PEAK PERFORMANCE

THEY SPOKE of “windows” in the weather. Of bodies starting to die above 6,000 metres; of a “dark side” that would flummox the hardiest of optimists. Chomolungma say the Tibetans, Sagarmatha say the Nepalese. Everest, reckons Dawson Stelfox, is a mountain to be climbed because it’s there. At 29,028 feet, its peak inches into the ozone at a point generally reserved for large metal flying crates with central heating and TV dinners. If God had intended us to straddle its summit surely he’d have supplied us with liquid lungs and skins of Gore-tex?
May 27th was a red letter day. After over two months spent stealthily inching their way towards the top (and a climb that was five years in the planning) Dawson Stelfox pushed the outside of the envelope for the final burst to the summit. Accompanied for all but the final four hours and 600 feet by Frank Nugent, a man who let it be known before he left home that he knew when to turn his back on a mountain, Stelfox pushed on until he could go no further. Edmund Hillery did it in 1953 because he felt that “life was a constant struggle against boredom.” Stelfox did it because he was ready and he hung around with a few others who were too.
Belfast-born, Stelfox is an architect of his own destiny. A man given to sublime understatement, he is insistent that his efforts on their own would not have taken him to the top. The team gets due recognition for the summit achievement. He is a man whose ego is more likely to be resting safely at the bottom of some rucksack than on display for public perusal.
Mountaineering being essentially a solitary pursuit, he’s more at home on a promontory than on a podium, more au fait with crampons than with camera angles. Almost embarrassed by the rapt attention with which he is now greeted everywhere, Dawson Stelfox would appear to favour genuine interest over the adulation that is invariably poured on him as he tours the country. True to the architect training that he has, he embodies precision, planning and patience and pays scant attention to the bouquets and laurels that have snowed him under since his return from The Mountain.
Chasing the Rainbow
Listening and watching him describe the first Irish expedition to Everest feels like a glance into another world. A world of yaks (a cow on its way to the opera, according to Paul Theroux) and 20 foot snow drifts and condensed food. He makes the task of slicing through the cold hard wedge of Chinese bureaucracy in Kathmandu seem like another day at the races and an acclimatisation trek in Nepal like nothing more taxing than a gander up the back of Mount Brandon.
A quick glance at the statistics though renders the nonchalance null and void. One third of all expeditions fail; there is a staggering one in thirty mortality rate among Everest climbers; while 81 intrepid tourists made it to the top via the South face this year, only eight had succeeded via the North face before Stelfox upped it to nine.
What is it that makes him embrace these endurance tests with relish? Why does he chase the rainbow when everybody knows the gold’s already been salted away, and probably in South America, certainly not in the higher reaches of Central Asia. Is climbing Everest simply fancy dress for metamorphosing into a beast of burden for some 72 or more days? If, as Bruce Chatwin suggested, “a journey is a fragment of hell,” what kind of inferno did Stelfox and co. encounter on the roof of the world?
Starting at the finish, Stelfox fails to disguise his sheer amazement at the level of interest the expedition has aroused at home. Having his head literally in the clouds for over two months meant that he had little awareness of the impact of his exploits on the multitude of star-gazers anchored firmly at sea-level.
“It was tremendous,” he recalls, “and it took us by surprise. Mountain climbing is a minority sport and there are only a few thousand climbers in Ireland. We thought that these would be the people with the main interest in what we were doing but the general and genuine interest that we’re seeing right across the country is far greater than we ever expected.”
No sooner had Stelfox touched base back home than he was setting in motion plans to lead a group of climbers in the French Alps in August. There seems to be a force which inexorably draws him back to higher altitudes – to regain his footing perhaps?
“It felt great to be back up on the mountains again,” he acknowledges.
While he may not consider tackling Everest again in the near future, he fully intends to continue climbing and insists that mountaineering is a pursuit that’s for the long haul as opposed to the more glamorous events like athletics or motor racing that leave the participants burnt out before they’ve hit middle age.
“All of us would intend to be climbing until we’re unable to walk. It’s very much a sport for life and it’s just a question of adjusting parts of the sport to suit your physical abilities.”
Apart from the physical requirements of the team members, what other factors did he consider to be essential for a successful campaign?
“Obviously it was very important that people were able to get on well with each other and work as a team,” he says. “In attempting the North side it was very much a team effort, and people had to help other people to get up, so I got to the top on the basis of other people helping, carrying stuff up to camps that I would be able to use. Every member of the team was committed to getting at least one person up – and everyone hoped it might be them!
“Climbing tends to be a fairly selfish sport and people tend to have very personal ambition and direction, and the idea of setting those to one side to help somebody else get to the top is a difficult one.”
Surely an essential prerequisite for anyone with ambitions to peep over the top is downright unfazability? Faced with the prospect of hours of waiting for decent weather conditions, followed by hours of trudging through inches and inches of packed snow, only to have to trundle right back down to where you’d started that morning, even the incorrigible would be contemplating voluntary admission to an asylum?
