Michael’s journey to the top of the world
He needed determination and a commitment as high as the mountain to make the attempt
THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE makes a joke about Hamilton Mountain not being much of a high place, you can point out that one of the last Canadians to climb Mount Everest actually got his start there.
His name is Michael Lees, 36, and on May 14 he became the 112th Canadian to make it to the summit. It was a harrowing journey, especially during the downbound trip when a major blizzard kicked up as he made his way through a section known as the “death zone.”
But he made it, like Edmund Hillary did in May 1953 and like nearly 5,000 others have since. And standing in front of the Wentworth Stairs in Hamilton a couple of weeks later, Lees recalled the days when he got his start at mountain climbing. He would run up and down the escarpment over and over again while dreaming about the big mountain on the other side of the world.
“Between here, the Dundas Valley, Spencer Gorge, and running around the bay, this is what I did every day,” says Lees, who like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather is a lawyer, although he isn’t practising these days.
“If you can make it 10 times up the Wentworth Stairs that is 3,000 feet. That is like doing a mountain in Canmore (Alberta),” says Lee, who grew up in Ancaster, attending Ancaster High School before going onto Queen’s University and the University of Toronto.
After graduating from university, he returned to Ancaster — “where I chilled out for a few years on my parents’ couch” — and happened to watch a television program about Mount Everest on the Discovery Channel that changed his life.
His mother Vera says “from that point on he would say ‘I’m going to climb Everest’ and we would roll our eyes. He would say the same thing to his friends and they would roll their eyes too.”
Friends and family pointed out that not only would a climb be outrageously dangerous — almost 300 people have died trying to make the climb — there were other logistical challenges. For one thing, it’s 12,000 kilometres away and it costs tens of thousands of dollars for climbing permits, guides and other services.
But Lees was determined, caught up in an all-consuming passion that Hillary once tried to explain by saying, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
Lees has lived in Calgary for the past several years where he further honed his climbing skills on weekend outings to the Rockies.
And then this spring, he figured he was ready.
He travelled to Nepal. But he says he got sick with the flu and had to hang back until he felt better.
“It was up in the air about whether I would be able to continue.” But the antibiotics he was taking were helping and he decided to go ahead, even though he was still suffering from some congestion in his lungs.
He found himself in a group of climbers from China, one of whom was Xia Boyu, a 69-year-old doubleamputee, who lost both legs from frostbite during a previous attempt several years before.
It was his fifth attempt over 40 years and his first with artificial legs.
Lees said he was worried at first that Boyu would hold back the group, but found he managed fine.
In fact, almost everything about the climb was going well — except for some high winds — until they got near to the summit of the 8,848-metre high mountain, the earth’s highest point of land above sea level.
The summit is the most difficult part of the journey at the best of times. “After 7,900 metres they call it the death zone. You can’t survive — even with oxygen on — for an extended period of time,” he said.
But in addition to that, the climbers had to deal with a massive storm they could see in the distance. He had to cut short his stay at the summit.
After about 20 minutes, he started making his way down “as the storm came in and clobbered us. We were in a whiteout blizzard, and I couldn’t see more than 10 or 20 feet in front of me.”
As a reminder of the danger, he said, he stumbled upon a frozen body from a climbing attempt some time ago. There are more than 200 climbers who died on the Mountain and whose bodies have never been recovered.
“People die at different times for different reasons,” said Lees. “Sometimes their bodies just give out on them. Other times, their lungs burst or they have cerebral edema where their brain swells so much there is not enough room in their skull,” he said.
Then he noticed a Sherpa, who was bleeding out of his mouth from pulmonary edema. Lees offered some steroid pills to help stop the bleeding but the Sherpa refused.
With the increasing storm, he pressed on, coming upon a second Sherpa who was suffering from hypothermia and delusional from the altitude and oxygen deprivation.
“He was yelling ‘we are all going to die.’ I tried to get him to get up and move. But he wouldn’t.”
The Sherpa had a two-way radio, which Lees used to call for help. The storm was worsening, so he continued his downward descent and became disoriented wandering off the track and became lost.
Luckily, a couple of Sherpas appeared after hearing his radio distress call to guide him back on track.
“That radio saved my life,” he said. By then, the distressed Sherpas he had previously seen appeared and passed him on their way down.
From there, he was able to make it the rest of the way down arriving at the bottom on May 16, where he boarded a helicopter back to Kathmandu.
Two days later, he wrote on his Facebook page — a page that he uses under the pseudonym Mikey Foreal — “Top of the world. For a brief moment in time, I was king of the castle. What a ride it was. It’s taken me several days of silence to digest my emotions. The climb had its challenges, but today I’ll only enjoy the success.”
After spending a week visiting his parents in Ancaster, he returned to Calgary June 2 to start looking for a job. He’s hoping for something in management to make use of his MBA degree that he has in addition to his law degree.
Asked what he plans to do for an encore after climbing the world’s highest mountain, he said, “I really don’t know. I’ll have to figure it out and do some searching. But I’ve been looking at what I have left in my bank account, and I definitely need to find some work pretty quickly.”