Cathy O'Dowd's Blog, page 2

Why I ghosted social media for a year

In the middle of 2018 I ghosted cyberspace. I walked out on a blog was I writing. On The Business of Adventure newsletter and website that I was running. On all my audience-building social media properties. I turned off my laptop, other than for dealing with emails and admin for my motivational speaking work. I abandoned Twitter without a second thought, stopped reading Facebook and turned Instagram into a one-way photo feed.

I didn’t explain or apologise or even really think through why I was doing it. I just felt overwhelmed. I had too much to do, much of it made up of things that mattered too little. A lot of the ‘too much’ was self-created work that brought in the kind of intangible benefits that are so seductive in cyberspace. It brought me connections with interesting people, information about inspiring adventures, lots of value-exchange type deals. What it didn’t do was get me outside, or bring in money. It was my motivational speaking work, conducted In Real Life, that paid my bills and funded my adventures.

What it did do was suck up hours and days and weeks of my time. Weeks spent with my butt wedged in a chair, eyes focused on the laptop screen. Followed by my tired but still sedentary butt sprawled on a sofa, thumbs tapping away on my phone, building, maintaining and responding on social media.

I ghosted cyberspace when plans I’d made for the summer suddenly flashed up on the calendar as Happening Now. I’d just finished an intense 10-day Independent Canyoneer course and had then been timed out in the Comapedrosa Skyrace, because I’d not done enough race training. Immediately after I had a week-long sea kayak trip in the Finnish archipelago, followed by a multi-week climbing and canyoning trip in the central Pyrenees.

I’d put all these plans in place earlier in the year to get the butt of my future self out of that chair and out into the world of adventure. But when it all suddenly came due, I was overcommitted and undertrained and something had to give.

So I chose Real Life. I abandoned the blogs and the newsletters and the social media feeds, the typing and tapping and scrolling. Instead I went kayaking and canyoning and climbing.

The way I want to do these adventures demands a price. I’m not interested in the sort of trip that hits maximum #hashtag exciting imagery for minimum work. The kind where you buy an adventure from a commercial operator, who has done all the planning and the risk management. Where you just turn up and snap selfies in exciting locations while the guide finesses a host of challenges in the background, maximising the appearance of adventure while minimising the actual risk. I want to do it myself. But to build and maintain the mental and physical skill that lets me do these things, demands engagement with Real Life.

I had a goal at the start of 2018. To redpoint 7a, a mediocre but for me mythic number that I’d never achieved in 32 years of rock climbing. I did it in June. And then came nowhere close again for the rest of the year. My one 7a still sits in sad isolation on top of my grade pyramid. I did three climbing trips in 2018 and climbed badly on all of them. Genuinely improving as a climber takes many hours of real effort in rock gyms and on rock faces. Cyberspace can provide information about training and inspiration for effort, but neither is a substitute for training and effort IRL.

The great gift of managing to be self-employed in the adventure space, as a guide or a sponsored athlete or a speaker or however you’ve made it work, is that you can – in theory – live anywhere, travel anywhere. The understanding that expeditions can be funded by grants and sponsorship, if you have the time, the talent and the tenacity to find those opportunities, means that – in theory – you can go anywhere.

That wealth of possibility can be overwhelming. It becomes easy to sit wherever you are in the world and second-guess yourself, wondering if you wouldn’t be better off somewhere else. Scrolling through endless social media ‘inspiration’ only makes it worse. You may be living vicariously through the adventures of others, or feeling defeated that everyone else is doing bigger, better, brasher adventures than you are. Either way, you are neither engaging in the outdoor space around you nor actively working towards a specific future destination.

Last year I decided to be content with where I have chosen to live, in Andorra, in the Pyrenees. The weather is great, there is skiing and climbing and canyoning and mountain running. Along with decent coffee shops and high-speed internet. In 2019 I want to live this choice, not wonder about alternatives.

Much as I’ve enjoyed widening my circle of acquaintances in the cyber adventure community, those people don’t help when I want a partner to go climbing or skiing. For that I need to engage with the people and the opportunities that lie outside my front door. I need to get to know the outdoor enthusiasts who live in my neighbourhood. I need to be stronger and fitter and more skilful for the adventures that abound in my backyard.

None of it will make for media headlines or interest sponsors or impress social media followers. But it is real – real in risk and challenge and joy. Real in accessibility. Real Life. It’s time to shut down the laptop and head out of the door.

I’m typing this sitting on a plane winging its way to Canada. There I join friends to attempt the SE ridge of Mount Steele, a 5073m peak in the Yukon. Once the small plane flies us in to the icecap there will be no email or mobile coverage. Just our team, our skis, and the mountains around us.

My blogging will continue. My Instagram account will still be updated and my phone will still be with me. But the phone will be tucked in the pocket of my ski pants or my climbing chalkbag or my rucksack. I’ll be out there In Real Life doing real things with real people. 

On the road again

One thing I love about being an inspirational speaker is that it is both a job and gift. It is a product that I can exchange, most often for money but sometimes for experiences – like a week of skiing in Italy! But it is also a gift that I can give to causes that I care about.

The month of March brings a rich mix of speaking engagements, bringing together all the most satisfying elements of my job.

[image error]Opening the EU regional meeting of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

Yesterday I was in Amsterdam, giving an opening keynote at the EU regional meeting of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an alliance devised to promote sustainable production in the apparel, footwear, and textile industries. I met one of the organisers back in December when we both served on the jury at the 2019 ISPO Innovation in Outdoor Products awards. Taken by both her enthusiasm and the importance of the cause I was happy to donate my time. 

Now I face the challenge of packing for a trip that veers from a balmy 26 degrees C in Orlando to a chilly -11 in Livigno. But it starts this weekend in Ireland, at the Killarney Mountain Festival. I’ll be doing two events for them, telling the story of the first ascent of the Mazeno ridge of Nanga Parbat (Sunday ) but also doing a pop-up workshop on Saturday 4pm), designed the answer the awkward question any adventurer eventually has to face: great idea, but how are you going to pay for it? I’ll be talking about the eight funding streams that most adventurers tap into and how you can combine to support one another. 

[image error]Eight Ways to Fund your Next Adventure

I’ll be able to stay for both days and getting to listen to other great adventure speakers is one of the big draws. I am so often the only external speaker as a big corporate event, so this is a treat. I’m hoping to hear Mick Fowler, Nick Bullock and Leo Houlding – all British legends in the world of climbing. And to see the film Dawn Wall, an extraordinary story of one of the great climbing achievements of modern times. And maybe I’ll even take part in the 10k Park Run (look out for me near the back – running is not one of my talents.) 

On Monday I’ll fly out from Dublin to Orlando, for another big event, but of a very different kind. SSOW North America is the largest and longest running shared services and outsourcing event in the world. I’m coming to Orlando after headlining their European event in Lisbon in 2018. This time I open day 3 (Thursday) with a keynote Think Like an Explorer: Doing What Has Never Been Done Before, speaking from their main stage to an audience of 1200 people. This is one of my favourite presentations, not least because it is interactive, so the audience gets to weigh in on key expedition decisions.

