Everest triumph for 68-year-old who trained with hikes in Devon
A 68-YEAR-OLD grandfather has become the oldest British climber to scale Everest, after training for his expedition by going on hikes in the hills of Devon.
Graham Keene, from Exeter, beat the previous record held by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who was 65 when he reached the world’s highest peak in 2009.
The grandfather-of-five set the record following a 16-day “flash” expedition that was much quicker than normal ascents which often take months.
To avoid the crowds of Everest and adding extra weeks to his trek, Mr Keene did the majority of his acclimatisation at home in Exeter by sleeping in a hypoxic tent.
A machine removed oxygen from the tent and it was dialled up to higher altitudes each night to help acclimatise him to the thinner air of the Himalayas.
Upon reaching the summit at 6.30am on May 13, Mr Keene proudly unveiled a flag of his local rugby team, the Exeter Chiefs, as well as pictures of his grandchildren.
Mr Keene’s son Ben said his father had spent much of the pandemic training at home with the help of a personal trainer.
He added that his father “would go for long walks with weighted packs on Dartmoor, Exmoor and the South West Coast Path, where he is a trustee for the organisation”.
“When he could travel, Graham went to the Alps, to do ice climb training with his German guide Luis Stizinger, who has been alongside him every step of the way for the past few years,” Ben Keene wrote on his blog.
Mr Keene is now one of the top 20 successful oldest climbers of Everest, according to the Himalayan database of those who have attempted the trek.
He was born in 1954, a year after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay completed the first Everest summit.
Mr Keene would start climbing in the early hours of each day to avoid being exposed to the sun and the crowds of other climbers attempting to reach the summit.
As well as his German guide, he was also accompanied to the summit by three sherpas, Kunga Sherpa, Ang Kaji and Lakpa Thinduk.
Ben said his father did not have time to be in the mountains until he retired as he was “still busy running a global events business he started in the 1980s”.
“But since ‘retiring’ he has slowly trained, trekked and climbed summits around the world,” he added.
In 1998, Mr Keene and his two sons, Ben and Daniel, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and he went on to climb the highest point in the Americas, Aconcagua, in 2004.
Following his retirement, he climbed Mount Vinson in Antarctica in 2017 and Cotopaxi in Ecuador earlier this year.
Ben said his father had not set the goal of climbing Everest until 2018 when he came close to reaching the summit on his first 8000m peak, Cho Oyu on the China-nepal border, but missed out on getting to the top “because he needed an extra day’s rest and there were not enough guides to help him with the final climb”.
“This lit a fire to try and return to the Himalayas knowing that an 8000m peak was within reach but he needed a different approach if he was going to succeed at his age,” his son added.