skill. We have become reliant on a collective taskforce in which we all have mono skills rather than the universal multitasking multi-skills of old.

My late grandfather built his own house on the shores of a Canadian lake. He dug the foundations, installed the pipework and the electrics. He cut the wood, roofed the house and fitted the windows.

I like to think of myself as a well-rounded individual, but I wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to building a house. I can sail, scuba dive and speak fluent Spanish, but I don’t understand electrics and I can’t even hammer a nail properly. Which set of skills are more useful? The latter of course; the problem is that society no longer requires them and we have lost the connection to our basic knowledge.

The wilderness requires resourcefulness; it forces us to connect with an inner self that once relied on survival skills to exist. When pushed, it’s amazing how adaptable we can become. The problem is that so few of us ever get a chance to test ourselves. We tend to take the easy option and avoid hardship. For me, expeditions have always been a way of reconnecting with my inner wildman.

The first time I really challenged myself was when I was marooned for a year on a remote corner of a windswept, treeless island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I had volunteered to be a castaway for a year on the island of Taransay, as part of a unique social experiment by the BBC to celebrate the millennium.

A group of 36 men, women and children were given 12 months to become a fully functioning community. We were given all the materials we would need to build accommodation, install water piping, a wind turbine and fencing. We put up polytunnels to grow fruit and veg in the inclement Scottish weather and we reared pigs, sheep and cattle. We built a slaughterhouse, harvested crops and became a simple, thriving off-grid community.

I learned so many new skills during that year: farming, building, teaching. In many ways, it converted a group of underskilled urbanites into a well-rounded, multi-tasking community, in which we all shared our different skill sets and knowledge for the betterment of the whole.

We became a very happy little settlement. I think we reintroduced lost values into our little community. We cared collectively for one another. There was no place for materialism. Our community was based on subsistence. We worked with what we had and maximised our efficiency. After 12 months, we were a happier, healthier, more efficient group of people.

In some ways, I have been chasing that beautiful, simple life ever since.

Castaway for a year on an island, rowing the Atlantic, trekking across Antarctica … all of these experiences have had a profound effect on me.

But it was Everest that changed me for good.

This seven-week expedition into the death zone was a life-changing, life-enhancing adventure. I walked the fine line between life and death. I experienced feelings and emotions that I’d never had before.

I never planned to write a book. After all, thousands of great mountaineering books have been written before. What would make my story so unique? Well, I hope you will read this book, not as an ego-chasing journey to the top of the world, but as a life-affirming lesson.

Humbled and enlightened, I hope these words jump out with the intensity of my own experience. I hope the positivity and the happiness and the joy overshadow the obligatory danger, fear and suffering that comes with a high-altitude mountain adventure.

I hope this book will inspire you to climb your own Everest.

CHAPTER ONE

Family

We were on a deserted beach in the Caribbean when I proposed to Marina.

Over a picnic of tea and sandwiches, I got down and proposed with a ring made from a little piece of string. I had just spent two months rowing across the Atlantic Ocean and hadn’t had time to get to a proper jewellers, so instead I made a special ring from a little piece of rope on the boat.

By the summer, we were married. I couldn’t wait to start my own family, but we decided not to rush into parenthood. It would be several years until Marina fell pregnant for the first time.

I had never been happier. We waited until the 12-week scan to tell everyone. In anticipation, we invited friends and family over for a party. That afternoon, we went for the final scan only to discover there was no heartbeat. We had lost our little child before it had even had time to form. It was crushing, but Marina insisted on going ahead with the party – one of many episodes in our lives that shows her resilience.

A month later, I went to Antarctica with James Cracknell. The polar trek was a pretty good way to overcome the tragedy of the loss. For those who haven’t experienced miscarriage, it can be a difficult thing to explain. To be honest, I had no idea of the emotional disappointment of losing a child at such a young age. It isn’t so much the loss, as the loss of the dream.

For three months, we had dreamed and hoped and planned. Of course, all new parents are warned not to become too hopeful before the 12-week scan, but we were intoxicated by happiness and perhaps confident through hopeful arrogance. We’d be fine, we had assumed.

We survived, and it made us both stronger. Less than a year later, Marina was pregnant again and this time she carried to term until we gave birth to our first child, a little baby boy we called Ludo.

Ludo brought such joy and happiness into our lives. Overnight, this little screaming baby became our world. Parenthood can be pretty overwhelming. As dog owners, both Marina and I had been pretty sure we would find it easy. A dog is, unsurprisingly, very different to a baby. We lived through the fog of broken sleepless nights and slowly life became a little easier.

What surprised me most was my instinctive spirit to nest and protect. Inadvertently, I found myself being more careful. I worried more and became more risk averse.

I don’t know if this is instinctive behaviour or whether it is born from the conventions of society, but I soon found fatherhood to be domineering, not in a bad way, but in an all-encompassing, all-consuming change to my lifestyle.

Ludo became our world. He was our everything. We were dazzled by the beauty of parenthood and that blinded us temporarily to everything else.

Family has always been important to me. I grew up in a tightly-knit family, the middle sibling to two sisters, living above my father’s veterinary clinic. We were close to our extended family, too. My parents gently instilled the core values of family life and it is probably no surprise that we all live within a mile radius of one another in central London.

Fortunately for me, my wife is also from a very close family. Perhaps it was part of the attraction for me. As it happens, I probably now spend more time with her parents and sisters than with my own. We spend most weekends with them in their little cottage in Buckinghamshire and the summer with them in Austria.

Whenever I travel, I am always moved by the intensity of the family dynamic in other parts of the world. Almost every other country places the family at the heart of the nation. Grandparents, aunts, uncles all live together. The very concept of retirement homes or old people’s homes is as alien as the concept of not putting family first. In Britain, I think family is a little more insular. For many it is the tight immediacy of the parents and their children. The wider family is often an afterthought for Christmas or a summer barbecue. The reason I never moved overseas permanently was because of the call of my family. I couldn’t bear the thought of being so far from them all.

To become a parent myself gave me a whole new perspective on life. I now had the parental responsibilities. I had a little child that would rely on me for the next 20 years or so. I was responsible for caring, sharing and preparing this little boy for life.

I had to teach him what was right and what was wrong. What was good and what was bad. Love and hate. Fear and loss. I was overwhelmed at the incredible burden of responsibility. What if I got it wrong? What if I failed? Can you fail at being a father?

No amount of planning or preparation can really prepare you for the magnitude of the journey. You can’t press the pause button. You can’t change your mind. Fatherhood is an unstoppable expedition into the unknown.

Expedition isn’t a bad way to describe it. You try to plan and prepare. It involves a whole new routine that often includes sleep deprivation and fear. It’s like you enter a new world in which you’re never really sure if you are right or wrong.