[image error]Bringing the audience on board for key expedition decisions.

The same afternoon I get back on the plane, change in Dublin and continue on to Geneva. The location for this event is a picturesque French ski resort and the client is one the world’s biggest aircraft manufacturers and their guests, the senior executives of the world’s major airlines. I’ll be doing a keynote just before dinner on Saturday evening. 

I’ll also be taking advantage of the stop to pick up some of my expedition gear that got left in the flat of a friend in Chamonix. I’ll be needing it for our Mount Steele expedition in May – skiing a 5000m peak in the Canadian Yukon. 

Then it is onwards, this time crossing all of Switzerland by train on Sunday, hopefully a beautiful and tranquil journey. I’m leaving behind the corporate world and heading back into the adventure space. I’m one of the faculty for the 2019 WEMski Ski Medicine course, held in Livigno in the Italian Alps. I will be staying for most of the week, doing a workshop on raising adventure funding, giving a talk on Teams In Extremes and of course going skiing!  The faculty range from Antarctica adventurers Lou Rudd and Nat Taylor, Icemaiden Team, to Prof Chris Imray, vascular surgeon and world authority on cold injuries. Again it is a great opportunity to meet and listen to both the great names and the new blood in the adventure world. 

After that I get all of two days at home before bouncing onwards to the UK to speak for a pharmaceutical company for their internal Women In Leadership event, linked to Women’s History Month. It is going to be a busy month! 

[image error]

The post On the road again appeared first on Cathy O’Dowd: motivational speaker, climber, author.

‘What are you doing next?’

“What are you doing next?”

I hate that question.

I know why you ask. I’ve asked it myself, talking to climbers or adventurers I admire, and winced inwardly as I heard the words tumble out of my mouth. I – you – we are excited to stand in the presence of this person, eager to learn that the story we’ve just heard doesn’t stop here. The climb goes on to ever greater heights and we’ll be able to follow along, that much closer to the beating heart of the adventure, now that we’ve met this amazing individual.

But as the person on the receiving end – it’s nothing more than an invitation to disappoint.

You don’t want to hear that I plan to sit on a sofa with my cat for a few months, munching down palmfuls of chocolate M&Ms while watching Netflix.

You don’t want to hear that right now I am so over pursuing sponsors, wrangling media, chasing peaks and ‘living life to the fullest’. I need some time to pay off debts, earn money, revive neglected friendships and wade through post-expedition depression and big-challenge burnout.

Even once I’ve emerged on the other side of the post-project lethargy, the goals that matter to me are not necessarily the ones that will impress you. You and I, we’ve been talking about a new route on an 8000 metre peak and now I tell you my big goal for 2018 is a 7a redpoint?

7a is a deeply mediocre climbing goal. Hundreds of thousands of climbers have done better. Nowadays children with ages in single digits redpoint 8a and harder. I’ve rock-climbed for over 30 years at this point. It has to be the world’s slowest warm-up for 7a. Nevertheless, I pulled it off! Just a few weeks ago, in June 2018. Nobody but myself, and two or three close friends, understand what it means to me.

But that’s not what you are hoping to hear. You’ve heard about the lists – the Seven Summits!, the 14 8000ers! You’ve heard about the tag lines – the Adventurers Grand Slam! You’re craving the drama of ‘first’, ‘fastest’, ‘highest’.

I don’t want to let you down. You’re a decent person who is being very complimentary about things I’ve achieved and I feel an unspoken pressure to measure up to your expectations.

You don’t want to hear that I am missing four of the Seven Summits, and that I don’t care. Two are boring, the third too expensive to justify the cost, and the fourth is cool but crowded, and anyway, the season for climbing it is in the middle of my peak work period and I have a mortgage to pay.

As for the 8000ers – jumar-hauling up fixed lines on the standard routes is slow, expensive, and headache-inducing, and most new routes I’m not good enough to do, and don’t care enough to try.

So I give you a long explanation about how 2018 is a year of adventuring close to home, and the value of exploring my extended back-yard, and how climbing in western Europe can be more challenging that the Himalaya, and etc, etc, waffling on.

I watch you looking baffled and vaguely disappointed.

Then I say something about not all challenges requiring intercontinental air-flights and you light up. Eco-warrior! Reduced carbon footprint! Save the planet! At least it’s a mission that is of the moment.

I smile awkwardly. I fly far too often with my work as a motivational speaker to claim any face-saving low-carbon credit.

Sometimes the question is phrased differently. When’s the next climb, or when’s the next mountain? I hesitate. I know what you mean. You want to hear about next mega-summit with a name you recognise. But the answer is probably – tomorrow. Or later this week. It’ll be Font Blanca, or Pedraforca. It’ll be Perles, or Coll de Nargo. Unless you live in Andorra, or climb in northern Catalonia, they’ll mean nothing to you.

Pedraforca in spring. One of the iconic mountains of Catalonia.  

 

Let me have a go at answering this question for you. In all my years of mountain adventure, what achievement am I most proud of?

I was first introduced to big mountains some 35 years ago, visiting the Drakensberg in South Africa as a young teenager on summer camp. Since then I’ve climbed on six continents – trad, sport, alpine, ski… on rock, snow and ice. I don’t choose my success on Everest – for which I’m best known, or hitting my limits on the Mazeno ridge of Nanga Parbat – which I hope is the hardest, riskiest thing I will ever find myself on.

Some of us are born in the right place for our temperament and passion. I wasn’t. I grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg, on the vast flat central plateau of South Africa. The most ambitious thing my parents did was day walks when we went on our annual beach holiday.

I spent seven years in higher education, I have a Masters in Media Studies to show for it, and the most valuable career move I made was to join the rock-climbing club. That club was the beginning of my journey to discover my people and find my home. All these years later, I’m more or less there. That’s what I’m proudest of.

I live in Andorra, a micro-state wedged between Spain and France in the Pyrenees mountains. I own a renovated stone farm building at the edge of a small town and I’m just months away from clearing the mortgage. I can run from my front door onto forested mountain paths. For less than 30 minutes of driving I can access several ski resorts and dozens of ski-touring peaks. Summer offers a selection of via ferratas, sport climbing crags and rocky ridge scrambles. There are canyons to descend, mountain trails to run, 2900 metres peaks to summit, mountain lakes to jump into. Most of this is done, summer or winter, bathed in the sunshine that I love from my South African roots.

Extend my back-yard circle to some three hours by car. World-class rock-climbing in Catalonia and the south of France. Limestone, granite, conglomerate, from one-pitch set-pieces to 18 pitch all-day adventures. Some of the best canyoning in Europe. Iconic mountain running country. Excellent ski-touring, with all the rush of 1500 metre descents and none of the risk of Alpine crevasses. Via ferratas all over the place. Caving for those who are inclined.

And if you insist, it’s only a three hour drive to the beach.

I don’t tick off Adventures from a 50 before 50 Bucket-List. I don’t Conquer Challenges. I just run, and climb, and ski, and swim, trying to live a life infused with the values that matter most to me.