“I don’t think any of us could be described as laid-back,” he says, smiling, “but some people would have had a fairly relaxed attitude to time pressures and schedules and that sort of thing.
“For some people, sitting in a tent for 4 or 5 days waiting for the weather to clear would just crack them up completely and they’d say ‘well, I’m away home now, no point in hanging around here’, but you have to be pretty stoical about it.”
Glamour event
Has climbing Everest become a glamour event, a feat of Olympian endeavour undertaken by those whose pockets (or sponsors’ pockets) are well-deep and aimed toward the lucrative post-climb tour junkets that have become part and parcel of a whole rash of expeditions in recent times? Part of the ‘you’ve climbed the mountain, now sell the video, write the travel guide and book a slot on Oprah Winfrey’ mentality?
“Climbing Everest has become something which in some countries is a measure of national pride or national ability,” he says. “So there have been some expeditions that have only succeeded because of the presence of the sherpas. Over the last few years there has been two types of Himalayan expedition, one large and quite heavily financed (costing anything up to half a million pounds), who climb the easiest route so that they can get to the top of the mountain and, more importantly, say they’ve got to the top. That usually involves a lot of sherpas and we would not really consider that real mountaineering; it’s climbing Everest for political or social reasons.
“On the other hand there’ve been others who managed to climb the mountain on their own. Rheinhold Messner did it totally alone, without any help, but he’s exceptional. In our case we wanted to get up there but we didn’t want to go up via the South Col because we feel that that route has been devalued by the number of expeditions going up. It’s become more of a logistical assault and less in the spirit of mountaineering as we would know it.
“There’s also an Irish link to the North side in that Charles Howard-Bury (from Mullingar) had been the leader of the first reconnaissance group to map the North side. It seemed a challenging route for us even though there’s only a 20% success rate there.”
As an architect specialising in building conservation and restoration, Stelfox must have some personal reservations about the massive assault teams battling for position on every face of Everest. Stories are rife of the litter and debris left on the mountain by climbers who seem to have a more finely developed sense of violation than of awe for these intransigent peaks.
“Well, at least from this autumn, the numbers on Everest are going to be strictly controlled, because it had got out of hand,” he admits. “It’s a big problem because Nepal doesn’t have any natural resources apart from water for hydroelectric schemes, and tourism.
“A lot of the money from tourism has actually gone to foreign investors who have built hotels and so on in Kathmandu but some of it does go to the local people in the upper valleys, and as a result the population in the upper valleys has risen so now forests are being cut down for firewood. Then when the monsoon rains come the slopes have been eroded which has already caused and will continue to cause very big environmental problems. To my mind those problems are much more serious than a bit of litter lying about on the mountain because the litter does n’t degrade, it doesn’t cause any pollution. It’s visually nasty but it’s only other climbers who see it.”
The real environmental enemies are far more sinister and long-term, according to Stelfox.
“Deforestation and erosion are far more serious and the Himalayan Trust which we are supporting through The Irish Himalayan Trust has started to tackle this. Reforestation has become a significant focus of the Trust’s activities. I think the mountains have to be controlled, as much in the Mournes and in Wicklow as in the Himalayas. Management of the uplands is extremely important everywhere, not just in Nepal or Tibet.”
A Nationalistic Expedition?
The launch of an All-Irish expedition was a huge milestone for climbing here, but how closely this decision was allied to the harsh task of finding sponsorship and publicity is a moot point. Did Stelfox have any difficulty with the determinedly all-Irish, and thus nationalistic nature of the expedition, coming as he does, from Belfast?
“Mountaineering in Ireland is organised on an all-Irish basis. The Mountaineering Council of Ireland draws its membership from all over the country so there’s a collective sense of identity among climbers in Ireland. As a result of that people in the north would tend to link themselves with people from the south more than with people from Britain, not through any political reason, simply because it’s easier to measure your climbing abilities against those of people who you meet and climb with on a regular basis.”
Would he have gone on a British expedition if the opportunity had arisen?
“Well,” he says, deliberating carefully on the possibility and, pragmatist that he is, coming up with a tangible compromise: “if there hadn’t been a possibility of undertaking an Irish expedition then I probably would have. But if it had been a choice between one or the other I would have gone for the Irish expedition.”
Was the cross-border element of the expedition a conscious conciliatory gesture, with political as well as sporting aims?
“We didn’t envisage it like that,” he insists, “but it became quite a big thing and we were very pleased to be involved in that. Everyone in the expedition was very pleased when the Lord Mayors of Dublin and Belfast exchanged places to greet us when we came back. That reflected our desire that it should be an all-Irish trip. Our attitude would be that when there are common ideals and interests and strengths, that they should be built on, rather than being used as a division in stopping people. Ultimately though, I don’t think we would make any great claims to be anything more than a good example of how sport can bring people together.”