I felt guilty about taking even the shortest overseas assignments, which was at odds with my instinctive desire to feather my nest financially. Money had never been a priority; of course it is a powerful enabler, but I’ve always been happy with simplicity, and the desire to accumulate great wealth has never been an ambition.

Overnight, this relaxed attitude changed into a sort of panic. As a freelancer, I had no guarantee of work from one day to the next. The vulnerability of a TV presenter cannot be underestimated. Our value can plunge overnight in the blink of a single scandal or change of a commissioner. Fashions change, and with them presenters come and go. As Piers Morgan likes to say, ‘One minute you are the cock of the walk, the next you are a feather duster.’

Most of all, I wanted to be a good role model. I admired, and still admire, both my parents. I am so proud of their achievements, and part of my own drive has been to make them equally proud. For me to succeed in life feels like success for them as parents.

Success isn’t always about impressing other people, but how can you ever define success if there is no one to congratulate you?

It wasn’t long before Marina was pregnant with our second child, Iona. Once again, we dipped into the nocturnal fog of parenthood, and once again I found myself torn by the contradiction of wanting to be a stay-at-home dad. To nurture and protect while at the same time battling my desire to build up my financial resources and work.

It was like trying to juggle too many balls. Family, friends, work, ambition and adventure. You can’t have your cake and eat it. The problem was that adventure has always been at the heart of who I am, and while instinct drove me to nest build, passion for the pursuit of adventure was driving me closer and closer to Everest, my childhood dream.

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to climb her. The first time I remember seeing a photograph of Everest was in National Geographic magazine. It seemed so extraordinary that man, with all our advancement, had taken until 1953 to get to the top.

I spent hours staring at those photographs of the towering peak, of weathered faces and heroic sherpas. There was something so romantically mesmerising and alluring about her. Dangerous and beautiful. I found myself dreaming about her. Thinking about her. But it was always just that. A dream. Like the pretty girl at school, I was never going to get her. I wasn’t a mountaineer. It seemed beyond my grasp on so many levels.

I’m not sure what it was that so captivated me. The remoteness. The romance of the highest place on earth. The drama. The tragedy. She has been at centre stage for so many incredible tales. Some heroic. Many tragic. Plenty unexplained.

As a young boy, summiting Everest represented the pinnacle of human endeavour. In my young mind, it was the ultimate achievement. It required grit, strength, bravery and confidence. None of which I had very much of, which is maybe why it had such magnetism. Here was a mountain that attracted the brave few; the romantics pursuing their standing at the top of the world.

Over the years, I had met plenty of people who had climbed Everest: Kenton Cool, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Bear Grylls, Annabelle Bond, Jake Meyer, the list goes on. To be honest, I seemed to know more people who had climbed it than hadn’t. I felt like the odd one out. It always made me feel like I had missed out on this incredible moment. Not in a ‘bagging’ or ‘ticking off’ kind of a way, but in the pursuit of my dream.

Many people are put off by the number of those who have climbed Everest. Nearly 4,000 have had the privilege of standing on the top of the world. I’d say out of a world population of over 7 billion, that’s still quite small.

It is difficult to define ‘why’. When Mallory was asked he famously answered, ‘because it’s there’. As flippant as it sounds, I can relate to his sentiments. We live in an age where there has to be a purpose and reason for everything we do.

There had never been a clear ‘purpose’ for me to climb Everest. In past conversations with Marina she had quite rightly explained that if climbing and mountaineering was my passion, then I should, and could quite justifiably, attempt a summit, but why? She had asked, why would I risk so much for so little?

Was I not risking my life to simply stand on a point? The answer is yes and no. For me, the Everest dream has always been so much more than just an ego trip. It’s the whole thing. The trek to Base Camp. The Icefall. The Western Cwm, the Lhotse Face, the South Col, the Balcony, the Hillary Step. For me, having read countless books, these places have the same spiritual draw as a pilgrimage.

Everest has always represented everything I dream of achieving. It has always had a wild, dangerous romance that is at the same time both terrifying and electrifying. It fills me, has always filled me, with such wondrous fascination and appeal. Like a forbidden fruit. So close and yet so far. Within touching distance.

It’s like an historian visiting the archaeological sites of the world, or a geographer visiting the geological sites.

I was wrestling with the balance between my need for adventure and my love of my family. Can you justifiably juggle both? Where is the line between sensible and selfish? I had found myself torn between the pursuit of my dreams and my family, who are my everything.

In the end, it comes down to who I am and what makes me who I am. Without travel, without adventure and without wilderness, I am nothing. Life is about embracing the good and the bad. It is the heady mix of fear, danger, adversity, heroics, romance, wilderness, beauty, tragedy, love, loss and achievement. Ultimately, it’s about pursuing our dreams. To dare to do. To dare to go where others fear.

What more can you ask for in life?

Everest would give me all that. It was a gamble. It was risky. There were dangers, but if I wasn’t being true to myself then how could I be honest to my own family? I just had to persuade Marina that climbing the highest mountain on earth was a good idea for all of us.

Marina – Home

For as long as I can remember, Ben has wanted to climb Everest. I guess, when you’re in his line of work, wanting to scale the tallest mountain in the world should come as no surprise. But Ben is a dreamer and I’m a realist, and when he’d talked of his lofty ambition, I’d always pooh-poohed the idea, dismissing his dream.

It’s not that I wasn’t seduced by the world’s tallest mountain in the way that he was. I grew up on a diet of adventure books. I spent my gap year reading the mountaineering authors Joe Simpson and Jon Krakauer. The ambitions of my 18-year-old self, aspirational and seemingly immortal, included participating in the Vendée Globe – the single-handed round-the-world sailing race – and climbing an ‘eight-thousander’, probably Everest, maybe even K2. As I waved Ben off from La Gomera on his mission to row the Atlantic, I was selecting which of my friends I’d ask to be in my team for the same race in two years’ time.

What is more telling is that by the time he’d reached the other end and I’d realised just what such a challenge involved, the idea had been well and truly scrapped. With a new ring on my finger and a wedding to organise, I was delighted to be at Ben’s side as he undertook his challenges. As his wife I would have the best seat in the house, but there was no way I was actually going to do them.

For Ben, however, actually participating in adventures is part of his DNA. My bold spouse is always on the lookout for a feat that will inspire the nation. When Ben announced he was going to row the Atlantic, everyone looked at me incredulously, not believing you could actually row across an ocean that only the most hardy sail across.

In the first few years of our marriage, Ben dabbled with extremes – facing the bitter cold walking to the South Pole and enduring the intense desert conditions walking across the Empty Quarter. Part of me was hoping that this thirst for adventure would cease as our children started needing him more. I was banking on the fact that he’d never get bored of talking about the life he’d led up until this point, and that I could continue to brush the ‘E idea’ under the carpet.

