Cathy O'Dowd's Blog, page 4
April 25, 2014
Mission: Dufourspitze! (or not…)
A team of five, a week to prepare – the goal: to ascend and ski the second highest peak in the Alps! Now the only thing that lay between failure and success was ourselves….
Or not.
The thing about being a climber – or at least someone who wanders around in the mountains in various ways – is that people assume you must always be off to ‘conquer’ something. It is written into the DNA of how we think about mountains, and how we use them as a metaphor for attaining goals.
But ‘conquering’ has always been an odd concept to use. It is not as if the mountain is going to pay you tribute once you’ve ‘mastered’ it. It is about a meaningful as an ant declaring that by crawling on to the top of your fridge, it has conquered it. (Possibly my fridge is crowned by a line of ants taking turns to wave very small flags, and call their sponsors on very small satellite phones. Possibly I don’t spend enough time in my kitchen to notice this phenomenon.)
A year ago I was wandering around the Saas Fee / Zermatt area on touring skis with three friends. We had a go at the Dufourspitze – at 4634 metres, the main summit of the Monte Rosa massif and the second highest mountain in the Alps, just 176 metres lower than Mont Blanc. Peering through thick mist, weaving between giant crevasses, we made it all the way up to the ski dump at 4515 metres. There the wind was so strong we couldn’t even stay on our feet for the time it took to remove the skins stuck to the bottom of our skis which allowed us to climb upwards. It was too risky to try the narrow rock ridge that leads the top and we slid back down through fresh powder to the valley instead.
It seemed the perfect objective for a return mission and this year I put together an Eagle Ski Club tour traversing around – and with luck, up – a series of 4000 metre peaks before placing us below the Dufourspitze for the final two days.
Challenges mounted. We were finishing up on the Easter weekend and the space-ship structure that is the new Monte Rosa hut, which sleeps some 140 people, was already full. There was no other point from which we could realistically tackle the peak. I was convinced that others, less committed than my team, would drop out and I kept pushing until, just a day before the tour was due to start, I had confirmation that we were in! Come hell or high snow, we would be there!
But what are goals really about? They are certainly useful. Without general goals, I’d probably stay in bed all day and read a good book. Without specific goals, I’d get up but wander around the house, making cups of coffee and inspecting the fridge for ants. Goals give me purpose and direction, but I’m not actually all that invested in attaining them. All too often while heading in their direction, I’ll get distracted by something more interesting – and I like it that way.
Clearly there are those who empowered by having clear long-term goals, whose lives are focused by 5- and 10- and 20-year plans. I speak for those of us who stand sheepishly by, not quite able to admit that we are just going to see how it all pans out and make it up as we go along. How do these goal-setting paragons know what the world will be like in five years time, what they will be like, what they will want? Are they not so focused on their path to destiny that they fail to notice the interesting track going off in an unexpected direction? Or the incoming storm that makes their objective impractical?
We know from weather reports that a storm is coming in on the first of our two possible Dufourspitze days, but we are forging on regardless! (Besides, it’s the Easter weekend in Zermatt, it’s not as if we are going to find anywhere else to stay.) We are twenty kilometres away, at the Britannia Hut, with 1200 vertical metres to climb, and we need to beat the storm to the Monte Rosa Hut. Our additional objective of the Stralhorn is abandoned, we gulp down the 6am breakfast of muesli, bread and jam, and leave the hut by the light of our head torches and a shortly setting moon.
My team is fast and efficient and all experienced enough to know the score – we don’t want to be caught out on one of the great glaciers of the Monte Rosa massif in a storm. Even with the delay of the rock ridge crossing, where somehow we end up down climbing a via ferreta with skis on our rucksacks, we are safe and cosy at the Monte Rosa hut in less than seven hours, wondering whether to take out a second mortgage on the house in order to afford a rosti with egg for lunch.
We discover that of those 140 people, less than 30 have turned up, only those with true commitment have forged on towards their objective!
And then follows 36 long hours, watching the snow fall, listening to the wind howl, chatting, sleeping, reading Kindles, trying to stretch out our meagre snacks until we finally make it to the dinner hour. We have one day left, the storm has lifted, the mountain lies on our doorstep….
We are going out onto 1800 vertical metres of fresh snow, less than 6 hours after the storm subsided (oh the joys of 3am breakfast!). It’s not a good idea.
There are two places on the Swiss ski map where the Dufourspitze route switches from creamy white to a pretty shade of pink, a shade that says the slope has an angle of more than thirty degrees, an angle where the avalanche monster dwells, avalanches that will be triggered by our own body weight. No amount of commitment, or inner grit, or ‘winners never quitting’ makes this a good idea.