That’s not to say that every day is #Adventure! Sometimes I wake up tired and unmotivated. It’s another sunny day in my mountain paradise but I pull the duvet over my head and go back to sleep.

Sometimes I lie on the sofa with my cat and binge on chocolate M&Ms and look at photos of climbers I know on expedition in the Himalaya, and I wonder if I should be doing more, trying harder.

But on the whole, I’m happy with where I’m at. I am proud of finding my way to this adventure life and living it on a daily basis.

I’m sorry my answer to your well-meant question is 1300 words long. I’m sorry it’s not what you were hoping for – a snappy reply about #HardestChallengeEver New Route on Everest in Winter Solo!!! Honestly, at this point in my life, it’s never going to be that.

“So what are you doing next?”

I’m opening my front door and heading out into my daily adventure life.

This article first appeared on  my Trek & Mountain blog .

‘Have you hashtagged your #adventure today?’

Recently I’ve found myself pondering what the rise of #adventure in our modern times really means.

#Adventure has been used over 45 million times on Instagram, a platform that hasn’t yet reached its tenth birthday. With every year that the hashtag replicates exponentially, our experience of adventure becomes safer and tamer. Are we shouting about it ever more loudly precisely because it is melting away as we watch, right along with the glaciers?

Wikipedia defines adventure in two ways: 1. an exciting or unusual experience. 2. a bold, usually risky undertaking, with an uncertain outcome. The rise of #AdventureTravel is consciously designed to replace the latter with the former, to sell us packaged excitement so we can pretend the outcome might be uncertain, while having lawyers on speed dial if it turns out that it actually is.

#ExtremeSleeping... Didn’t we used to just call that ‘camping’?

It’s not just commercial operators who are shouting ever louder about ever less. Every #adventurer is doing the same. I admire Phoebe Smith for successfully branding herself as an #ExtremeSleeping adventurer, but she’s not talking about about snowhole bivvis at 7700 metres, or portaledges of Karakorum rock walls. It’s about sleeping outside somewhere in Britain that isn’t a commercial campsite. Didn’t we used to just call that ‘camping’?

Al Humphreys has had similar success in bringing us the #MicroAdventure… which looks a lot like the old-fashioned concept of a weekend outdoors. It’s not just old people grumbling that it was better back in the day; the change is real. Just when we seem to be most anxious about letting our children out of our sight, it has also never been safer to be outside.

I took off on my first expedition at the age of 21, a young woman with a young man I barely knew, going to climb the Rwenzori mountains in central Africa. Unknowingly we were travelling through the east side of Zaire (now the DRC) just before the war erupted that would render the area unsafe for tourists for the next twenty years. All we had was a guidebook that was sixty years out of date. There was no satellite mapping to peruse, no weather reports to download; we had no Spot tracker bread-crumbing our progress, no Delorme Inreach texting to our Twitter accounts, no mobile or satellite phones.

My mother dropped me off at the airport and just had to believe that I would be there again six weeks later. Up in the mountains there was no rescue of any kind – no EPIRB, no Global Rescue Insurance, no helicopters. One of the two of us would have had to run down to the nearest village – a two-day run from basecamp – and beg for help.

Travel in Africa and you will inevitably come across a woman walking along a dust road, a load balanced on her head, miles from a village. Or a man on a single-speed bicycle, on a track deep in the bush. They aren’t #adventurers, blogging their way to a first bike/run/Elliptigo crossing of the continent. They are just people doing what it takes to live and survive in their daily lives. On our return through Goma, we were given a letter by a Zairean man, to post when we returned home. As soon as he left, we gently prised it open to check the contents. It was a letter to a South African radio station that blared our propaganda across the continent, asking them to play a song for him on their request show.

Of course, an experience that was life-changing for me in 1991 was inconsequential by global adventure standards. Almost anything that you can call an adventure will impress someone, even if only your mum (at least back then my mother couldn’t leave embarrassing comments on my blog.) The most record-breaking, attention-getting adventure in the world will have some critics. Someone will say it was all better in the 1980s or the 1880s, or when homo sapiens first walked out of Africa. The style depends on the age you live in.

When the expedition of the Duke of Abruzzi did the first ascent of the Rwenzori’s highest peaks in 1906, they marched across East Africa to reach the range, accompanied by a line of porters half a kilometre long. The Duke was a man who knew how to camp. No #ExtremeSleeping for him; on his expedition to do the first ascent of Mount St Elias he took a brass bed frame to base camp.

People sometimes wonder why first ascents of mountains were generally not done by the local people. The answer is simple: why would they? There was nothing to be gained up there. When you are focused on subsistence living, there’s more than enough work to be going on with and quite enough risk already – there’s no need to seek out more. The pursuit of mountain summits came out of the rise of a class of people with leisure and money, and ever fewer dangers to face in their daily lives.

The change in mountaineering in just our lifetimes has been astonishing. Jan Morris, the journalist who sent out news of the first Everest ascent by giving a coded note to a boy to run down the trail to a radio shack to send a telex is still alive and writing, in a year when two American climbers Snapchatted their Everest ascent from base camp to summit. Adventures weren’t ‘athletes’ a generation ago but rather keen amateurs or curious scientists. Extreme sports were only defined as a concept in the 1990s and their participants now bring Olympic levels of training and science to their physical endeavours. The jump in standard in climbing in less than a lifetime has been phenomenal.

You can see modern adventure athletes leaning into the game, alternating between projects done for themselves and projects done for sponsors, media and audiences that delight in sensational visuals, number-smashing records, and easy-to-understand objectives – Ueli Steck being filmed for his speed-ascent of the iconic North Face of the Eiger, Kilian Jornet racing up Everest. However there has always been a ‘game’ to all of this. There has always been a sense that the current generation is deprived of something that was better in years gone by. The rise of exploration as more of a leisure activity than a search for new trade routes coincided with the Victorian era, when steamships and telegraphs initiated the modern phenomenon of the shrinking globe.

The Geographical societies that we now think of as symbols remaining from an age of capital ‘A’ Adventure, grew out of a era that was becoming ever more standardised and urbanised. With Victorian adventure came all the trappings we associate with modern #adventure sensationalism: the best-selling books, the lucrative lecture tours, the how-to-do-adventure manuals, the blatant lying about adventure records – the Victorians had it all.

They also had it tidily reserved for the ‘right kind of chap’. Those august societies were rooted in a foundation of sexism, racism and classism we now consider intolerable. If we push aside an often deeply unrealistic nostalgia for a golden age that never existed for most people, there is no better time to be trying to get outdoors than right now.

Equipment has never been lighter and easier to use. The tool that lets us research remote locations, find adventure partners and learn outdoor techniques and safety protocols sits in our pocket or on our desk. It has never been more accessible to so many to range widely in the outdoors.

Many of us feel the world is somehow diminished in modern times, smaller and more crowded. That smaller feeling is a product of our technology and seem to be the price we pay for all the advantages that tech brings. That crowded feeling is real. In 1850 there were 1.2 billion people on the planet. Today there are roughly 7.5 billion. Every one of those Victorians now has six neighbours standing next to them.