The first time I knew he was serious was on a Sunday afternoon as we walked across the Chiltern hills. The lives of new parents tend to revolve around their children, leaving the parents little time for each other. We’re at the stage where every conversation is hijacked by an eight-year-old.

‘But Mummy, won’t you get put in prison if you kill that traffic warden?’

‘Mummy, what is resting bitch face?’

So last year, we made a conscious decision to try and have an hour when we walk and talk, just the two of us, every weekend. Since Ben is away for most of the year, the reality is that these walks happen once a month. Not ideal but good enough (which as every parent knows, is the gold standard).

Spring was just casting her delicate fingers over the winter-hewn hills. Around us new life was emerging from the rich earth, and blossom buds were tentatively bursting from naked trees. ‘So I think I’ve found a way to do Everest,’ Ben started. I glanced at him and at that moment my stomach lurched, because for the first time I knew he really meant it.

Ben and I don’t have the kind of relationship where he tells me what he’s going to do. I’d never have signed up for that, but as a couple we’re absolutely terrible at conflict and so, over the decade that we’ve been married, we have worked out how to tackle potentially sensitive conversations without it resulting in an argument. We don’t always achieve this, but amazingly, this time it worked.

I’d been told by a therapist that potentially difficult conversations are best had while walking. Raising your heart rate is good for the body and mind, and the fact that you’re looking ahead rather than looking intensely into each other’s eyes takes the edge off it. As we dipped into the Hambleden Valley, he told me his plan; that Kenton Cool, the rock star of the climbing world, had agreed to guide him, that he’d found a sponsor so that we didn’t have to re-mortgage our house. He told me about why he’d always wanted to do it and, while he recognised such a feat would always be dangerous, what he was planning to do to mitigate that risk.

We returned home, our cheeks red from the chilly spring breeze, the dogs exhausted and me understanding that Everest was now a reality.

There was only ever one contender when it came to who could help us achieve this dream: Kenton Cool. I had known Kenton for several years after we had met through a mutual friend, Sir Ranulph Fiennes. He had told me that should I ever decide to do some climbing, we should consider teaming up together. Five years passed before I gave him a call to ask if he would help Victoria and myself with our Everest dreams.

Kenton set out a two-year plan for our Everest attempt. Respect of the mountain and a dedication to the project would ensure we had the best chances of summiting. He wanted to break it up into three phases. The first would involve an Alpine expedition for Victoria to give her a feel for the mountains. After all, while I was still a relative novice when it came to mountain climbing, Victoria was a mountaineering virgin. Green. Once she had become familiarised, we would then head to Bolivia for a three-week training programme in the Andes. This would then be followed by more training in the European Alps, before the final stage which would be a pre-Everest expedition to Nepal.

Kenton is one of Britain’s most respected mountaineers who has an astonishing 12 summits under his belt. His climbing formula has been tried and tested so, although it would mean a huge amount of time away from family and work, I was committed to the plan.

The idea behind the programme was to build up our confidence using crampons, ice axes, ropes and harnesses. By the time we reached Everest, they needed to be second nature. We had to move efficiently and safely. It would also give us a chance to familiarise ourselves with mountain living. Once again, while I had plenty of experience of camping in the wilderness, for Victoria this would be a whole new experience.

Finally, it would also give us two years to get to know one another properly. To understand one another and to recognise our behaviours. The idea being that by the time we reached Everest, we would be able to know when something wasn’t right; we would understand the nuanced behavioural changes that may be a result of altitude sickness.

For someone who has embraced the slow life, I am quite an impatient person, and the two-year plan was a pretty big commitment. To be honest, it was probably tailored more towards Victoria’s inexperience, but we were a team and I relished the time we spent together.

In 2017, tragedy struck our tiny corner of West London. Just a few hundred metres from our house, Grenfell Tower caught alight and took more than 70 lives with her – some were friends. This tight-knit community was torn apart. It is still hard to think about. We pass the charred remains of that tragic building every day and we think about those lives lost.

It turned our little community upside down, but in those awful days and weeks after the inferno, a team of volunteers from the British Red Cross descended on North Kensington. It was both terrible and beautiful to see the same vehicles I had seen so often in faraway lands, now parked on my own street.

When Nepal was devastated by an earthquake back in 2015, the Red Cross had been one of the first aid agencies on the scene. I had long admired the Red Cross and decided that if I was going to climb Mount Everest, it would be in support of their incredible, heroic efforts at home and abroad. The countless volunteers across the world who selflessly dedicate their lives to improving the lives of others is true heroism, way greater than standing on the summit of any mountain.

Marina had given the green light. Kenton had agreed to help us prepare for Everest. We had agreed to support the British Red Cross and Victoria was fully committed to the expedition.

Now all we had to do was learn how to climb.

CHAPTER TWO

Preparation

After a long summer in the Austrian Alps, I left Marina and the children and headed to the other side of the world, to La Paz in Bolivia, where our team would have a crash course in mountain climbing. Kenton had designed an expedition that would take us up four Andean peaks in ascending order, culminating in Illimani at just under 6,500 metres (or three-quarters of the height of our ultimate goal, Everest).

I had only met Victoria a handful of times, and although I had known Kenton for a few years, we were all comparative strangers. This would be a great opportunity to get to know one another, and also to see if we were suited to mountains.

I had made it very clear to Victoria that she had to be 100 per cent sure that she wanted to take on the highest mountain in the world. I knew the risks involved. Everest required respect and commitment. The two-year plan we had embarked on would take us away from families and work for long stretches, so we had to both be fully invested. I felt a sense of responsibility that would be mitigated by Victoria’s full commitment and devotion to the expedition. While mine was a childhood dream to climb Everest, hers was more about the ‘challenge’.

It was early morning when we landed in the highest capital city in the world, La Paz. At 4,000 metres, it is so high that emergency oxygen cylinders are provided around the airport for new arrivals struggling with the thin air.

Our little minibus hurtled through the empty streets. La Paz really is an astonishing city. In the bowl of a valley, it is surrounded by towering snow-capped peaks. We explored the city for a day or two to acclimatise, even visiting the Witches’ market with its dried llama foetuses, snakes, herbs and spells. There is something rather overwhelming in the enduring practice of witchcraft and folklore remedies.

We left the city for the peace and tranquillity of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. I had first come here as a 19-year-old. I never forgot the haunting beauty of the lake with its floating reed islands and the fishermen’s iconic boats. We spent a day sailing the lake on a reed boat, stopping at the Island of the Sun for an afternoon hike. Slowly, the three of us were getting to know our different personalities and discovering how we might work as a team: Kenton, the slightly laid back and forgetful mountain guide (so forgetful he had failed to pack a headtorch and a satellite phone for the final peak); Victoria, the vegan and ex-Olympian; and me, the romantic daydreamer.

