The As It Happens Files by Mary Lou Finlay Read Free Book Online Page B

must be a unique sensation.
    All right, but still. Forget the Vendée Globe. I have always wondered, who but a madman would willingly—
willingly—
expose himself to the brutal cold of Mount Everest, where if you don’t die of exposure or a fall, the altitude alone could kill you? In May 1996, several people paid a small fortune for the privilege of dying an agonizing death on the roof of the world. That season on Everest was notorious for the loss of life—8 in one day, 15 by the end of the climbing season—and people were wondering how much commercial exploitation should be permitted on the world’s highest peak.
    The traffic doesn’t seem to have diminished. In 2005 Canadian climber Pierre Bourdeau was one of three hundred would-be Everest summiters. We spoke to him just after he’d narrowly escaped being wiped out by an avalanche that had come down on his camp on the Kumbu Glacier.
    It was 5:30 in the morning when Bourdeau was awakened by something that sounded like thunder. Two or three seconds later, his tent was being pelted by rocks and debris. He knew what was happening, and he was sure he was going to die; if the rocks didn’t kill him, he’d be buried alive in thesnow. The next thing he remembers is being about a hundred metres away from where the tents had been, and alive. The tents were all destroyed, but by some miracle, he and his fellow climbers had escaped with only a few bruises.
    “We don’t know why we’re alive,” Pierre Bourdeau told us.
    “So are you done with climbing for a while?”
    “For a short time, yes.”
    Another very cold place to visit is the North Pole, which is where British adventurer David Hempleman-Adams got himself in April 1998, making him the first person to climb the highest peaks on seven continents
and
reach the magnetic and geographic North and South poles. He spoke to us from Resolute Bay after being air-lifted off the ice, together with his Norwegian travelling companion, Rune Gjeldnes.
    ML: How did you know you were there [at the North Pole]?
    DH: We had two systems: we had a Global Positioning System and an Argos system. So we were within three metres, actually, of the Pole. And what happens, it’s drifting all the time, and by the time the airplane the next day came in, we’d drifted off seven miles, so we had to walk through the night to get back to the North Pole again, so we went there a couple of times.
    ML: Let’s make it clear to everybody exactly what kind of an ordeal this is. Some four hundred miles on skis? … How heavy was the sled?
    DH: Mine was about 150 pounds; Rune’s was probably nearer 200.
    ML: And the weather’s not nice.
    DH: Well, when we started, it was dark and it went down to—we recorded minus 55. Well, we think it was minus 55, because we could only record minus 55; it was right on the backstop, so it might have been lower. You got open water and wind, so the actual winds will take the windchill factor much lower. But it warmed up. We were picked up on a beautiful day; it was minus 20, no wind.…
    ML: You probably had your shirt off at minus 20.
    DH: You could certainly feel the difference, because by that time, we’d got acclimatized, of course, and we used to have two sleeping bags [each] and we threw away the inner sleeping bags, so, yeah, it was much warmer.
    ML: What did you eat?
    DH: Well, we had to get in six thousand calories, because we were burning twelve thousand up.
    ML: Every day?
    DH: Yeah. Good place to go for a diet. I lost about 24 pounds. But in any event, we had dehydrated food and what you do is you mix a lot of oil with it to try and get the caloristic value up, and it was the same food every day, so it got pretty hard to eat in the end.
    ML: You fell in the water at one point.
    DH: Yeah, that was probably the lowest point of the whole trip.
    ML: No kidding!
    DH: I thought,
Boy,
you know,
this is it.
It wasn’t a problem falling in the water, but I had my skis on as well, and I didn’t want to lose my