Climber who beat cancer and Everest’s deadliest day
AFTERSHOCK: ONE MAN’S QUEST AND THE QUAKE ON EVEREST by Jules Mountain (Eye Books £9.99)
LAST May, on Friday the 13th, the aptly- named Jules Mountain stood, exultantly, on the summit of everest.
the date hadn’t put him off the perilous final ascent, even though superstition looms large on the world’s highest peak. Sherpas know everest as Chomolungma. It means ‘ goddess of the universe’ and even as they help adventurers to climb it, they strive to appease the deities of the mountain.
But Mountain, the human version, could hardly view Friday 13 as an unpropitious date, since just about everything that could go wrong for him in life already had.
he had first attempted to climb everest the previous April, only to get caught in a massive avalanche triggered by the catastrophic earthquake that devastated nepal and killed almost 9,000 people.
Moreover, his reason for being there on that fateful day was that, back in Britain, he had survived a particularly dangerous form of cancer, which required a seven-hour operation to cut out a brain tumour. he wanted to climb everest to celebrate still being alive.
his chances of surviving cancer had been one in five. And the chances of dying on everest are about one in 60. But those latter odds were dramatically reduced on April 25, 2015.
he was in his tent at Base Camp when the ground beneath him reared up. he rushed out to see an enormous avalanche of rocks, ice and snow careering towards him at over 100mph.
Seconds later, with ‘indescribable noise’, the avalanche struck. he was engulfed, but miraculously fought his way back into the open air. now it looked like a ‘war zone, as if pillaged by the Vikings’.
that day was the deadliest in everest’s history: 21 people perished. the author doesn’t spare us the grisly details of finding one man with his jaw gone, his ears touching his nose, his legs wrapped round his head. Another was still alive, but bleeding profusely, and the smell of his blood ‘was almost overwhelming — he smelt like an abattoir’.
Mountain, who had so much experience of being a patient, was now forced to become a temporary medic as, with so much of nepal destroyed, help was slow to arrive.
the story of the disaster is a remarkable chronicle of resilience and resourcefulness, but also of almost manic determination.
Indeed, Mountain hoped to press on through the devastation to the top. he wondered whether he was suffering from ‘summit fever’, a recognised psychological condition whereby even experienced climbers toss aside the risks, becoming irrational in the obsession to reach their goal.
he thought of ‘Green Boots’, frozen into the same resting place for years, and one of the most recognisable corpses on everest because of his luminous footwear. nobody knows his name, and the body is inaccessible even by helicopter.
In the end, Mountain was blocked by the most prosaic of reasons: cost. the expedition leader had paid $100,000 for the two kilometres of rope required to reach the summit from Camp two, assuming that other expeditions would pay their share. But there were no other expeditions left, and to use the rope would have meant shouldering all of the cost.
So Mountain had to chase his dream the following year. But he made it. And who would begrudge him his exultation, looking down on the world as a survivor of one of the deadliest of diseases, and of everest’s deadliest day?