On the face of it, we were a pretty unusual trio.

Our first summit to tackle was in the Cordillera Real, a mountain range situated a couple of hours from La Paz, where we hiked to base camp. For Victoria, it was her first proper camping experience. Not only was she learning the new art of mountaineering and acclimatising to the thin air, but she was also a camping virgin. On top of this was the difficulty in catering for a vegan in meat-loving, milk-drinking South America, where the local idea of a vegetarian is having half a portion of meat.

It had been many years since I climbed in crampons with ropes and harness. It was like becoming a student again as Kenton taught us the basics of rope work and how to plant our crampons in the ice. Testament to my climbing inexperience were the tattered, torn hems of my climbing trousers, where the sharp blades of the crampons had slashed through the material.

For 10 days we yomped, trekked, hiked and climbed across the Andean peaks until we reached our final challenge, Illimani. Victoria had struggled with the food and had been suffering from an upset stomach, but Kenton felt confident that we had the strength, stamina and resolve for our first 6,500-metre peak. After all, this was the main event. This was what we had come halfway around the world for. Leaving without an ascent would not only have felt like failure but also bad karma for our ultimate goal, Everest – more than two vertical miles higher.

I was halfway up the mountain when I got the call from Dad.

‘It’s Mum,’ he said. ‘She’s in the ICU in an induced coma.’

The call came as a bolt from the blue. Why now, when I was stuck on the other side of the world?

I felt as helpless as I was clueless. I didn’t know what to do. My instinct was to drop everything and head home as quickly as possible, but that was easier said than done when you are clinging to an icy mountain in the isolated nation of Bolivia.

Dad explained that Mum had fallen ill after a routine injection. The needle had pierced an artery and she had bled internally for 12 hours until she passed out. The hospital had placed her in an induced coma. She had a tracheostomy tube cut into her neck and she was in the intensive care unit, being cared for by four nurses, day and night.

‘I’m coming home,’ I told Dad.

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ he reassured me, ‘she’s unconscious, she won’t even know who’s there.’

If all went well, we would summit the following day and I would be home within three days.

‘She would want you to continue,’ he added.

It was a knife-edge decision. My instinct was to head straight home, but even I could see the pointlessness of returning to a mother who was in an induced coma. Things weren’t good, but Dad’s reassuring tone implied that she was in the best hands and that three days wouldn’t make a difference. I still don’t know if I made the right decision, but I decided to carry on. Dad had implored me. He told me it was what Mum would have wanted me to do.

At midnight, we packed up our rucksacks and headed off for our first big summit together. Under torchlight we trudged and zig-zagged up the snowy, icy flanks of Illimani. She was a brute to climb. Starved of oxygen, cold and hungry, we battled on until dawn when the mountain was illuminated pink. The power of that sunrise was incredible. I could feel the sun charge my energy – it felt like new batteries had been placed inside me.

The three of us marched on in silence. Heads bowed to the mountain, each of us in our own misery. The suffering on a high mountain is largely invisible. It is the nakedness of that suffering that makes it harder to grasp. You end up hating yourself and beating yourself up for feeling as you do.

It is completely unlike running a marathon in which the physical drain is obvious. Here, the exhaustion is invisible. It creeps up on you and renders you useless. It is impossible to fight it; you simply have to endure it. Suffer it and deal with it.

‘That’s it,’ came an exclamation from Victoria, ‘I’m out.’

It was 6.30 am and we were just a few metres from the summit. Kenton and I were incredulous. She had endured more than six hours of climbing and hardship, only to declare her quitting a matter of minutes from the summit. It was as unexpected as it was illogical, but then mountains have a strange effect on people. Irrationality is the norm and unreasonable behaviour becomes commonplace. It is one of the reasons solo mountaineering is so dangerous. Without another perspective, it’s difficult to gauge right from wrong. Kenton’s surprise soon turned to exasperation.

‘Get some bloody food in you,’ he berated her. ‘You have no energy because you haven’t eaten anything.’

She had ‘bonked’, as the cycling term refers to it. She had used up her reserves and was running on empty. Kenton was right, but I could tell she didn’t like his style. Victoria is not at all precious, but she has also spent her post-Olympic years trying to exorcise the ghosts of always being told what to do. She popped some nuts into her mouth and less than 20 minutes later we summited the highest peak that Victoria or I had ever climbed.

The summit was bittersweet. We had succeeded, but my mind and focus were elsewhere, back in Britain, worrying about my mother. The expedition had also opened a slight rift between Victoria and Kenton.

I spent the next few months visiting my mother’s bedside each day. Slowly, she recovered and three months later she was discharged from hospital. She had defied the odds, and not only could she walk – something my father had warned us might not be possible – but she also had control of all her senses.

Meanwhile, Victoria was worried about the expedition. She had been unimpressed with Kenton’s slightly laissez-faire approach. His lack of headtorch and failure to pack a satellite phone had rankled her. It had bothered me too, but I’d put it down to a one-off error.

Victoria is a harsher critic and I had to try and convince her that not only was Kenton still the man for the job, but also that Everest was still the right challenge for us.

We had both struggled in Bolivia. Victoria had displayed worrying physiological stats and had struggled in the thin air at 6,500 metres, the same height as Camp 1 on Everest. We would be going several vertical miles higher.

Bolivia had been my first real mountain test. It had pushed me physically, but I had also been inadvertently pushed mentally – worrying about both Victoria and my mother. I am a worrier. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. I worry about everything. Worry and guilt are my two worst traits.

I’m one of those people that never really enjoys a party I host, because I’m so busy worrying about whether my guests are having a good time and guilty that they have made the effort to come to the party in the first place.

I often feel guilty. There is often no sensible or rational reason for it. I had always been worried (there we go again) that I would worry about Victoria. I felt a guilty responsibility for her being in the mountains in the first place, even though our decision to try and climb Everest had been very much a collaborative one.

Taking on Mount Everest was a massive task. We had to want it, but we also had to enjoy it. There was no point taking two years out of our lives, and the sacrifices that come with that, to climb one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, if we didn’t really enjoy it.

Life is way too short to spend that amount of time doing something you aren’t really committed to. I got the impression that Victoria had already dedicated enough of her life to cycling, which had never really been her passion. She had simply gone with the ride and discovered she was pretty good at it. She had impressed Kenton with her stamina and mental drive in Bolivia, but she hadn’t impressed herself. We had both seen her ability to beat herself up. But I wanted Victoria to persevere. I could see the life-changing beauty that lay ahead for her, if only she would embrace the challenge.