The impact of those numbers demands management far beyond grumbling over a few sensational hashtags. If more people get outdoors this weekend because they bought into #MicroAdventure, if more people get to see the stars because they tried #ExtremeSleeping, is that a bad thing? As the new billions continue to crowd into cities and lose touch with the risks and rewards of interacting with nature, anything that helps bring them back into contact with nature seems worth embracing.

This article first appeared in Trek & Mountain.

Not all adventurers are born equal

There is a fashion right now for blog posts telling you that your dream/adventure/expedition is totally possible. Just Do It! Throw your fears to the wind! Believe in yourself! Stop dreaming, start doing! The cliches abound, all of them look great pasted on a sunrise stock photo in a jazzy font, and uploaded to Instagram.

Underlying all of them is the same message: the only thing holding you back is yourself. If only you had more confidence and courage, you too could be living a life a grand adventure. For some it’s an inspiring call to action. For others it’s a demoralising judgement – your failure to live this exciting life is entirely your fault.

Lost in the snappy one-liner is the truth that we start from very different places. People tossing out inspiring messages often fail to acknowledge that their ability to do this is partly founded in life advantages resulting from pure luck. People failing to meet these rousing calls can overlook that systemic disadvantages they face.

Money matters. It makes everything easier. Whether money comes from family, luck in the property market, cashing in your stock options at the right moment, starting a company and selling at the peak of a wave, twenty years working as an investment banker – money (and the business contacts that frequently come with having money) makes it all simpler.

Grand slam ‘fastest’ records (mountains plus poles) often have more to do with cash than talent. It takes money to pay for the flights from one continent to the next, to pay some else to have done all the ground arrangements, to pay to have guides waiting to escort you up the peak.

‘Youngest’ records also tend to come from money. The teenagers involved have seldom come up with the funds themselves. But money isn’t just cash in the bank. It’s also about understanding how to access other people who have resources. Cold-calling for sponsorship is difficult. Prior connections always make it easier. That may be your colleagues and contacts in business or your CEO-level parents calling in a few favours with their friends.

Plenty of blog posts extol the virtues of cheap adventure, throw caution to the wind and set forth with £25 in your pocket. It’ll all work out! It might…. But in the unlikely event that all your possessions are stolen, or you are injured or assaulted – what is the back-up plan? For many people it involves a tearful phone call back home. Having long-suffering parents with the money (and the willingness) to bail you out of trouble is a huge asset, and it’s not one that everybody has.

Being able to return from your multi-year adventure and move back into your parents’ home while you figure out your next move is another undervalued asset. And it’s not only parents quietly providing support. Many a mid-life career change, swapping working for ‘the man’ for a life of adventure, is backed-up by a tolerant partner who continues to hold down a ‘normal’ job.

Parents don’t just offer money and shelter. When yet another youngest age-record falls, it’s always interesting to see whether the parents are Arctic or mountain guides. Any level of outdoor activity in your childhood will put you ahead of the pack. An outdoor-focused upbringing will put a young adult 20 years ahead in skills and confidence compared to an exclusively urban childhood.

Advantages aren’t only about family wealth or outdoor upbringing. Your generation, your culture, your country of residency and citizenship all bestow advantages or limitations. Tertiary education is where many young people join outdoor clubs and get their first taste of adventure. Did you come from a generation or live in a country where that education was free? Where you able to spend your university holidays going off on trips and gaining experience, or did you have to work for money or do unpaid internships to bolster the chance of getting the job to pay off your student debt?

Some countries require that student loan repayment begins immediately after graduating, others set an earning threshold before repayment starts but interest adds up in the interim. Either way, it makes it harder to take off on an adventure rather then seek out a job. And that’s without considering whether you need to earn to help out younger siblings with their education or family with their living costs.

Other advantages come from the country where you live. There are many adventure grants available but only a few are open world-wide. The majority are available to citizens or residents of a small number of countries – the UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada.

Which passport(s) you hold makes a huge diference. As a South African, there is a conversation I can have with Russians and Argentinians about visas that leaves passport holders from the EU and North American countries bewildered. Grab a bike and head off across Europe / Asia / the world – that’s a lot easier if you can access visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel. Germans can travel visa-free to 176 out of a possible 218 destinations. Citizens of Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan have that sort of access to fewer than 30. It’s not just about spontaneity, it’s about money. Visa fees, combined with having to visit a consulate in a capital city for face-to-face interviews and/or fingerprinting, carries real costs.

Sponsorship is citizen-specific too. Sponsors tend to support people from their own country. Media report on their own nationals and the topics that interest their readers. If you are a citizen of a country with no history of adventure and no infrastructure around it, you are at a massive disadvantage. It’s not only money and media. It may be far harder to learn the skills and source the equipment needed to do your adventure safely.

Of course, it can work the other way. In an adventurous country, many of the ‘firsts’ for your nationality have probably been done. In a non-adventure country, you still have a chance to be the first X to do Y – if you can gain the skills and find the funding.

To raise your hand for adventure, you have to be able to imagine yourself in that space. You may not come from a culture that values outdoor achievement. Certain Western cultures have been romanticising the wilderness for generations. Other cultures have little interest, putting far more value on upgrading to comfortable urban living rather than on roughing it for no good reason. It’s hard to stay motivated and focused on your mad plans if you don’t have people around you who share your passion and support your vision.

Seeing role models who resemble you can help too. Browse through the covers of adventure magazines. Look at the athletes sponsored by outdoor brands. Watch the faces on the speaker stage at the next adventure festival that you attend. Search Google Images for adventure-related keywords. How long does it take you to find the not-white face? Or not-male, not-slim, not-young face? They are out there, but in much smaller numbers.

Women adventurers have begun to fight the gender imbalance by pulling together assertively in all-women Facebook groups, online magazines and adventure festivals, and brands are beginning to respond. But the other kinds of gaps remain very noticeable.

There are a whole set of accidents of birth that can be very helpful. English is now the second language of choice of most of the planet and over 80% of the information stored in the world’s computers is in English. You will have an easier time both researching and executing your adventure if you have a good command of English.

Having a white skin helps. In many countries it gains you an extra level of respect. It may be almost unconscious on both sides – white-skinned people expect to be treated well, brown-skinned people have learned that whites need to be handled with care. A white skin may earn you the clueless-foreigner pass, or (as a woman) the honorary-man pass. However, a brown skin in a predominately white-skinned country brings the assumption you are a (possibly unwanted) refugee or economic immigrant, rather than a tourist or traveller.

Being a man helps too. Men can fear assault while travelling. Women can fear assault and then add rape on top. Of course it’s a generalisation. Man can be sexually assaulted. Plenty of women travel alone through most of the countries of the world in complete safety. That doesn’t make the fear of sexual assault carried by women any less real. Or the experience of endless harassment in certain countries any less exhausting.

