Climbing Everest: Patrick Hollingworth at TEDxPerth

so my job this afternoon is actually pretty easy I just get to tell you a story and it's a little bit self-indulgent but at the end of that story I want to share with you what is probably the biggest takeaway for me over my approximately 15 year mountaineering career so it's a story or a narrative whose literal high point was on this date here the 17th of May 2010 so about three and a half years ago when I was very fortunate to be one of the few West Australians to stand on the actual summit sit as it were on the actual summit of Mount Everest now I don't want you to go away thinking this is something I decided to do one day and a few excited women did it it was a 10-year project so I'm going to take you on that journey today now I'm a Perth boy so you might be wondering how on earth you're going to become a high-altitude Mountaineer Perth is not the most conducive breeding environment for Mountaineers but I was very fortunate because my mum and dad had a real love of the outdoor environment and they tried to instill that into all of their four kids so most of our school holidays were spent camping either in the southwest or the northwest of the state so I grew to love the outdoor environment it led me to studying environmental science here at the University of Western Australia now the end of my first year of university mum and dad decided that the family home was getting a bit cramped with for young adults it was time to kick them out but before doing so they take us on one final family holiday together and we traveled to the South Island of New Zealand we embarked on some of the classic mountain walks the Milford Track the routeburn track and the kepler track if you're if you're a mountain lover you may have heard of those walks so surrounded by stunning mountain scenery I felt for the first time my life I knew exactly where I belonged the mountains I found it a little bit limiting walking through the mountains being surrounded by amazing snow-capped peaks we actually couldn't go up amongst them you need to have specialist skills in so I decided then in there that as a reward for finishing my university degree I would come back to New Zealand and I did that three years later I completed a technical mountaineering course where you learn the basic skills to to be able to survive in what is sometimes a dangerous Alpine environment this photograph is taken on that climbing course a copy of the picture takes pride of place over my mum and dad's dining room table now I know of their friends have commented over the years Wow you know your son must be so brave but what they don't know in this photograph is that I am quite literally sobbing because the drop on either side of that Ridge was so severe turns out I'm terrified of heights a slight impediment to my then burgeoning mountaineering career I had read all the books I had romanticized about it a lot but in reality it was far different very difficult the first few years of my mountaineering career a lot of was about learning to overcome that irrational fear which is essentially what a fear of heights is so I used mountaineering as a fantastic way to travel the world once a year I'd take all of my annual leave and embark off to a different continent a different culture on a different mountaineering expedition so it's been very rewarding for me allowing me to travel to many different countries most of the continents but what I found more than anything was my real love was in the Himalayas the highest mountain range on earth and I loved climbing in Nepal Tibet and Pakistan so by about 2006 I had started working towards my goal of climbing Mount Everest I had sat down and mapped out a series of mountains which if I could climb each one progressively higher than the last one that would give me sufficient skill to hopefully get to the summit of Everest so I turn my attention in 2006 to this mountain here it's called Amma dablam it stands at six thousand eight hundred and fifty meters just down the valley from Mount Everest the very steep technical mountain for a guy who's horrified of heights when I first saw this man tonight I have to admit I think I started crying again but it doesn't matter I didn't need to worry about that because I didn't get anywhere near the summit at a much lower altitude of about 6,000 meters I developed a very serious altitude illness known as pulmonary edema where due to the lack of oxygen a lack of pressure that you get at altitude my lungs started filling with fluid high-altitude pulmonary edema it's an insidious disease and it will kill you very quickly the only treatment for this disease is to descend as quickly as you can but at 6000 meters in altitude the air is too thin for a helicopter to perform a rescue the rotor blades can't get any purchase in the thin air but fortunately two strong teammates were able to assist me that down the mountain taking about nine hours to get me back into base camp but I wasn't out of the woods just yet base camp for ammeter Blom is at about five thousand meters I was placing this red tube here which is known as a gamma of bag it's named after the Russian inventor it's a sealed tube you lie inside that bag and you can see my buddy on the left there he pumps that foot pump it blows air into the sealed bag increasing the pressure thereby effectively simulating a lower altitude and it effectively drops you about 2,000 meters or so so it's a very restrictive space he line that gamma of bag you can't move your legs or your arms you've got a small perspex window to look out of I was in that game of bag for about seven hours so by the time I was let out of that game of bag I had yet another chronic phobia to contend with I'm pretty much afraid of everything so whilst the rest of my teammates were moving on up the mountain to try and get to the summit I had to leave the expedition to return