The handful of teams idly passing time in the common room glance around at each other’s maps, ask casually about plans for the morning. A word is building momentum in the room: Signalkuppe. 4554 metres high, 5th highest peak in the Alps (or 6th, depending on your list), still a 1750 metre climb, but crucially with a route entire free of pretty pink patches.
We leave the hut at 4am. We watch the rising sun tint the summit of the Matterhorn a deep pink and then bathe the serrated peaks in golden light.
Eventually we leave the skis below the final rise and crampon up icy slopes to stand on the summit at 10am, breath snatched away by the thin air, and by the astonishing view of wave after wave of blue-white mountains stretching away from us into Italy and Switzerland and France. It is the highest peak in the Alps that any of the five of us has reached. (Yes, I know I’ve climbed Everest, I’m still excited!) We hug and chatter and take endless photographs.
We can see the Dufourspitze just across the way – a wonderful reason to come back here another time – but right now we are more interested in the 2800 vertical metres descent that lies below us, on much of which we will be able to put in fresh tracks.
Our goal has got us out of bed, focused our path through the mountains, pushed us on as conditions became ever tougher. But we have let it go, as lightly as a flag blown away in the wind. What matters are the landscapes we have travelled through, the experiences we have accumulated, the choices we have negotiated. None of that is linked to any specific target, but rather underlies our understanding of why we chose to travel in mountains. We travel, not to ‘conquer’ or to ‘fail’ but to discover and explore, to enrich our lives and share our joy. Nothing is conquered but everything is gained as we ski the line offered to us by a beautiful, ever-changing world.
Ants industriously raising the flag (have you checked your fridge recently?)
[image error]Image by Sami Rautiainen. Shared under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.
The post Mission: Dufourspitze! (or not…) appeared first on Everest Climber & Motivational Speaker Cathy O’Dowd.
January 20, 2014
When I met Nelson Mandela
“I know you are going to succeed.”
The thing about camp two on Everest – at least back in the day when there were only 11 teams up there rather than 50 – is that it is a pretty boring place to hang out. There not a lot to do, or to see.
We, as members of the 1st South African Everest Expedition, were killing time as we often did by listening to famous American mountaineer David Breashers shout important things into his radio. He was leading a team with a multi-million dollar budget featuring various international climbing superstars, there to film the IMAX Everest movie. He had never actually condescended to speak to us.
We, like them, had returned to the mountain immediately after the “great storm” of 10/11 May 1996 where five climbers had died high on the south side of Everest, including two famous expedition leaders and professional guides – Rob Hall and Scott Fisher. We were not at all sure that we were doing the right thing in trying again.
David Breashers stopped, listened intently into his radio and then turned to us. He was actually going to talk to us!
“Turn on your radios,” he called. “Nelson Mandela wants to speak to you.”
We stared at him in stunned silence. It sounded like a particularly lame joke. Nobody wanted to be the fool who would radio down to basecamp and ask. But what if…
A few minutes later a voice came through, faint but clear: “This is President Mandela here in South Africa.”
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/130...″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Transcript: I am so happy that you are attempting to climb Mount Everest again. Over. I am fully behind you. I have a lot of confidence in you and I know you are going to succeed. The whole of South Africa stands behind you because it is a significant expedition and I wish you all the luck. Over.
I know you are going to succeed.
The truth was that a man who had spent 27 years in prison and was now the first president of the post-apartheid South Africa did indeed know many things, from the intricacies of politics to the brutality man can offer to man. However, he knew nothing about mountain climbing. He had no idea if we could succeed. But for us, shaken by the disaster of the storm, depressed by the general conviction that trying again on Everest was foolish in the extreme, those seven words came to mean a great deal. We were going to live up to that expectation.
The first time I met the man who was then the first president of post-apartheid South Africa, I was a member of the 1st South African Everest expedition and he was our patron. We were using the publicity around the expedition to raise money for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and this was a press photo shoot. This was before the climb started and before we knew what a fraught expedition it would be. We were all waiting awkwardly in an antechamber, whispering nervously to each other and wondering what on earth one said to such an important man that wouldn’t just sound banal or idiotic.
He walked in, crossed the room to the expedition leader, Ian Woodall, shook his hand and turned to the rest of us to say: “I’ve shaken the hand of an Everest man… I’ll never wash it again!” We all started to laugh at the utter ridiculousness of it.
That was the kind of man he was.
I was not the first in my family to have met him. My father’s older brother, Tony (Anthony) O’Dowd has an entry in the index of Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom
. In 1943 Mandela enrolled at Wits University to study law and he wrote: “I befriended Tony O’Dowd and Harold Wolpe, who were political radicals and members of the Communist Party.” (The Communist Party would be banned in 1950.)