Looks matter as well. There are men ready to claim that attractive young female adventurers get attention that has more to do with how they look that with what they’ve done. Women can retort that they lose out on sponsorship because they don’t fit the ‘adventure look’. Or that their talent gets ignored if they don’t have the looks to match it.

However, men don’t escape this trap. There is a certain kind of ‘Indiana Jones’ ruggedly handsome image that is associated with adventure. Men with that kind of appearance are more likely to get onto a magazine cover, into an advertising campaign or on television as a presenter.

And all of this supposed that you were born into a body that can set adventure records. Not everyone has a mindset that enjoys a suffer-fest of striving, travelling alone and dirt-cheap living. Even for the able-bodied, it can feel like a moral failure to step down from a project when you see people around you who seem to have more ‘grit’ and ‘drive’.

With ‘human-powered’ unsupported adventure in fashion for sponsorships and the new generation of adventure grants, there are many people who are born with or develop through life physical or mental disabilities that don’t make that kind of travel possible.

To top it all off is an element of pure luck – being in the right place at the right moment. Some element outside your control meant your adventure found a sponsor, attracted media attention, caught the public imagination. After that initial boost it then becomes self-perpetuating, as your profile and track-record make it easier to find further opportunities.

Of course you need to have done the work to be in the right place to seize that lucky break, and you need to work the opportunities that then come your way. But you can also do all the work and never get the break.

The final truth to keep in mind when comparing yourself to other adventurers is that they started building up their reputation a decade ago, or longer. It’s hard to look back and appreciate how far they’ve come.

None of these are reasons why you can’t do it. But they are factors that can impact how difficult it may be for you and how long it may take. You will be further down the road on your adventure path by being realistic about the assets you already have, the disadvantages you need to overcome, and the opportunities that you can access.

Look to the adventurers who are already doing well for inspiration and ideas. But don’t use them as a yardstick and then beat yourself up for your inability to equal their success. Your only comparison should be with yourself. The measure that matters is where you are a year from now, and five years from now, based on the work you start doing today.

What You Heard is Not What I Meant

One Key Way Communication Breaks Down In Teams and What You Can Do About It

A year ago I reached the summit of Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada. The most important lesson I learnt from that expedition was the vital importance of clear communication within a team.

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” – mis-attributed to Alan Greenspan, among others

“We won’t move onto the plateau unless we have a reasonable weather forecast.”

For context, the plateau lay at 5000 metres and would be the last obstacle between us and the summit of a mountain notorious for terrible weather. It sounded reasonable, right?

And yet that innocuous statement started the biggest conflict we faced on the expedition I did this spring. We were using the same words, but we didn’t agree on their meaning.

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The summit team of four about to head off into the mist. Cathy is second from the right, in green.

The mountain in question was Mount Logan, 5959m, the second highest in North America. To set up the final camp we had to cross a col and drop down onto the plateau. From there we faced a long climb, fully exposed to the worse of the mountain weather. To escape, we had to climb back up over the col. Climbers trapped on the plateau in bad weather had died. The risk was real.

We were a group of six, members of a ski-touring club, with varied but considerable experience. We’d had a team meeting while still safely down on the valley floor and all agreed that the primary objectives were to have a good time and coming home safely. The safety discussion included that agreement: “We won’t move onto the plateau unless we have a reasonable weather forecast.”

Now we were at camp 4, at 5,300 metres, huddled in two tents dug in behind metre-high snow walls, buffeted by howling wind, taking turns to venture out to dig away the snow that was endlessly building up against the thin fabric walls of the tents. The col – the gateway to the plateau – was just above us and the moment of truth had arrived.

What exactly did we mean by ‘reasonable’? What seemed self-evident in the sunshine down by the shores of Kluane lake was now a source of contention.

For Robert*, reasonable meant perfect – no wind, blue skies – and with no sign of any such forecast in the next week, our expedition was effectively over. For others of us, myself included, buoyed by our success in getting this far, resignedly accepting that no magic weather window lay in our future, reasonable meant whatever wasn’t awful. Winds, cloud, poor visibility – we could deal with some of each or all of it, as long as we were careful.

We had all come a long way and invested a lot of time, money and effort in this project. We were climbing with two of each of the key pieces of equipments – three-man tents, GPSs, sat-comm devices, stoves. We had the capacity to split the team but one person could not safely descend alone.

In groups with glaring cultural differences it is much more obvious that time needs to be spent checking that underlying assumptions are not skewing communication. Blinded by our apparent similarity of experience and culture, we’d not thought to dig into what we meant by ‘reasonable’.

How can you clarify concepts that are mostly easily explained by ‘I’ll know it when I see it’? Asking people to tell stories around the concept in question helps. We could have asked each person to give an example of a time when the weather was so bad they decided to turn back from their objective.

But even with more clarity from each individual, that fact remains that ‘reasonable’ is a subjective concept. And one that we were arguing about without any truly objective information. Weather forecasts are only truly reliable within a 48 hour window and became even less so at high altitudes in remote locations. And the outcomes of the weather depends on us – the state of our equipment and of ourselves, mentally and physically.

Our choice will always be a best guess. Try as we might to be factual, emotion and judgement creep in. For those of us who wanted to continue, Robert was giving up too easily, lacking determination. For Robert, we were too pushy, being reckless.

We spent a day arguing in circles over what counted as sufficiently good conditions, and what kind of weather report would satisfy Robert before finally beginning to realise that weather was no longer (and maybe had never been) the real issue. Robert wanted to go home, and go home now.

Once it became clear that Robert wouldn’t even come to the top camp and support our summit bid, but was determined to leave, without explanation, the undertone of judgement became stronger and nastier. Someone else had to lose their summit chance to accompany Robert down. His choices felt weak and selfish. Already frustrated, the argument over what to do became increasingly emotionally loaded.

Time spent arguing takes a toll whatever the final outcome. The period of uncertainty and frustration undermines confidence and motivation within the group. It pays to drill down to the real issue as quickly as possible, not be distracted by arguing over peripheral details.

We needed to steer the group towards a consensus and away from mutual blaming, and that steering role is normally done by the leader. To be a ‘leader’ on a team like ours does not mean having final authority. The leader is generally the person who came up with the idea and did much of the planning. We were on the mountain of our own free will, on ‘holiday’, paying our own way, taking some serious risks. Team members have to be persuaded into consensus.

Our problem was that Robert was the leader, he was the one who had chosen this mountain. So the argument about what to do next wobbled along without anyone else stepping into the guiding role.

Our process might have been quicker and less painful if we’d had an acknowledged deputy, someone we has all agreed would step up in any situation where the leader could not.

Two days into an ongoing argument, the issue was finally becoming clear. Robert was determined to leave. Someone else had to go down with him. Of the five remaining, three were highly motivated to go on – we were also the three most experienced on the team. Two were tired and cold, unsure how much more effort and risk they wanted to embrace. So did we draw straws, and so potentially weaken the summit team by sending one of our best members down with Robert? Or did we pass judgement on each other and declare who was the weakest and so could most easily be sacrificed?