back to Australia to recover now I was really quite overwhelmed because firstly I'd almost lost my life but secondly I was really overwhelmed by a sense of failure once you've had an altitude illness anecdotally the evidence suggests that you're more prone to getting it again and so for all intents and purposes the every stream was really over before it had begun so this last day in the mountains Everest who'd normally about to see her hiding on the left-hand side of that photo but she was hiding behind the clouds all day I got to the final bend in the path above the town of Nancy where you do get your last classic view of Mount Everest it was late in the afternoon into the evening and I remember think I'm going to turn around one last time I know that I'm not going to be able to see Mount Everest I'll take that as a sign to put this what was essentially a stupid idea to bed I turned around and was quite surprised to see the summit of Everest just poking up there in the distance there may have been angels singing at that point in time I'm not sure but it was a very strong moment for me I thought okay let's not give this let's not put this idea to bed just yet but I returned to Australia and I recuperated about 18 months before I went back into the mountains and I needed to go back to a similar altitude to that road had the illness so I'm returning to the mountains very tentatively and it's this one here it's called Denali it's the highest peak in North America it stands at about 6,200 meters in altitude so similar altitude to where I'd had the illness it's one of the highest freestanding mountains in the world base camp is at 2,000 meters the summit more than four vertical kilometers up it's also one of the coldest mountains in the world it lies only a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle we climb it in the summer months we don't have to take a head torch because we have 24 hours of light but despite this it's still incredibly cold I remember one morning waking up in our tents and it's minus 20 degrees inside the tent let alone outside now when it's this cold as you can imagine everything freezes your food freezes your water freezes your toothpaste your something in your camera batteries your clothes your boots things that you didn't know could freeze freeze so you can see what I'm doing them gradually acquiring a skill set which is going to serve them on Everest because Everest is likewise a particularly cold Mountain three and a half weeks into the expedition I'm lucky enough to stand on the summit so at last on my third big mountain expedition I got to experience that pure joy of 99% hard work and then this this pure joy of looking around seeing this amazing scenery and thinking well it's all paid off now given my track record to date I hadn't been particularly successful in my big mountain expeditions I didn't know if I was likely to be on the summit of a big peak anytime soon so I thought well look I'd better at least make the most of this opportunity so we'll practice our various summit poses here that's my favorite on it's the noble adventurer but I did feel that I was back on track for my Everest goal and I continued to climb over the subsequent years with my final training climb being on this mountain here it's called Choi yo u and it's the sixth highest peak in the world stands at eight thousand two hundred and one meters and I just had to throw this photograph in because this is the best photo I've ever taken in my climbing life at an altitude of 8,000 meters you may just be able to make out the curvature of the earth and you can also see that large black shadow that's the shadow of the mountain being projected more than 100 kilometers out into the atmosphere so at last I was ready to give Everest a crack so how do we go about doing that well first of all we fly to Nepal when the capital city Katmandu from there we take a small plane flight to the mountain village of Lukla lukla is the gateway to the everest valley and for the next six to eight weeks we're on foot spending ten to eleven days slowly trekking into base camp taking our time to allow our bodies time to acclimatize to the chronic lack of oxygen at altitude we finally arrive in base camp itself at an altitude of 5,000 300 metres so more than five vertical kilometers up into the Earth's atmosphere that is in itself a huge achievement and for most people that's the end goal but for us as Mountaineers it's just the starting point we're going to turn our attention higher up the mountain firstly passing through what is probably the most dangerous feature of Everest it's called the Icefall a glacier which cascades down the side once we've passed through the ice we establish our first camp at 6100 metres our second camp is at 6,500 metres still two and a half vertical kilometers below the summit of Everest up on our left there but we're actually going to divert out to the right now to this mountain on the right it's called light sea it's the fourth highest peak in the world and we have to climb that first of all halfway up loads we put our third camp at an altitude of seven thousand three hundred metres and then our highest camp on the mountain camp for at 8,000 meters so we call this the Death Zone eight thousand meters there's a third the amount of oxygen that there is at sea level a very difficult environment in a true edge environment this is the highest camp on the mountain looking to the left the summit of light sea padding background to the right we can see the final summit ridge of Mount Everest that right-hand skyline ridge it's the southeast Ridge of Mount Everest following the original route that Seward Hillary and Tenzing Norgay took in 1953 when they were the first people to successfully climb to the top passing over the South Summit which is a minor summit before finally making it to the main summit of Everest at 8,848 is so almost nine vertical