Apolitical as their aims may have been, the climbers haven’t shied away from approaches made to them by conciliatory bodies like Co-operation North.
“We’re doing a lecture in Limerick which is being organised in association with The Irish Peace Institute which is part of the Co-operation North grouping. We’re certainly more than happy to support organisations like that, ones that are political with a small ‘p’ as opposed to major politics.”
Stelfox is anxious that if any political interpretation is to be applied to the Everest expedition that the broader political canvas be considered, rather than fixating on the domestic, which after all, is only part of the picture.
“The Chinese occupation of Tibet is something that needs explanation,” he contends. “The Chinese have been committing genocide in Tibet for the last 40 years. Over a million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese, and another million have been forced to flee because they’ve been treated very much as second-class citizens in their own country with very few political rights such as health care and education. So we feel a desire to explain those things to people and if people want to use us as an example of how people from both sides of the border can work together, that’s fine. But we know better than to go around trumpeting that as a solution to Northern Ireland’s, or Ireland’s, problems.”
Gender Imbalance
President Robinson, in her enthusiasm for the achievement of the team, rushed to congratulate them not only on their success on the mountain, but on their gender balance, a calculation that would raise the eyebrows of even the flimsiest of mathematical brains. Mention was made of an all-female Everest team at some point in the future. Is this a possibility even worth contemplating, given the difficulty they have already had in finding women who can absent themselves from family commitments for up to three months at a time?
“She actually said we were gender balanced and we weren’t at all!” Stelfox laughs. “There were two women on the expedition, very much in a support role rather than a climbing role, and I think that two women out of 16 is not really gender balanced! So she was being a bit liberal there.
“There were two women who we felt had enough experience to tackle Everest but they both felt that, since they have very young children, they wouldn’t really be able to leave them for such a long period of time. We agonised a lot over the choice of the team but we had to pick people who had already proven their ability on big mountains and for that reason we felt we couldn’t invite some younger climbers, both male and female, though they may have great potential.
“But the trip has been a spur for some future plans. Some of those men and women climbers have all sorts of plans at the moment for trips.”
The precise nature of the experience of being “the tallest man in the world” as Dermot Somers christened Stelfox from base camp on May 27, is one that he finds difficult to describe. Surely amid the highest peaks on earth, one is moved to contemplating thoughts more lofty than the position of the altimeter?
“Well,” he concedes, “it’s very much a ‘whole’ experience as opposed to purely a physical achievement. Climbing mountains means much more to us than just the physical effort of getting to the top. When you’re away on an expedition your whole mind and body is tuned into doing one thing, and it’s a very intense experience which you very rarely feel in day to day life because you’ve got so many different things coming at you from all sides and your mind is constantly flicking from one thing to the other.
“It was a tremendous experience to be sitting on the top of the mountain but to a certain extent your brain is dulled (by the high altitude and the oxygen debt incurred in the climb) so it’s nearly impossible to absorb it completely.”
INTERPRETIVE CENTRE
And all of that with not a sign of an interpretive centre to embellish the experience! If the greatest natural wonder can survive and indeed summon the multitudes to its site every year without the aid of even a shed to decipher, elucidate or interpret its natural beauty, is it really necessary to shrink-wrap all of our natural scenic resources into bite-size chunks for easy digestion? Stelfox thinks not.
“I think the modern trend with interpretive centres is to make people lazy basically. They’ve been so successful they’ve almost overcome their original function and they’ve become tourist attractions in themselves, and people are being spoon-fed with stuff that they wouldn’t bother to find out for themselves. Information about the environment is useful but the problem is that the centres have become victims of their own success and they encourage more people to come, not because of the environment, but because of the interpretive centre itself.
“If there was information available for people who want it instead of these huge interpretive centres I think that that would be a better solution. Toilets, a car park and an information board; that’s good enough, I think. I think interpretive centres have gone too far in terms of over-explaining, and in the process of over-explaining, simplifying the actual information. This can devalue the environment, or whatever it is they are interpreting.”
Having scaled the heights and followed his dream through five long years of financial and physical planning and training, is it possible to return to a “normal” life? The transition from the rarefied heights of Everest to the doldrums of life at sea-level can’t be an easy one. Stelfox ponders the intricacies of the excursion, akin to piloting Concorde for a day only to be told that a Morris Minor’s your destiny thereafter, though as ever, he considers the dilemma with hermetical stoicism.
“Well I certainly haven’t returned to a “normal” life yet anyway! It’s nearly inevitable when you come back from a big expedition that there’s a slight feeling of anti-climax, or a feeling of a slight loss of direction.
“The public interest in the whole affair has also made enormous demands on everybody in terms of time – which we’re very glad to do. But because of the amount of interest we’ve been inundated with requests to do slide shows and give talks, appear at this and go to that so I haven’t had a chance to get back to a normal life yet.”