Our second training expedition would take us into the heart of Nepal and the Himalayas. Kenton wanted to get us used to the high mountains of the Everest region, to introduce us to the food, the sherpas, the equipment and the landscape in which we would spend upwards of two months in our ultimate quest.

It was early January 2018. Kenton and Victoria had gone ahead of me. I thought it would be good for the pair of them to have an extra week to re-bond and connect. We needed absolute trust and confidence in one another, and it was the perfect opportunity for the two of them to spend time together.

I joined them a week later, at the foot of Imja Tse, a 6,000-metre snow peak in the Himalayas of eastern Nepal that is popular with trekkers. It was given the name ‘Island Peak’ by members of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, because it is surrounded by a sea of ice. Renamed Imja Tse some 20 years later, it is still called Island Peak by most trekkers and climbers today.

I had spent the previous month at sea-level with my family in the Bahamas. The cold, snowy mountains of Nepal were certainly a shock to the system as I helicoptered from Kathmandu deep into the Khumbu Valley – on the route to Everest herself. Within a day of arriving we were at base camp getting ready to climb another 6,000-metre peak. It was the first time since Bolivia that the three of us had been together in the mountains.

At midnight, we pulled on our safety harness and roped ourselves together. Joining us was a local sherpa called Siddhi. In the chill morning air, we set off up the mountain. The climb was easier than Illimani, but nonetheless we struggled.

About halfway up, Victoria stopped for a rest and she broke. She hit the wall and just couldn’t go on. I was confused and upset, and I didn’t know what we could do. If she was struggling here, then what would happen once we went higher?

Victoria settled on a safe glacial plane while the three of us climbed on towards the summit. We could see her all the way to the top, a tiny silhouette dwarfed by the surrounding snow and ice. Just as the summiting of Illimani had been tempered by worry and guilt, I found myself once again torn between the elation of reaching the summit of Island Peak, getting another step closer to my dream to climb Mount Everest, and my worry over Victoria.

Surprisingly, we never talked about what happened on Island Peak. I’m not sure why. In some ways, I assumed Victoria might have decided to abandon the expedition, but she didn’t. In fact, she seemed to have a renewed sense of determination and Kenton and I admired her resolve.

An astonishing athlete, Victoria had embraced mountaineering effortlessly. I never doubted her physical ability and in fact, I always felt she had a better chance of summiting Everest than I did. But I could see that she struggled with self-doubt. She seemed to listen to a loud inner voice of negativity, which belied her strengths and amazing potential. Kenton and I did our best to reassure her and reinforce how good she was on the mountain, but her own questions about her ability were never far from her mind.

I asked her once whether she had ever been happy with her performance in life.

‘No,’ she replied.

‘Not even when you won a gold medal?’

‘I could have won it better,’ she smiled back.

That’s the thing about Victoria, always scrutinising herself, her own harshest critic.

I hoped that Everest would be a chance to change that. To embrace the unknown and the uncontrollable variables, to give in to the wilderness and silence the inner voice of doubt. We returned to Britain with just a couple of months to make final preparations for the climb.

Shortly after returning from Nepal, my father-in-law announced that after 40 years as a doctor, he had decided to retire. Weekly tennis and golf had kept him in rude health. Fit as a fiddle, he was in great shape. I had been thinking about the trek to Everest Base Camp and decided to invite both my father, Bruce and my father-in-law, Jonathan Hunt. Although I knew the trek would be demanding of two 70-year-olds, I also thought it would be a great opportunity for them to share the experience.

Both Mum and Dad had joined me in various escapades around the world. Dad came out to Ecuador and we visited the Galapagos together, and my mother came out to see me in Costa Rica where we explored the rainforest and even trekked to a smouldering volcano together. They had both come out to La Gomera when James Cracknell and I had set off to row across the Atlantic together, and they had been in Antigua when we arrived two months later.

They have both always supported me 100 per cent. I hate to think of the angst through which I must have put my mother.

In 2017, I invited Dad to join me in Tanzania. He had never visited Africa and I wanted to share with him the wonders of the Serengeti where I was making a documentary about the migration of the wildebeest as they made their way up to the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Dad was with us for 10 days, and it was magical to share with him one of my favourite places on earth.

Dad, at 74, is still working. A veterinary surgeon, he is one of the world’s leading authorities on animal behaviour. He has written nearly a hundred books on dogs and cats and he loves his job. I have often worried about him and wondered whether retirement would be a sensible option, but then his job is who he is. I don’t know what he would do without it.

Dad’s commitment to the clinic and his continuing support of my mother, who was still convalescing at home after her long period in ICU, meant that he couldn’t come on our Everest expedition, but Jonathan surprised me by accepting.

It had been a genuine offer and I hoped that he would add an extra dimension to the trek to Base Camp. While many people are drawn to the Base Camp trek itself, for us it was merely a means to an end. It was an important part of our acclimatisation, but it was incidental.

Kenton had warned us of the risk of sickness and ill health along the route. The 10-day trek to Base Camp is often the breeding ground for illness that can jeopardise the whole mountain climb, from colds and flu bugs to stomach ailments and other lurgies. Jonathan’s 40-year career as a GP meant that we would have a doctor along with us to keep us in good health, as well as me having a family member there. He could be our team doctor.

Victoria and Kenton embraced the idea, and before we knew it, I found myself shopping with my father-in-law for pee bottles and thermal leggings. While having Jonathan along was a great idea, I was worried about the responsibility of taking him. The trek to Base Camp would be a relative walk in the park for those of us heading higher, but for a 70-something the trek could be physically demanding. What if something happened?

I knew how much it meant to Marina for him to accompany us. In a strange way I think it softened her overall worries. The original plan was that Jonathan accompany us to Base Camp where he could stay for a couple of days before heading home.

‘I think he should stay for the whole expedition,’ she said, ‘why doesn’t he become your Base Camp doctor too?’

I think there was a relief for Marina in the knowledge that we would both look out for one another. It made the Everest Expedition more palatable to her.

At the end of our Island Peak climb in Nepal, Victoria and I stayed on to do a couple of days’ fieldwork with the Red Cross. The idea was we would visit some of the people and places supported by the charity.

On the first day, we visited a prosthetic clinic where those who had lost limbs in the earthquake had new limbs fitted. We watched a wheelchair basketball match and met survivors of the disasters, including a young boy who had lost his mother and his leg. We met volunteers who had lost family members and families who had lost their homes and their livelihoods. We visited a blood bank, where I left a pint of my own blood, and we visited rural communities that had lost all their infrastructure.