kilometers up into the Earth's atmosphere standing on the summit of Everest there is a quarter the amount of oxygen that there is here at sea level so if we as an audience were lifted up to that altitude right now we would be gasping for air straight away we will be unconscious within 10 to 15 minutes and died not long after that so how do after we actually go up this high well what we need to do is we acclimatize lower down the mountain we spend five to six weeks getting our bodies used to that lack of oxygen from base camp we'll pass through the Icefall up to camp one for the day drop that down to base camp and rest for another day then it's on back up through the ice ball again to camp one from night we drop back down through the Icefall and rest back up through the Icefall onto camp one for a night camp two for three or four nights drop back down through the Icefall and rest back up through the ice we'll count one count to one night at camp three drop all the way back down to base camp and rest finally we spend two weeks resting in base camp before our final summit push taking us all the way up to count four on to the summit so it's not an easy job it's two months on the mountain it's there's no immediate return on Everest so we're in base camp now that's the summit of Everest three and a half vertical kilometers higher in the top right hand corner of that photograph the bottom left-hand corner you can see some yellow blotches that's actually base camp there if we zoom in on that you can see it's quite a crowded affair there's a lot of people wanting to climb Mount Everest and there's generally only one season annually when you can do so during the months of April and May when the winds on the summit are not too strong so in 2010 there are more than 30 expeditions on the mountain so incredibly crowded now unfortunately a lot of climbers on Everest these days have not served the requisite mountaineering apprenticeship they're big on dollars but not so big on skills they come to Everest and more often than not these are the climbers who lose their lives when I was on Everest in 2010 four climbers lost their lives last year eleven people died on Everest including five on one day so we're at the foot of the ice ball that's the ice ball behind us it's about five to six hundred meters vertical elevation and if we zoom in on that photograph we can see the scale of it those two climbers in the middle surrounded by huge towers of ice which we call Sur acts so racks are inherently unstable they have a tendency to topple over without any notice so we need to move through the ice wall as quickly as we can we generally leave base camp at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. in the morning when it's at its coldest therefore it's most stable difficult to move quickly through the ice although because of this broken up nature of the terrain and the other large difficulty being very large crevasses huge gaps in the ice some of which are bottomless well they're black so they appear to be bottomless in some instances we actually have to use ladders to get over these so first of all we own across this smaller crevasse it's it's black so it's very very deep but fortunately I'm six foot four and I've got long legs so I can make my way across that one but the next one is a little bit more imposing now we've got a heavy backpack on thick clothing double-layer boots crampons spikes for chinami size 12 shoe that makes this a little bit easier now every time you pass through the Icefall you will come across this scene probably about thirty occasions or so so by the end of the expedition you've done this hundreds and hundreds of times and you're actually quite used to it then we arrived in our first camp on the mountain now we're above camp so you headed up towards camp three and you remember I I told you that we're going to climb up like see first of all until halfway up let's see there is our third camp and if we zoom in on this photograph we can see exactly what's going on it's going to take us about nine hours to make our way up to the tents at the very top but look it's actually starting to get a little bit busy not what you'd expect to see on Everest you can see the tents in the top left corner on the lights you face now looking straight up always keeping our eyes open for rock and ice which can be knocked down from above because looking back the other way it's a pretty healthy eight hundred meter drop down that steep icy slope we arrive in our third camp at seven thousand three hundred metres so the simple things on Everest that keep us alive it's the right I always stay attached to that rope a number of climbers have lost their lives in camp three over the years having gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet not being clipped into a rope and slipped and fall into their deaths so now we're on our final summit push we've spent six weeks of climate izing up and down up and down up and down and we've got a weather forecast which is telling us in a couple of days time the wind is going to lift off the summit so actual ease use weather forecasts at commercial airline pilots use to to fly efficiently between continents because there the winds that are sitting on the summit of Everest we know we need that wind to lift off the top so we've had the forecast we're moving up towards count four and you can see here I'm wearing what is probably the biggest risk mitigator we can use on our summit push and that's an oxygen mask and bottle it doesn't make it climbing Everest much easier but it certainly makes it so ensuring our respiratory and circulatory systems can continue to function so let's have a look at just how difficult it is climbing at this extremely altitude you can see how many steps I take before I'm absolutely exhausted I think I get to four four steps and that's it and if we can check the audio please I think we're down on the audio