Everest The Inexperienced Way

Mick's Mountain

Would you attempt Everest with next to no high altitude experience. Mick Crosthwaite did...

Depending on your viewpoint, I guess Mick Crosthwaite is either an inspirational figure or a daft idiot. Not, I'd guess that he'd want to be viewed as either. At the age of 23, with precious little climbing experience, he chucked in his lucrative job in the City, gave himself two months to get fit and set off to climb the world's highest mountain. That's either plain stupid - suicidal even - or an admirable act of gutsy single-mindedness. Perhaps both.

Sitting across a pub table from him, I have trouble stopping myself from popping the vital question: are you mad or what? Instead I ask him the one that's been spinning round my head since reading his own account of the trip in autumn 1998 - why? Why would someone with just a little high altitude scrambling and a smattering of easy rock climbing under his belt go to Everest? And not even with a guided expedition at that.

I guess I was on a bit of a mission...

Did he have an accurate picture of the risks, I wondered. 'I was aware,' he concedes. 'But I didn't have a framework to put it in. It's not until you're there that you really understand it. I guess I was on a bit of a mission.

'When you get there, you're really aware. You see the power of it [the mountain], the size of it. It lives with you every day. Look up from Base Camp when you first arrive and it's pretty terrifying. It's critical to have faith in yourself.'

Just as well really given the catalogue of misfortunes that hindered his progress up the mountain. The first was the thankfully brief collapse of a climbing partner from dehydration above the Khumbu ice fall. But it was around Mick's summit day that the gremlins really struck.

His ice axe was buried at Camp 3...

His ice axe - a critical piece of climbing safety equipment - was buried at Camp 3 after being used to anchor a tent and the replacement never arrived at the South Col, leaving him to improvise a replacement with an old metal snow stake and a piece of wood - some of the world's highest recycling - then, nominated high altitude Delia Smith by virtue of his position in the tent, a pot of boiling water exploded, soaking his thermal layer and scalding

'When you're at 8000 metres, you don't need too many kicks in the bollocks,' he comments ruefully. 'Lots of things seemed to be telling me to back off, but in that sort of situation it comes down to determination and I wasn't going to let these things get the better of me.'

Starting off from the South Col with fellow climber Neil Laughton and a sherpa, Mick's problems continued as his oxygen set developed a fault which reduced the amount of oxygen reaching him and slowed his progress. On reaching the balcony, a small hump on the SE ridge, he swapped masks with a sherpa and continued upwards with a new cylinder.

As he reached the South Summit, a tantalising 100 metres below the top, he realised that other climbers were turning back. The team who had agreed to fix ropes between the South Summit and the Step hadn't done so and rising winds meant it was too dangerous to continue. Even worse, when he asked another climber to check his oxygen supply, it became apparent that he had very little left, moments later he was totally without oxygen.

Concentration became more and more difficult

For most climbers, supplementary oxygen is crucial at 8000 metres plus - the climber is still breathing the atmosphere, but the extra oomph from his or her set is crucial. 'The immediate effect isn't dramatic,' says Mick. 'You don't collapse on the floor, but slowly thought, movement and coordination become more and more difficult. Fortunately the route immediately beneath the South Summit was roped and I began to descend slowly and uncertainly, carefully lowering myself on my arse.'

The most insidious effect of oxygen deprivation though is what he calls: 'A sort of drunken acceptance. You just don't care. It makes you totally indifferent to your predicament. There's just a drunken acceptance of the position you're in.'

I wonder aloud if more mountaineering experience might have helped. If it might have made the action of climbing more instinctive, but Mick reckons not. 'The lack of oxygen is the real problem. You can't train yourself to be at that altitude without it.' Though he does feel that there's almost a two-tier hierarchy on the mountain. 'There's definitely a barrier between the serious high altitude mountaineers, guides and sherpas and the rest of us who are just visiting. They're on a different level.'

Fresh oxygen and food and drink at the Balcony revived him considerably and he continued down, then with the South Col and relative safety in sight, the snow softened by the heat of the afternoon sun gave way beneath his boots and he found himself sliding downwards.

'There was a surge of acceleration as the snow continued to give way, then suddenly I lost control and found myself slipping down fast on my front. Then I made the crucial error of trying to slow down by digging in my crampons. As they caught I started somersaulting through the air, accelerating at a horrifying rate.

'In my absolute terror I lost all sense of horizon, I was just tumbling through space in a totally uncontrollable display of high altitude aerobatics, all the while horribly aware of my circumstances and the terrifying prospect of veering left and plummeting 2000 metres down the sheer Kanshung face into Tibet.

'Then, to my incredible relief I slowed again and this time came to a halt. I just lay there shaking, eyes closed trying to take in what had happened.'

Incredibly Mick was uninjured and just 200 metres above the South Col. Badly shocked and exhausted, he was helped back to his tent by some Iranian climbers.

I decided not to make another summit bid...

Some 48 hours later he staggered back into Base Camp, 'More worn out and exhausted than anyone could believe possible. Given the further possibility of delayed shock from the fall, I decided not to make another summit bid.'

And that, six months later in a London pub, is a decision that still holds good. Mick's mate 'Bear' Grylls summited a couple of days later to become, at 22 the youngest ever Brit on the roof of the world, but for Crosthwaite the extra 100 metres, he says, don't matter. 'It doesn't matter about getting to the top, but giving it a go does. If you've found out something about yourself, it doesn't matter if you don't summit.'

The random terrors of the ice fall

Talking to him, it's as if the seriousness of the whole thing has washed away any 'fun' element - he was, for example, so frightened by the random terrors of the ice fall that he couldn't sleep the night before any of his seven return trips to Base Camp. 'Outwardly you become blasé,' he says. 'But internally you never adjust. There are house-sized blocks of ice toppling over up there at the rate of one an hour.'

I'm reminded of something Steve Bell said: 'On Everest you learn a great deal about yourself. In normal life you can even pretend to yourself, but up there, there's no facade to hide behind. You might be in for a bit of a shock.'

In the end it doesn't really matter if you think that Mick Crosthwaite's as mad as a box of frogs or not. He's had the guts and imagination, or maybe lack of it, to get up and do something that most people think they can only dream of. No-one's saying you should climb Everest, but Mick's story shows that it's nowhere near as unlikely as you might think. One phone call could be the start of a two-year road to 29,028 feet.

Thanks to Mick Crosthwaite for his words and time. This article was first published in Adventure Travel Magazine.