Victoria and I saw how the Red Cross had helped the Nepalese get back on their feet. They had helped communities rebuild water supplies and sanitation. We were shown how micro-financing had helped families start new businesses and stand on their own two feet. It was moving and humbling. For Victoria in particular, it gave purpose and meaning to our climb and strengthened her resolve. I was always worried that she didn’t have the same motivation to climb Everest that I had.

While my ambition and hope were part of a lifelong dream, her motivation was slightly more rudderless. By that, I don’t mean she lacked commitment, but I always felt she needed more of a reason why she should do it aside from just the physical challenge. Our time with the Red Cross in Nepal was surprisingly emotional and armed us both with a greater sense of purpose and connection to the task at hand.

CHAPTER THREE

Responsibility

I hate goodbyes. I always have. And this one wasn’t going to be easy.

The first goodbye I can remember was when I was about eight. My Canadian father would pack my two sisters and me off to his homeland every summer for eight weeks with my grandparents, Morris and Aileen. How I loved those long summers, those two months on the shores of Lake Chemong in the Kawartha region of Ontario in my grandfather’s hand-built cottage. We paddled, swam and fished. It was the antithesis to London where we lived just off Baker Street in a house with no garden.

Here, nature was on our doorstep. We had freedom within the Canadian wilderness. I felt alive. But all good things must come to an end, and I’d have to say goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa for a year. I hated those goodbyes. I would bawl my eyes out when we were on the way to the airport and cry all the way back to England.

It’s strange but 35 years later I can still feel the emotion, that unique pain of longing and missing. I’m sure it’s why I still hate goodbyes.

Then there was the first time my mother dropped me off at boarding school. I was 14, a year later than everyone else mainly because I was never meant to go to boarding school. I didn’t want to go. My parents didn’t want me to go, but no other school would have me. My parents had taken the decision at an early age to send me to a private school, but I wasn’t academic enough for the high-intensity academia of London day schools. I flunked my exams and ended up with a place boarding in Dorset.

The memory of Mum and Dad driving up the seemingly endless drive towards the imposing building will never fade. All the other pupils already knew one another. I was the new kid. Geeky, unsporty and spotty. I clung to my parents and cried for the better part of a year. A year. Can you imagine what I put my parents through? Sorry Mum and Dad.

Like I say, I’ve never been good at goodbyes and that hasn’t changed.

We are in Colombo International Airport in Sri Lanka. We have just had the most amazing family holiday. Me, Marina, Ludo and Iona: three weeks exploring this beautiful Indian Ocean island. We have laughed and smiled, swum and surfed in the sweltering heat, met elephants and released baby turtles, bumped around in tuk-tuks and eaten every meal together. And now it’s over.

I always get post-holiday blues, but this is different. Much, much different. It’s bigger and it’s sadder. I am saying goodbye as I head off on the biggest challenge of my life. From here, I will fly straight to Kathmandu in Nepal while the rest fly back to England. Our happy family will separate, and I will begin a two-month expedition to climb the highest mountain in the world.

The last day in Colombo had been slightly painful. It had been hot and humid and by the afternoon a huge thunderstorm had broken over the city. Everest had loomed over us like an invisible weight.

The children of course were oblivious to the magnitude of what lay ahead. They were still in the sweet spot of innocence, glorious naivety. It was one of the attractions of attempting the climb while they were still basking in childhood optimism and hopefulness, to avoid them having to face the reality of the risks ahead.

Marina was quieter than usual. I could sense the weight of Everest on her shoulders. The burden of the unknown that she would carry for the next few weeks as she continued with life back in London while I began my trek deep into the Himalayas. We smiled and laughed, but there was an air of sadness. Perhaps it was the rain and the thunder, but it felt heavy. It clung to us.

And now, here we were at Colombo Airport where our lives would separate. No more family smiles, hugs, laughter …

I waited until the last call for my flight. I wanted to put off the goodbyes for as long as I could.

I scooped up the children who enveloped me like an octopus. I squeezed them and inhaled their smell. I nuzzled their necks and whispered into their ears, ‘Look after Mummy.’

‘Have fun, Daddy,’ they both smiled with that innocence and excitement that only children can muster.

‘Please keep safe,’ hugged Marina, ‘we need you.’

We both cried. I didn’t want the children to see my tears. They have seen me cry before and it’s important for children to know they can cry, but this felt different. The tears felt like an admission of fear and I didn’t want them to fear Everest. I wanted them to be excited and inspired by the mountain.

The tears felt like a weakness, liquid fear. In a way they were. My stomach was knotted and twisted. I have left my family for plenty of risky expeditions over the years, but this one felt different – it felt bigger, taller, badder.

I had struggled to rationalise my yearning to climb Mount Everest with my role as husband and father. After all, being a dad is a primary role. It’s not something that you just do part-time. It comes with responsibility and commitment.

I need them and they need me.

Shortly before I left, I had asked the children to give me something special that I could take to the summit with me. Ludo chose his panda teddy bear that he’d had since he was a small child, known as Pandear, and Iona, a little more inexplicably, chose a carrot dog toy.

As well as the two stuffed children’s toys, I wanted to take something else. One of Ludo’s favourite things in the whole world is his silver shark’s tooth necklace. He got it while we were in the Bahamas and he never takes it off. ‘Can I borrow your shark’s tooth to wear to the summit?’ I asked him. It was a big ask, but without hesitation, Ludo placed it around my neck. In its place, I made Ludo a special necklace that I placed around his neck.

That little necklace ceremony was profoundly moving. The silver shark’s tooth had such a profound power and energy. It was a reminder always of what was waiting for me at home.

Marina – Saying goodbye

As the dregs of the harsh winter loitered into March, Ben packed for three months away – two weeks of tropical heat in Sri Lanka, a teardrop-shaped jewel of a country for an amazing family vacation, and two months of extreme altitude in one of the harshest terrains on the planet.

Our holiday was blissful. We travelled through the verdant land, racing along the endless beaches, surfing and releasing turtle hatchlings back into the sea. We fell in love with stray dogs, learned about different curries and watched in awe as blue whales breached majestically in the gargantuan ocean. As our halcyon holiday neared an end, I felt the wave of anxiety welling up in my chest. Our goodbye was fast approaching, and I wanted to put a pause on our bliss.

My mother reminded me that I’ve never been good at goodbyes as Ben left for the South Pole and my face was a blurry sea of tears. When my holidays ended and I had to return to boarding school, my tears would start two days before I actually left. The anticipation was often worse than the actual goodbye.

Distraction is the only thing that helps and for me this came in the form of Ludo and Iona, whose emotions it was my job to temper.

In the days before we left for Sri Lanka, Ben asked the children to think of something special for him to take up Everest. He asked them to give it some thought, and had the idea that it would be a poignant thing for the film crew to record before he left.