More rigorous contingency planning beforehand would have helped. We assumed everyone would want go to the top given decent conditions. We happily agreed that some or all of us would descend if anyone was injured or ill. But we ignored the large grey area between those two extremes, the idea that people might simply lose their motivation. It’s uncomfortable to do that kind of planning in a small group and very easy to skip over the emotionally awkward scenarios in favour of more dramatic events which have clearer solutions.

We did finally arrive at the best solution – the least motivated of the final five volunteered to go down with Robert, and the four of us who remained squeezed into a 3-man tent and successfully reached the top in cloud and howling wind. Sadly the day before had been a perfect summit day and we had missed it in the the time-consuming multi-day process of reaching a conclusion. The team had not broken but the bruises left by the conflict lingered through the rest of the expedition.

*Robert’s name has been changed to protect his privacy.

What would have helped us handle the situation more effectively?

1. Using stories to interrogate meaning and reveal underlying assumptions – asking people about conditions that had led them to give up on projects before.

2. Establishing a chain of leadership, who would step in to take the leader’s role as ‘chairman’.

3. Remembering that problems exist in layers, and drilling down more quickly to find the core of the issue.

4. Working through potential scenarios beforehand, including the emotionally awkward grey area problems.

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An old “Cathy” cartoon.

The post What You Heard is Not What I Meant appeared first on Everest Climber & Motivational Speaker Cathy O’Dowd.

Public Everest lecture, to support Heart Health

Four years ago Darren Tate, a family friend, had a major heart attack while out hiking on Blencathra in Cumbria. He was lucky to survive through the night, until he could be treated the next morning.

Young, fit and active, Darren was completely unaware he had a heart defect. Under the name Hearts of Cumbria, he then set up a campaign to get The Heart Centre at Cumberland Infirmary open 24hrs a day, rather than just from 9am to 5pm.

I’m proud to be supporting his ongoing fundraising efforts through a talk about my 1st Everest expedition, an epic ascent in which a team already weakened by conflict within the group, then climbed into the worst storm in the history of Everest.

Join us! All costs are sponsored. All ticket money goes to the Heart Centre.

Date: Monday 23 January
Venue: Harraby Community Centre (Edgehill Rd, Carlisle CA1, UK)
Time: 19:00, for a 19:30 start
Tickets: Adult £10 / Under 16s £5 / 65+ £8
To book: Call 01228 544 133 or email darren.tate66@gmail.com

The post Public Everest lecture, to support Heart Health appeared first on Everest Climber & Motivational Speaker Cathy O’Dowd.

30 years & counting

We had reached the short section of fixed rope below the Lower Saddle in the Grand Tetons when the youngster caught up with us. He had a huge rucksack and Michael joked that he was loaded like a pack mule. It turned out he was carrying gear for his father and younger brother who were far behind. “They’re slow,” he said, “Dad’s 45.” We started to laugh – both being over 45 ourselves – and he got that embarrassed look of the young having to deal with old folk. “Yeah, but my dad, he’s only 45 but he acts like he’s fifty!” Michael was one week shy of his fiftieth birthday.

We waved the youngster past. The next day we soloed the Exum ridge, racing to get to the summit of the Grand Teton between thunderstorm fronts. A week later we did the Grand Traverse of the Tetons – 10 summits, 28 kilometres, 3600 metres of height gain, over three days. It was a route we’d had in mind for years and it was deeply satisfying to dump the packs beside the hire car and declare it done.

Michael at sunset at the first bivi on the Grand Traverse – at the foot of the north face of the Grand Teton.

I’ve known Michael since I was 18. We met through our university climbing club in South Africa and dated briefly before moving on to be adventure buddies. Thirty years later neither the adventure or the friendship has died away and there seems to be no reason why that should change. So what have I learned in thirty years on the rock-face? What has changed and what remains true through all the decades?

Looking for images for this post reminded me of some of the most obvious. That was a time when photographs required real cameras loaded the film, sent for developing afterwards, and the result is that very few pictures have survived. It was also a time of some dubious fashion choices, although I still miss my pink-and-purple leopardskin climbing tights.

One of the strongest beliefs I remember from the early years was the sense that it all had to be done now. Roger, the best climber in our clique, was convinced that by 25 his climbing career would be over. As if adult life would immediately render us old and frail, Cinderella turning into a pumpkin on the stroke of midnight. Roger is now past fifty, thoroughly adult with a demanding career as an anaesthesiologist, a happy marriage, teenage boys – and he still redpoints 8a.

Myself, leading Fallen Angel at Dome in South Africa, back when I was young and pink & green tights were all the rage.

It turns out that those now years last much, much longer than we thought. It’s okay not to be a blazing natural talent, you can build ability and confidence over time. Some years ago I climbed with a man who had recently retired after a career as a teacher and later an outdoor instructor. He started in the 1950s with a hawserlaid rope around his waist and Joe Brown as his hero. On bolted French rock 50 years later he managed his hardest lead ever – a treacherous 6b+ granite slab. Incidentally, one of the pleasures of climbing is the way it crosses generations. I have adventure partners ranging in age from teens to 60s, and we meet as equals in our shared enthusiasm for the sport.

I climbed Everest at 27 – quite young in those days for an 8000er, although now it’s commonplace. Sixteen years later I was a member of the team attempting the first ascent of Nanga Parbat via the Mazeno ridge. Climbing alpine style, we made our first summit bid after 11 days on the move. We failed and four of us, myself included, contemplated the lack of food, the two-day descent down a route we’d never seen and our utter exhaustion, and decided to get off the mountain while we could. An avalanche and a broken ankle later, we were safely down. Sandy Allan and Rick Allen went on to summit on day 14 and then, without food or water, took four more days to descend. They won a Piolet d’Or for the ascent. Their ages? Fifty-seven and fifty-eight.

Sandy Allan (l) and Rick Allen at the Diamir Face basecamp, after their epic 18 day ascent of Nanga Parbat by the Mazeno ridge. Not bad for two old men!

There are many happy years of adventure ahead of all of us, and there is a lot to be said for pacing yourself. Some of the pushiest young men of my generation are no longer with us, having died falling or abseiling in remote corners of the world. Others carry permanent injuries from over-training. It certainly becomes more difficult to stay thin and fit as I age, and my back no longer likes carrying really heavy loads. But then again I have more experience now and much more confidence. Also more money – which helps to make equipment and travel affordable!

I look at my hands and my face and see wrinkles that I wish weren’t there. I try and touch my toes in my Pilates class and wonder where my youthful flexibility went. But when I look in the mirror I essentially see a body that gets stuff done! Legs that carry me up mountainsides, arms that pull me up rock faces. There is a lot in the media these days about body image issues for the young and climbing is a great way to build confidence in your body as most than just an object to be judged on appearance.

At university, we used to get climbing videos from overseas on VHS tape. I only ever saw two involving girls. In one Catherine Destivelle and another woman did some superb alpine climbing – but the close of the video still required them to jump under a waterfall for no good reason so the film could end with no-bra wet t-shirt images.