for this video sorry that's how difficult climbing above 8,000 meters is four steps at a time that's how we break down what would otherwise be an insurmountable difficult job of climbing we chunk it down to four steps at a time so we arrive in our fourth camp on the edge of the Death Zone at 8,000 meters you can see two things at night firstly that yellow tent has actually been torn by the wind that's the reality of how strong these winds blow but also you can see that large pile of oxygen bottles that suggest there's a large commercial expedition up and count for also targeting the same weather window now I like to climb in small teams just with some of my friends we're much more agile and dynamic I think it's a much safer way to climb we don't want to get caught up in these larger expeditions but it looks like that's what's going to happen so it's an incredibly long night leaving Apple at 9 o'clock in evening that gives us enough time to climb through the night get up to the summit the next day and back to the relative safety Apple or the second - 30 degrees we're feeling that oxygen kind of change over in the way so an incredibly long night climbing through the darkness you can't see how far up the mountain you've gone but it's when you get these first signs of sunshine on the eastern horizon you know that you're getting closer and hopefully this is going to be the greatest day of your life looking out to the South now you can see the monsoon storm clouds silently flashing away over India and I remember being very moved very privileged to be witnessing this incredible beauty looking down into Tibet I remember seeing a light turn on and thinking wow there's a Tibetan farmer he's getting up for his days work and little does he know that there's an Australian just below the summit of Everest spying down on him so now we're passing over the South Summit at eight thousand seven hundred and fifty meters so only 100 vertical meters left to go to the top now we have to make this very narrow Traverse across this knife-edge reach the summit in the distance a 3,000 meter drop on the right hand side a 2500 meter drop on the left hand side so quite difficult climbing as we make our way along this final summit ridge now wearing a head cam gives you great first-person perspective of what it's like and for me again I was overcome by a sense of privilege following in the footsteps of all of my mountaineering poor fathers starting with Sir ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay I felt very very lucky to be up here like a stairway through the heavens finally we come to the last technical hurdle it's a rock step which is about 15 meters high it's called the Hillary step named after Sir ed at sea level you've probably scan profit in all of about 30 seconds at this altitude it takes about 15 minutes to get up it that's the last technical Hill once we're above that the final summit slopes are quite benign but you can see just how deprived of oxygen we are now but we keep pushing on and finally after many many years of hard work we find ourselves taking those final steps up onto the summit of Mount Everest here we are but I have to be honest this is a scene I was not really expecting hello everybody its 24 other people on the summit equal tikal on Mount Everest Everest summit at 10:30 this morning the pole time these are these incredible views you get from the very top but what's particularly worrying is that wind and the cloud that is building up we've got a storm on the way so we cannot linger for long on the top we take our photos and we get out of there it's quite an unnerving feeling being on the summit of Everest you certainly don't sit down and relax you know that you've only got the job half done it's like there's a doorway to the rest of your life and safety and if you don't get back through that doorway before it closes it's going to slam shut on you and you'll be stuck up there for good so it's almost a feeling of living on borrowed time we take our photos and we get out of there this is our last photograph from the top within a few minutes of this photo being taken we were in sconce doing a whiteout so we couldn't see where we were going 13 hours to get to the summit another nine to get back down to the relative safety of camp for another two days subsequent to that to finally step back into base camp and that's when this huge sense of relief really washes over you my very very dear sherpa friends there five of us in the middle there together three days earlier we'd been standing on the summit of Mount Everest well supported by our Basecamp staff this is my favorite photo from that expedition because it shows you what a team of individuals can do when they work together towards a goal but ultimately what does this mean you might think yeah that's pretty cool but so what what can we learn from this in the bigger context my big takeaways the benefits as an individual of taking yourself outside your comfort zone that's where I think there is an immense capacity for self awareness and self growth at times when I get trouble where the direction humankind is headed I think well if we can all take ourselves outside of our comfort zones do away with complacency I think we can all live a much better life so thank you all I hope you've enjoyed listening to me today

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 607,162

Rating: 4.7828474 out of 5

Keywords: Nepal, altitude sickness, Denali, Edmund Hillary, tedx talks, Gamow bag, 2013, Octagon, doubt, base camp, teams, tedx, Lhotse, tedx talk, ted talks, Hillary Step, Icefall, acrophobia, Western Australia, Kathmandu, mountaineer, Lukla, TEDx, pulmonary edema, Perth, Everest, ted x, goals, Tibet, phobia, ted, UWA, ted talk, Australia, Cho Oyu, climber, New Zealand, Mount McKinley, motivation, Ama Dablam, Himalayas

Id: 2a9EVaTMfdw

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2014