We gathered the children and asked them to fetch the prized objects that Ben would carry to the roof of the world. They disappeared to their rooms and returned shortly after, bearing their prized possessions. With great reverence, they presented to Ben these carefully selected talismans. His eyes looking earnestly into Ben’s, Ludo placed a skiing medal (third place) that he had won earlier in the year on a family ski trip. In the meantime, Iona pressed a squeaky carrot dog toy that she had bought in the garden centre that weekend.

A consummate professional in front of the camera, even Ben couldn’t hide his surprise. He did a good job at feigning excitement, but he is not an actor and when the cameras had stopped he asked why they’d come up with the choices they had. ‘My medal is my most precious thing – it’s real gold!’ Ludo exclaimed, bursting with pride. ‘And I just love my squeaky carrot,’ explained Iona. ‘I know it’s meant to be a dog toy but it makes me laugh, and you know I love carrots!’ After a gentle explanation that his ski school medal was not in fact made of a precious metal, Ludo agreed to send his beloved panda with Ben instead: appropriately threadbare and well-loved and conveniently small and light, it fit the bill perfectly. Iona, however, demonstrated all the confidence and stubbornness that we love in our seven-year-old, and nothing would convince her to change her mind.

Ben’s flight to Kathmandu left half an hour before our London-bound flight. As his flight was called, he gave the children one last hug, clutching the precious toys they’d given him to take to the top of the world, Ludo’s beloved shark’s tooth necklace around his neck. I gulped back my tears.

‘Make sure you come home safe,’ I mumbled through my sobs as I clutched his broad shoulders and buried my head in his neck. He nodded and held me tight. ‘I love you,’ he whispered, ‘don’t ever forget that’ and with that he was gone, his tear-stained face turning back to me to wave as he walked down the long airport corridor.

I hastily wiped the tears off my face, returning to the children. We sat, perched by the window overlooking the runway as we watched Ben’s plane taxi away, frantically waving, the children electrified with excitement that we could actually see his plane and with innocent joy at the adventure that lay ahead of him; while I tried to muffle my sobs and crossed my fingers that the luck that had defined our lives up until this point was not about to run out.

Being a father is my proudest achievement. My children are my all. I would do everything and anything for them. I would give my life for them. So why was I risking my life?

Life, of course, is full of compromise. Society instills so many ‘values’ and ‘expectations’ on all of us. There is an assumption when you marry and start a family that you will conform to an idea of parenthood. And life, of course, is also filled with sacrifices, but here’s the thing: who are you if you have sacrificed the very things that made you the person you were? You are pretending to be the person people expect you to be, rather than the person you really are. Isn’t that being disingenuous when we as parents are trying to instil confidence and honesty in our children? Are we not being slightly fraudulent ourselves?

When Ludo and Iona were born, I found myself increasingly careful and risk averse. I think it’s probably instinct, an evolutionary way of telling us to preserve and protect. The thing about adventure is that it has made me the person I am. Without it, I would be no one. You see, I was never really good at anything. If I’m honest, I am still full of self-doubt. I think psychologists call it ‘Imposter Syndrome’, the feeling that you are about to be called out any minute.

That time in the Outer Hebrides when I took part in the BBC TV show, Castaway, had a seismic impact on my life. I grew. It emboldened me and gave me opportunities I could never have imagined. It gave me the confidence to be who I am. Most importantly it ‘re-wilded’ me. It reconnected me to nature and created an unshakeable relationship with the wilderness. And the wilderness became my mentor.

I am not a religious type, but if I had to choose someone or something to worship then it would be nature. The wilderness possesses the power to heal and nurture, and my year on that windswept island off the west coast of Scotland was like a self-esteem rehab. A detox from the complexities of modern life.

We have such a complex relationship with the wilderness. Man has made it his business to ‘tame’ the wilderness, but I think it’s the wilderness that must tame us.

It’s difficult to explain the feeling of freedom and liberty that comes from the wilderness. Of course, there are many different ways we engage with the wild, but for me, the most profound experiences are those in which I have suffered or endured. It isn’t the only way to benefit from nature, but it has always given me the biggest returns.

The Scandinavians have a powerful connection with the wilderness; it is written into their language. Where we refer to it as ‘nature’, they always refer to ‘the nature’, which I think adds reverence and power. It shows respect and humility.

I am often asked how I would describe myself. The answer is that I am a modern-day journeyman. The journeyman of old would set out on foot on a travelling apprenticeship. In many ways, that is how I would describe my own life. I am perpetually in motion on an apprenticeship of the wild. There is a spiritual calling to nature. It is profound but sometimes difficult to explain, partly because I have no idea where it will lead.

Mine is a strange life. In many ways, it’s that of a 20th-century nomad. I have a family that I love and a beautiful home, and yet I am constantly on the move. I never stop. I rarely have time to settle and dwell, but where does the journey end? Whereas a river empties into a lake or an ocean, I have no idea where my meandering life will lead.

Most jobs or vocations lead to an ultimate goal. Perhaps that of seniority in a company or of financial success or of professional recognition. Mine has no defined or measurable goal.

I am driven and determined, but I have always been guided by instinct and chance. Opportunity has played a big part in my life. It sounds like a cliché, but I have always lived to seize the moment. I am a ‘yes’ man.

It is this combination of travel and curiosity with adventure that has been my medicine.

What is adventure? How do you define it? For me, adventure is anything out of the ordinary. It is a break from normality. It is anything that tests you and takes you out of your comfort zone. While it is often synonymous with physical challenge, I think the description is more nuanced.

My own definition of adventure has changed over the years. A little like spicy food: the more of it you eat, the more spicy you want it. Over time your taste buds are desensitised, and you need ever stronger spice.

They also say that your taste buds change every seven years or so, which sounds about right. I used to hate seafood and curry and now they make up the substance of my diet. Fatherhood has unquestionably had an impact: my whole attitude to life has also changed. I find myself looking at life and the world with a new perspective. On one hand, it’s with a little more care and diligence in the knowledge that my children will have to live on this planet for the next hundred years or so, but also there is a renewed sense of wonder.

One of the problems of travelling so prolifically is that it essentially devalues the power of my experiences. The impact is lessened through their frequency.

The first big journey I ever took, was when I was 18. I had just finished my A levels and I set out for South America with nothing but a rucksack, a Lonely Planet guidebook and plenty of young hope.

I landed in Brazil and spent the next 12 months travelling this exciting new world, experiencing the richness of the food, the people, the cultures and the landscapes. I can still remember that spark of excitement that came with each border crossing and every new stamp in my passport.

That year in South America was a game changer. I came home a different person. I had left a little of me in Latin America. In the interim, I had somehow managed to secure a place at the University of Central England in Birmingham to read Politics. I lived in a little windowless room below Spaghetti Junction and spent my days in the travel section of the city’s Waterstones bookshop, leafing through travel guides and travel books.