There are now far more women climbing at the highest level, and those role models are important. Women broke through in sport climbing first, but now I see more and more female partnerships doing rad alpine routes in remote locations. I remember heading out to do a multi-pitch rock route with a girl friend in the remote Drakensberg (where frankly the tufts of grass are more reliable than the rock) and us being interrogated by older men in the hut as to whether we were capable.

Myself on that Drakensberg climb – the Angus Leppan route on the Sentinel. The grumpy men are in the hut far below in the mist.

As a woman, I feel free in my adult life in a way that I suspect my mother never was. Free to earn my own money, live where I want, choose not to have children, wear at 47 much the same clothes I wore at 27 (although perhaps not the hotpants from when I was 17). Free to continue to make climbing a central part of my existence and to expect that it will stay that way as long as health allows. The burgeoning opportunities to stay fit and active well into old age are a blessing for our quality of life.

I enjoy social media. I like being able to stay in touch with climbers and skiers I meet on my travels and I curate my feeds so they are a river of adventure – people I know sharing photos and plans and passions. It’s a great motivator. Nevertheless, I wonder how I’d feel as a young woman trying to get started now. Would I worry about sharing my opinions for fear of being trolled? Would I wonder whether I was attractive enough to post photos?

There have been obvious changes to the sport over the years. It’s much less of a fringe activity. Standards are higher, training is better and much more accessible. It is easier to get started and to learn techniques. There are indoor walls in most urban centres, commercial courses, coaching clinics and organised weeks away, and a wealth of information free on the internet. It’s easier to find partners by browsing through internet forums or joining social media groups, and much easier to find information about crags.

I first encountered rock-climbing (along with hiking and camping) at a summer camp in the Drakensberg, when I was 14. I loved it but there was no way to continue for a teenage girl with parents who didn’t do such things. I was lucky to attend a university with a strong climbing club and a system to train us in the art of trad leading. But in the years post-university and pre the explosion of the internet, finding climbing partners was hard.

When I moved to Andorra in 2000, I was vaguely aware I now lived in an important climbing centre but I couldn’t find the local areas. There was no Rockfax guide to the Ariege. Each little French village had a slim paper guide to their local crag sold at the tourist office. I found them by driving village to village and stopping in each one to ask with my five words of French.

Catalonia was even worse. In a dark corner in a bar in a village (no way of knowing which bar in which village) would be a A4 file containing tatty paper topos. If they didn’t have a photocopier, you copied them by hand. No camera phones back then. Spanish topos also tended to be ‘artistic’ which meant the drawing would somehow involve a semi-nude woman but bear no resemblance to the crag in question. So unless you already knew the cliff, you had no idea what they were going on about. The recent explosion of photo-driven guide-books is a huge improvement.

I do think there are drawbacks to our new world of indoor walls and commercial training courses. I’ve met novice climbers who, having started inside, declare they are ‘not yet ready’ to venture out. As if ‘outside’ is some wild dangerous upgrade to the climbing experience. My first route, done on the beginners meet of my university club, was multi-pitch trad in a beautiful gorge called Tonquani. The exposure was considerable!

Taking up a friend up the same route I had done as my first ever climb – Hawkseye in Tonquani.

Taking up a friend up the same route I had done as my first ever climb – Hawkseye in Tonquani. [/caption]Safety training is undoubtedly more rigorous than it used to be. Our informal apprenticeship system meant you learned only what your partner knew, and absorbed their bad habits alongside their skills. Some attitudes to safety are a product of age. As an eighteen-year-old I didn’t want to learn safety procedures from the 1950s! I wanted the very latest information. All these years later I don’t see why techniques I learned way back then, and have used safely for three decades, aren’t good enough to go on with.

Probably the most obvious difference we saw in our multi-pitch road trip through Idaho and Wyoming this summer was how everyone now wears helmets, ourselves included – it helps that they are a lot more comfortable these days. However, I noticed a certain rigidity around modern safety techniques. Abseiling off the Grand Teton, we shared a rope with a young American couple, young enough that they weren’t yet born when we started climbing.

He was horrified that we were abbing straight off our harness loops, rather than using an extender and a backup. We shrugged and were down the hill in a fraction of the time it took them. Newer climbers can believe there is just one way something can be done, rather than thinking about why they do it and understanding what risks it’s designed to minimise.

Many younger climbers seem to see safety as all about procedures. Slow and careful is the only way to go. We lay beside our tent at the Cirque of the Towers, and watched teams still crawling up the Northeast face of Pingora as the rain clouds drew in, on a route we’d finished hours earlier. Climbers new to the sport are losing sight of how speed is a safety tool as well.

Looking across Lonesome Lake at Pingora – the Northeast face is the righthand skyline.

But in the end, the joy of the sport is that we can each find our own path within it. With the passing of time I’ve stepped back from some of the more competitive aspects of climbing. When I started we had to yo-yo. Does anyone even remember that any more? Leading on trad, if you fell, you had to lower off and restart from the ground. The route was done once you got all the way through to the top. No hanging, no working moves. After thirty years of evolving style and ethics wars, I’ve reached the happy place of not giving a damn.

For me, one of the great pleasures of climbing is how deeply personal it is. It’s a puzzle to be solved. There is you, with your current level of mental and physical abilities. There is the wall, with features sprinkled across it in a variety of shapes and sizes. There is your partner, offering both security and encouragement. You try and combine all these elements in creative ways to make progress upwards. Each moment and each movement is different. But the joy that underlies them hasn’t changed in thirty years and I expect it to last another thirty.

First published on HoldBreaker.com 02/11/2016

The post 30 years & counting appeared first on Everest Climber & Motivational Speaker Cathy O’Dowd.

From Kilimanjaro to Everest

Key moments in the journey of life.

Looking back at the course of a lifetime, there are certain moments where, if you’d made a different choice, you’d be living a completely different life. Given how experiences shape character, you’d probably be a different person. It’s twenty years since I became the first South African to climb Everest, but that epic, complex, controversial journey didn’t begin in Nepal. It began on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. And it began with one of those key moments.



I was 26 years old, living in sleepy university town of Grahamstown in South Africa, in theory working on my masters thesis but actually lying on the carpet on a sunny Sunday morning, reading the newspaper. A front page article caught my attention.

‘Sunday Times Everest Expedition. We take the South African flag to the top of the world’.

Under it was a picture of three men standing on top of Table Mountain, the most famous mountain in the country, all of 1,000 metres high.

It was the third paragraph that jumped out and grabbed me by the throat: ‘The other male members have been selected, but Woodall is still looking for a South African woman climber.’

South African. Woman. Climber. I was all of those things. But Everest? I’d been rock-climbing since I was eighteen, I’d gone mountaineering in the Rwenzori, Bolivia and the Alps, but it had never occurred to me to consider Everest. It seemed much too high, too hard, utterly out-of-reach for the likes of me. Nevertheless, ever since I’d read my first book about mountaineering, I’d hoped one day to see the Himalaya. That book was Annapurna: a woman’s place, by Arlene Blum (I highly recommend it). It was the story of the first all-woman expedition to the Himalaya, their cheeky (for the 1970s) motto was A woman’s place is on top.

