Climb every mountain
Mithan Kansal spent 40 years providing for his family, never thinking of himself. After retiring, he decided it was finally time to live out his lofty dreams
Roughly 3,960 metres above sea level, Nepal’s Everest View Hotel is nestled on a ridge overlooking the famous mountain that shares its name.
Mithan Kansal was walking near the hotel on an April morning in 2015 when the whole mountain suddenly started shaking. Surrounded by thunderous cacophony as the ground shuddered violently beneath his feet, Kansal dug both his hiking poles hard into the mountainside until the steel began to bend, then he fell to the ground — and blacked out.
Kansal, a 66-year-old retired warehouse co-ordinator from Markham, was climbing Mount Everest when the region was hit by one of Nepal’s most devastating recent earthquakes — one with a magnitude of around 7.8 — which killed more than 8,000 people and injured thousands more.
It was just one piece of his retirement “bucket list” to climb a series of mountains or passes of more than 5,000 metres — a death-defying, around-the-world adventure, taking him from the base camp of Aconcagua in the Andes to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and pitting him against below-freezing temperatures, avalanches and whipping winds.
Born in India, Kansal came to Canada in 1975 and spent the next four decades trying to provide the best life for his wife, Kalpna, and the couple’s three children; adventure took a back seat to being a family man and provider.
“I worked for 40 years without ever thinking about me,” Kansal says from his home in Markham. “Then came retirement — and all my dreams and ambitions came back.”
He started thinking back to a trip to Tibet he made around a decade ago, five years before his retirement. It was a religious expedition — though Kansal considers himself more spiritual than religious — to the region’s sacred Mount Kailash Kora.
Kansal traversed the Drolma La Pass, the most challenging stretch of the region’s holy pilgrimage route.
“The fun part was, it was an expedition into the unknown,” he says.
“You had to cross over about 6,000 metres. I did that and I loved it. The mountain was so beautiful; being around nature gave me so much peace and happiness.”
Kansal also visited holy sites in India with his wife. These were places a horse and buggy can carry you, if you’d like. “He’d walk, and I’d sit on the horse,” recalls Kalpna with a laugh.
Years later, after watching a television show about Mount Everest, Kansal made a decision: He was going to make a climbing bucket list, with the Drolma La Pass as the first box to tick off.
He imagined himself on top of a summit. He made sure he had money saved for all his expeditions. He found guides and climbing companies to help make the trips a reality. And then he started training — both his mind and his body — six to seven hours a day through meditation, yoga, and workouts. The routine included walking around five to six kilometres a day, often with a 25-kilogram backpack, for three months.
“Then,” he says. “I booked my ticket.”
Kansal’s first stop was a second trip to the Drolma La Pass in 2011. Then, in December 2014, he embarked on a climbing expedition to Aconcagua in the Andes mountain range of western Argentina. At 6,962 metres, it’s the highest mountain outside of Asia, but he didn’t summit — a snow storm hit after he reached the second camp, upwards of 5,000 metres on the mountainside. Back at base camp, Kansal cried throughout the night. “I was so disappointed,” he recalls.
His next attempt was the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro, the famous dormant volcano in Tanzania. During Kansal’s 17-hour expedition, the wind whipped volcanic ash into his face and temperatures near the top dropped to around -20 C. When he reached the 5,895metre summit, Kansal screamed and shouted in a fit of joy. What man in his 60s, he wondered, is supposed to climb a mountain?
His next two years of travel also took him to Mount Elbrus in Russia, the highest mountain in Europe, Mount Bonnettee in Argentina and Mount Meru in Tanzania — though he didn’t count that last one on his
“If you have experience reaching the summit of your life . . . that will give you so much strength.” MITHAN KANSAL
list since it’s “only” 4,565 metres.
And, of course, his travels brought him to the heights of Everest on that fateful day in April 2015.
After passing out amid the earthquake, Kansal woke up on the ground. He later found his climbing guides and eventually made it the town of Namche Bazaar, south-west of Everest. “The whole town was a ghost town,” Kansal recalls. “There was nothing — nothing at all.”
He spent two days in the town and two more days sleeping outside before heading south to another town — Lukla — for three days. Then, he took a flight in a small plane to Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, where stranded Canadians were able to fly out on a Canadian Armed Forces plane.
Kansal felt lucky to be alive. But after returning home to Markham, he wanted another go.
“I couldn’t handle the failure,” he says. “I had to succeed.”
His wife of 41 years admires his determination, but every trip — each of them lasting weeks at a time — left Kalpna at home, praying and worrying about his safety, and waiting for his sporadic phone calls. She busied herself with friends and family to ease her mind. But, she says, she never wanted to stop his adventures.
“A lot of people asked me, ‘Why would you let him go?’” she says. “I say, if he wants to go, he should go.”
And this past March, her husband did go — yet again — to Mount Everest.
For his second attempt, Kansal hoped to reach base camp, more than 5,300 metres above sea level. And he made it, but not without another terrifying moment as an avalanche roared down the other side of the mountain. “I thought: I’m going to die for sure,” Kansal recalls. “There were some aftershocks, but nothing major happened. We made it safely back.”
Kansal is putting his climbing gear to rest for now, but hopes his whirlwind journey around the world leaves a legacy for his children, and their children — the knowledge their grandfather accomplished something amazing. He also hopes others look to him for inspiration. Retirement is not “old age,” he says, but a chance to fulfil your dreams.
“The experiences I’ve had — I look back at how hard it was to climb Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, the Everest base camp — and I look at what I do in my daily life, and it’s nothing. I can do anything, I feel,” he says.
“If you have experience reaching the summit of your life — whatever you want to do — that will give you so much strength.”