Two months later, I quit university and set off for Mexico on a one-way ticket.

To be honest, I had no real plans to ever come home. Apart from my family, I had no reason to. I had flunked my exams, left my studies and was working as a barman. I was still living at home and I didn’t even have a girlfriend.

Latin America represented excitement, hope and adventure. It was like a shiny beacon at the end of a very dark tunnel.

Travel and adventure have always had the power to heal and transform. The more you put in, the more you get out. The return to Latin America reminded me that the thrill, excitement and challenges of the new and the unknown were intoxicating. It was like looking at the world through a magnifying glass. Everything seemed amplified: sounds, smells, colours. It made my own culture look monotone and bland. Here, everything felt richer, and so did I. I had found work on a turtle conservation project on the Mosquito Coast between Nicaragua and Honduras. I was earning enough to get by, and I had become fluent in Spanish. I had friends. It excited me and it made me feel alive. I was so happy there.

The emotional wealth that comes from travel cannot be underestimated. Each time I returned from somewhere new, I felt like I had been given a booster. But, of course, everything comes at a cost and I couldn’t backpack forever.

When I returned to reality and the comparative mundanity of life, the come-down was immense. When I think back now, I wonder why I ever came back at all. Apart from my family, I had nothing. A couple of terrible A level results and, well, that was it.

I suppose it was the expectations of society in general that drew me home. After all, I couldn’t just ‘bum around’ forever. My parents were heroically silent. They have always allowed me and my sisters to make our own decisions carefully and quietly, helping us navigate through the complexities of life.

In their shoes, I think I might have been a little disappointed in me. Both Mum and Dad came from hard-working blue-collar families: my late paternal grandfather was a florist and my late maternal grandfather was an estate agent in Brighton. Mum, the actress Julia Foster, and Dad, the vet, Bruce Fogle, both worked incredibly hard to pay for my school fees.

Underachieving and dyslexic from an early age, I was not a good student. My parents decided to send me to private school to improve my academic levels. Alas, it didn’t work so well. But Mum and Dad never said anything. They let me do my own thing.

At the time, the ‘right thing’ seemed to be to return to Britain and try to get a degree, a job, a career, and a mortgage. I don’t want to give the ending away, but it all turned out quite well. That being said, if I were to go back in time, I think I would tell my 19-year-old self to stay where I was.

I love my parents. I love my family and I love my country, but in hindsight there was so much more opportunity overseas. Back home, I was a tiny fish in a pond with 66 million other fish, all hungry for food and space.

But that was nearly 25 years ago. A lot can happen in a quarter of a century. And now, here I was on an airplane heading to Kathmandu for the journey of a lifetime. I was leaving my own family behind, as I set off once again on a journey to a faraway land.

As the plane pulled away from its stand, I could make out two little silhouettes in the window, waving frantically. I sat back in my seat, tears streaming down my cheeks, as I watched the shadows of my two children disappear.

Marina – Am I worried? Not yet

Having dreaded the moment when Ben left us for Everest for months, the reality was not so bad. I was launched back into the chaos of home life, of work, getting the kids to school, of teaching and recording my podcast. Because I had to keep it together for the kids, I ended up having no time to dwell on worry. I had the odd snatched conversation with Ben, but since neither of us are great on the phone, he sent pictures of his trek to Base Camp instead.

A few months before he left, he asked me what I thought of asking my father to join him on the walk to Base Camp. My father has always loved walking and adventure. It was he who took us as children, often moaning and unwilling, up the Austrian mountains during our long summer holidays. His walking boots were well worn in and he was never happier than when he had my grandfather’s old canvas rucksack slung over his back and a pair of binoculars in hand. While resting, his nose was often buried in a book recounting some extraordinary adventure. It was he who first introduced me to the genre of literature that I would become fascinated by, handing me his well-thumbed copy of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

Ordinarily, taking a long period of holiday would have been impossible. For nearly 50 years, my father has been a GP and taking that much time off from his practice would not have worked. However, he’d made plans to retire in February and the March departure of Ben, Kenton and Victoria could not have been better timed.

My father needed little persuading. As a family, our greatest worry was that our father, who seemed to thrive on a busy and full life, would be bored in retirement. He was honoured to be asked, but wanted to check that Ben was only asking him because he genuinely wanted him along, rather than because he felt duty bound to do the right thing.

Having a 70-year-old retired GP on a trek to Everest is probably not something Kenton and Victoria had anticipated. But for years his patients had joked that he’d somehow found the secret to eternal youth, regularly drinking from some fabled elixir that prevented him from ageing. In spite of his years, he is lean and fit and his dark hair is only just starting to become peppered with grey. We were having lunch shortly before he left, after visiting an outdoor shop to kit him up, and I’m sure many people presumed that I was actually his wife.

I loved Ben for asking my father to join him on the walk to Base Camp. I hadn’t ever thought about the possibility, but the suggestion was perfect. It shows what a thoughtful and insightful person my husband is. Instead of being consumed by the stress of the preparation of such a mammoth expedition, he continued to think about our families, not blinded by what lay ahead.

The weeks before they set off, I saw the eager anticipation in my father’s eyes. ‘Well, actually I’m off to Everest,’ he’d tell people who asked what his retirement plans consisted of, his eyes twinkling with the thrill of it all. His friends, family, patients and colleagues were beside themselves with excitement. One weekend, as the children played in the garden, I set up an Instagram account so that he could keep us all abreast of his adventures. Within a week, hundreds of friends were following, desperate to follow his adventure.

It was these updates, starting with a selfie of Ben and my father, shortly after arriving in Kathmandu, with flower garlands around their necks, smiling goofily at the camera, that were the highlights of those early weeks. As their trip started, @TheWanderingGP, my father’s Instagram moniker, recounted his hair-raising flight into Lukla, the world’s most dangerous airport, where the carcasses of less fortunate planes littered the apron and hillside around; their overnights in teahouses and the people whom they encountered on the trail. My favourite showed my father with his arms around Kenton and a Nepali climber, Kami Rita Sherpa, who had summited Everest an astonishing 22 times.

‘Between the three of us there have been 33 successful summits of Everest (Kenton 12, Kami Rita Sherpa 21, The Wandering GP 0 (for now)),’ he wrote, brilliantly signing off JH (Jonathan Hunt), reminding us that his understanding of the 21st-century phenomenon that is social media would only go so far.

Everywhere I went, all anyone wanted to talk about was Everest, about Ben and how my father was getting on. And inevitably they asked whether I was worried, whether I was sleeping and how I was coping, and honestly, I responded that I was okay … for now. The reality was that I was only okay because they weren’t yet doing the dangerous bit.

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