The newspaper article explained that interested women needed to send a written motivation. The team leader would draw up a short-list of six and take them on an expedition to Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain. One would then be invited to join the Everest team.

Kilimanjaro from the slopes of Mount Meru

I could think of a thousand reasons not to apply. I wasn’t experienced enough. I wouldn’t be chosen. It was a publicity stunt. It was sexist to invite the men but put the women through selection.

I could think of a thousand reasons to apply. I was one of the most experienced women climbers in South Africa. I might well be chosen. Who cared if it was sexist? And I would get a free trip to Kilimanjaro. In the end, one reason prevailed over all others.

If I didn’t apply, another woman would go and for the rest of my life I would wonder:

Could that have been me? What might have been?

I agonised for over a week over my application. It felt intensely difficult to express all of myself in a few pages of black-and-white text. I was one of over 200 women who took the plunge and applied.

Much later I would read the remainder of those letters. Most were not from young adventurers but from women in early middle age. A common thread ran through many of them. These women filled their roles in life well. They were good wives, mothers, employees. Many were clearly outstanding at what they did. Yet there was an unspoken question shining through all their applications: Was this all there was to life? There was a yearning to do something more, something just for themselves.

It was three long weeks before I heard that I was on the short-list. Soon thereafter I was on a plane to Tanzania, one of six women, being assessed by a male team leader, and observed by a male journalist and a two-man TV crew. It was an odd dynamic and a very early example of what we now call reality television. But that was before anyone realised these sort of experiences could lead to media careers. We were there with eyes firmly focused on mountain summits.

The six women apparently not enjoying the process of being on selection.

Despite the many differences, I could see a common trait in all the women – a determination and focus that we applied to whatever dominated our lives. Where a similar group of men might have been more inclined to posture, to try and top each other with stories of how far they’d run or how high they’d climbed, we pulled together as a group. Nevertheless, under all that lay an intensely competitive spirit. For the team leader this might be a selection, but for us it was competition. All of us desperately wanted to go.

The hardest part was that the leader made it clear he was not looking for the most experienced person. He wanted compatibility, mental strength, determination. He told us just to be ourselves. That left me with the horrible thought: What if being myself was simply not good enough?

The expedition began with an ascent of Mount Meru. The mountain was in a setting more reminiscent of Hollywood Africa than real Africa, rising out of a deep green tropical forest surrounded by green grassland dotted with small trees and grazing giraffes. Two magnificent rock ridges formed a horseshoe of huge cliffs, encircling what remained of an ancient volcanic crater.

From the peak we had a magnificent view of Kilimanjaro on the horizon to the east, a great swelling rising out of the plateau. Across its broad summit lay a mantle of snow and glacier. It seemed to float above the heat haze, an unlikely vision rising above tropical Africa. I could imagine no better place to be at dawn on New Year’s Day, 1996.

Kilimanjaro was a longer, more complex challenge than Meru. A dirt road led us past giant banana palms and tiny houses, before turning into mud as we vanished into lush forest, very green and very wet. One of the fascinations of the mountain is the many climatic zones. We emerged from the clammy jungle heat into the heather belt, climbing up through a landscape of rock and moss slopes. Days of mist teased us with brief glimpses of huge rocky peaks hovering in banks of cloud. Clear nights found us huddled around a campfire, telling jokes under a vast black sky studded with stars.

The landscape was a delight but the process of being ‘on selection’ was not. As we all became more used to the expedition conditions, the group became less cohesive and the strain began to tell. The leader made it clear he expected some of us would withdraw from selection. Through the pleasant days of hiking, I couldn’t imagine giving up. I felt very differently on the summit night. We left camp at about 1 a.m., stumbling up loose scree slopes through the long, dark hours of early morning. It was a relentless steep slog and I was sliding downwards with each step on the broken rock. Exhausted, freezing cold and demoralised, I was desperate to stop and rest. Sadly, the only way to keep warm was to keep moving.

Somewhere in those long icy hours, when it seemed as if the sun would never rise again, I decided to withdraw from selection. If Kilimanjaro was this unpleasant, Everest had to be far worse. Without enjoyment, I couldn’t see the point of it all. Then the first glimmer of dawn appeared, a slim line of red on the horizon. Slowly a golden glow crept up the eastern sky. As it grew so did my energy. All thoughts of giving up slipped away with the retreating darkness.

Cathy on the summit plateau of Kilimanjaro.

I worked my way around the crater rim, past the great slabs of glacier, lying on the rock like massive chunks of wedding cake. I pulled my down jacket tightly around me as protection against the howling wind. At 5.17 a.m. I finally stood on the summit of the African continent. Could the next summit possibly be Everest?

Back in the garden of the hotel, we prepared for the final decision. There was a kind of tense camaraderie among us as we waited. As befitted reality TV, the whole process was drawn out until I felt like a piece of putty that had been stretched far too thin. I thought I was the best choice and that I had a good chance. But I didn’t want to be too confident for fear of being wrong. As the tension mounted, I desperately wanted to be selected.

Finally, finally, the leader made his announcement. He was inviting two women to come to Nepal on the three week trek to base camp. Only at base camp would one of the two finally be selected to go onto the climbing permit. I got one invitation. Deshun Deysel, a young PE teacher from a coloured township, got the other.

My dream had come true. I was going to the Himalaya! But I still didn’t know if I was going to climb on Everest.

You can read the full story of the epic Everest expedition that would follow in my book Just For The Love Of It.

The six women on the summit of Kilimanjaro.

Originally published on the Kandoo Adventures blog

The post From Kilimanjaro to Everest appeared first on Everest Climber & Motivational Speaker Cathy O’Dowd.

Mount Logan on Skis – public lectures UK Nov/Dec

Most of my talks are closed events for corporate clients but here is something different!

In spring 2016 I was part of an Eagle Ski Club six-person team that tackled Mount Logan on skis, and one of four who reached the top. Mount Logan is the highest peak in Canada, and the second highest in North America. A giant slab of a mountain set deep in a remote icecap on the Yukon/Alaska border, it is notorious for bad weather.

I’m going to be sharing the story at four venues across the UK. Do join me if you are interested.

Bristol, 10 Nov, 7.30pm – Novia Scotia pub, Nova Scotia Pl, BS1 6XJ
Grindleford, 15 Nov, 7pm – The Maynard, Main Rd, Grindleford
Staveley, 24 Nov, 7pm – Hawkshead Brewery, Mill Yard, LA8 9LR
London, 5 Dec, 7pm – Civil Service Club, 13-15 Great Scotland Yard, SW1A 2HJ

I will also be telling the story of the first ascent of Nanga Parbat via the Mazeno ridge at the Extreme Medicine Expo in Edinburgh – 19 Nov 6pm.

The post Mount Logan on Skis – public lectures UK Nov/Dec appeared first on Everest Climber & Motivational Speaker Cathy O’Dowd.