When in 1958 Mandela was one of 92 South Africans on trial for high treason, potentially facing the death penalty, Tony was one of the assistants on the defence team. (By 1961 everyone would have been found not guilty but in 1963 Mandela would be tried again on other charges and then start his 27-year jail term. Tony would give up on South Africa and leave for the UK, to spend the rest of his career working for Lloyd’s of London.)
Like Tony, my father had also studied law, but unlike him he went into business, joining Anglo American. He would become the executive chairman of the Chairman’s Fund, the first and biggest professionally managed corporate social investment programme in South Africa. Under his leadership the fund would distribute some R1.7billion to NGOs, and in that capacity he would meet Mandela various times.
[image error]
Michael O’Dowd with Nelson Mandela. I don’t know when or where this was taken, or by who. I found it in my father’s archives after his death.
Mandela knew what we were trying to do was not easy. The team had fallen apart very publicly before we even got to base camp, and he had issued a statement saying: “When I met the team I warned them it would not be easy and there would be set-backs…” I doubt he ever fully appreciated the power his words would have for us, as we battled our way back up the mountain after the great storm.
I know you are going to succeed. The call was played on public radio. His words had been shared with all South Africans and we now carried the weight and the hope of their expectations. It was a cautious ascent, we lost one possible summit day (when the IMAX team reached the top) being too careful about weather. But on 25 May 1996 we too finally reached the highest point on earth, the last team that season to do so, and with the mountain entirely to ourselves.
Mandela called the team again, but this time we were too caught up in the climbing to be able to talk to him live.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/130...″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Transcript: I just want to say that the news came to us as a real surprise, and also a cause for jubilation because the conditions on top there were not conducive to this achievement. Our children did very well indeed.
[image error]Patrick Conroy, the Radio 702 reporter at our basecamp, took the call. Mandela asked if he could speak to us when we were safely down and began to give Patrick his telephone number. Patrick interrupted frantically. He visualised President Mandela giving out his personal telephone number live on air. He could imagine every citizen in South Africa phoning the President up at home to complain about everything from the state of the nation to the neighbour’s barking dog.
Of course triumph famously turned to tragedy as team-member Bruce Herrod was killed on the descent and the media celebration quickly turned poisonous. Still, we would get to meet Mandela several times after the expedition. The highlight for myself was getting to sit on a sofa next to him in his official residence in Pretoria, show him photographs from the expedition and tell him some of what had happened during those terrible, magical, unforgettable weeks.
Over the years I have often been asked if the reality of man lived up to his almost saintly reputation and I have to say that, as best I could judge, yes it did. He had instinctive understanding of the power of his presence, how important his acknowledgment could be in reaching out to the many different constituencies that made up South Africa. But a meeting with him was more than such a public relations opportunity, staged for press cameras. He had palpable personal charisma, and most importantly, he came across as intensely, genuinely interested in the person he was meeting.
Unlike some famous people I have met, it was not about him being conscious of how honoured you were to be in his presence. It was about him, for the short time you spent with him, being completely invested in who you were and what he could learn about the world by knowing you. It was an intensely heady experience, to be offered that focused attention by such a man.
Apart from his genuine interest in who people actually were, his other great talent that I actually saw in action was his ability to see what other people I did not. Another occasion when I met him was when Ian and I attended some fancy business dinner, where the great and the good of Johannesburg society (then still largely white) were attending a gala dinner where President Mandela was the guest of honour.
I remember there as being some two hundred guests and there was a receiving line, poor Mandela had to shake hands with each one of the two hundred and listen to them gush about what an honour it was to meet him. All the while the kitchen staff (entirely black) were clustered at the service door, trying to catch a glimpse of this man who was a hero to all South Africans.
When he had finished with the receiving line, he indicated to the hosts that he would return in a minute, and then he walked into the kitchen. There he shook the hand of every worker there, from the chefs to the dishwashers, before returning to the hall to rejoin the guests. He had the ability to see the things – and the people – that most of us simply don’t notice around us. He had the political acumen to understand the power of his presence to inspire others. And he had the generosity of spirit and curiosity of mind to give of his presence freely, willingly – always giving the impression that what he learnt from meeting you was more than fair recompense for the time he gave to you.
Mandela says in his book: “The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people… but the dictates of oppression and brutality had another unintended effect, and that was it produced … men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom and generosity that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character.”
Nelson Mandela could have been writing about himself. He was a truly remarkable man, I was very fortunate to have met him, our country was blessed to have had him among us. He will be greatly missed but his words can still echo in our lives:
It will not be easy and there will be set-backs… I know you are going to succeed.
[image error]
You will find more about my years on Everest in my book, Just for the love of it
, now available as an ebook.
The post When I met Nelson Mandela appeared first on Everest Climber & Motivational Speaker Cathy O’Dowd.
