ALTITUDE PROBLEM
ANT MIDDLETON EMBARKS ON THE MISSION OF A LIFETIME – BUT IT DOESN’T QUITE GO TO PLAN…
IT WAS THE MOST VULNERABLE I’VE EVER FELT IN MY LIFE”
Ant Middleton is not afraid of a challenge, as anyone who’s ever watched SAS: Who Dares
Wins has surely realised. Earlier this year, he got the chance to fulfil a lifelong ambition by climbing Mount Everest. But although Ant is an experienced climber, unexpected conditions led to him fearing for his life. And this week, a one-off documentary charts Ant’s perilous journey to the summit and back again…
“I wasn’t excited about standing on the summit – it was the thrill of the unknown,” Ant tells Inside TV. “Experiencing a lack of oxygen, the Death Zone, standing in the centre of the Khumbu Icefall watching avalanches – that was what attracted me to Mount Everest.”
It’s at this point in the conversation when Inside TV can’t help but enquire whether taking on a climb where the fourth and final camp is literally referred to as ‘the Death Zone’ isn’t the sort of thing where you stop and question the sanity of what you’re doing… Ant admits he did find it quite a strange experience – but one with a fantastic pay-off.
“When you get to Camp Four, no one really wants to be there,” reveals Ant. “It’s a zone where everyone’s morbid – nothing’s there, and people are like zombies. Then going up from there to the summit, you’re going past dead bodies and it’s almost like discovering a whole new world. But all of a sudden you come above the cloud cover, you can see the sun, and you have this amazing feeling of elation.”
Upon reaching the summit, however, Ant and his crew were beset by an intense, life-threatening storm – and getting back down to safe ground was suddenly far from a foregone conclusion.
“There was a stage where I thought, ‘I’m done, I’m not getting off this mountain,’” recalls
Ant. “But, you know,
I practice what
I preach, so I had a word with myself.
I said, ‘Get a grip of your mind, get a grip of your body, you need to get off this mountain and back to your family,’ and then pure survival instinct kicked in. It was also completely out of my hands. It didn’t matter how capable I was, it was the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt in my life, because there’s one way on and one way off – and there were 15 people in front of me.”
One surprising – and slightly worrying – aspect we’ll see in
the film is that a number of the people attempting to climb Everest at the same time as Ant weren’t anywhere near skilled or experienced enough, increasing the danger for everyone.
“I believe the biggest killer on the mountain is other climbers,” muses Ant. “You’ve got the altitude, unpredictable weather, then incompetent climbers – people who pay thousands to be dragged up the mountain, then when it hits the fan in the Death Zone, guess what? There’s nothing you can do about it, mate.
“If you can’t help yourself, you put other people’s lives at risk, too – which was proven on that day… ”