English adventurer, writer and television presenter (born 1974)
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Hey! Monkey! Over here!’ one of the tourists called. The reverent atmosphere burst like a balloon. The orang-utan paused and looked back at them. Her face was long and grave, as if wondering how anyone could be such an idiot. Then she turned away again and disappeared into the trees. ‘Hah!’ The man clapped his hands, very pleased with himself. Then: ‘What?’ as he noticed the expressions on some of the faces around him. ‘I made her look, didn’t I? We travel for three hours in a hot bus, you want to see something at the other end!
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.
I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.
But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.
As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.
But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.
Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.
The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.
The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.
I mean, what does a child know about faith?
It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.
Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.
Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.
I was devastated.
I remember sitting up a
So I got lucky. But then again, it took me many hundreds of rejections to manage to find that luck.
I am sure there is a lesson n that somewhere.
Someone had taken a punt and had faith in me. I wouldn’t let them down, and I would be eternally grateful to them for giving me that chance to shine.
Once DLE were on board, a few other companies joined them. It’s funny how, once one person backs you, somehow other people feel more comfortable doing the same.
I guess most people don’t like to trailblaze.
So before I knew it, suddenly, from nothing, I had the required funds for a place on the team. (In fact I was about £600 short, but Dad helped me out on that one, and refused to hear anything about ever being paid back. Great man.)
The dream of an attempt on Everest was now about to become a reality.
So many people over the years have asked me how to get sponsorship, but there is only one magic ingredient. Action. You just have to keep going.
Then keep going some more.
Our dreams are just wishes, if we never follow them through with action. And in life, you have got to be able to light your own fire.
The reality of planning big expeditions is often tedious and frustrating. There is no glamour in yet another potential sponsor’s rejection letter, and I have often felt my own internal fire flickering close to snuff point.
Action is what keeps it alight.
The summit might be the goal.
But it’s in the journey where you spend most of your time!
I still struggle with bumps in the road, it can be tough when things don't go to plan. Life pushes, noise creeps in, priorities blur.
One thing that helps me:
Decide in advance who you want to be on the inside.
Then let your actions follow that, not the other way round.
During my time at Eton, I led regular nighttime adventures, and word spread. I even thought about charging to take people on trips.
I remember one where we tried to cross the whole town of Eton in the old sewers. I had found an old grill under a bridge that led into these four-foot-high old brick pipes, running under the streets.
It took a little nerve to probe into these in the pitch black with no idea where the hell they were leading you; and they stank.
I took a pack of playing cards and a flashlight, and I would jam cards into the brickwork every ten paces to mark my way. Eventually I found a manhole cover that lifted up, and it brought us out in the little lane right outside the headmaster’s private house.
I loved that. “All crap flows from here,” I remember us joking at that time.
Just under the South Summit I could make out the shape where Rob Hall lay. He had died up here some twenty-four months earlier.
His body, half covered in drift-snow, remained unchanged. Frozen in time. A stark reminder that those who survive the mountain do so because she allows you to.
But when she turns, she really turns.
And the further into her grasp you are, the greater the danger.
Right now, we were about as far into her grasp as it was possible to venture.
And I knew it.
Rob’s last words to his wife, Jan, had been: “Please don’t worry too much.”
They are desperate words from a mountaineer who bravely understood he was going to die.
I tried to shake his memory from my oxygen-starved brain. But I couldn’t.
Just get going, Bear. Get this done, then get down.