We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was produced, the Galligall people of the orination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
Hi team, and here I've just got back from climbing Everest to taking a quick break from the podcast. In the meantime, I thought this would be a great opportunity to take a look back at some of my favorite interviews with my fellow climbers. In this episode, you'll hear from Kenton Call, Jim Davison, and Nimsday Perda. First up, Kenton Call. Summating Everest is an impressive feat in itself, but doing it eighteen times that takes a seriously hardcore individual.
Here's what Kenton had to say about it.
I found myself in that pit of kind of negative despair. One of the consultants came in and said, right, I'm going to operate on you tomorrow, and my immediate thought was when can I climb?
And he just laughed and said, you're never climbing again.
You're never going to walk without stick, you know, And that spiled me into that pit. But then about ten days later, another consultant, John Handley. He said, I'm going to rebuild your foot to the best of my ability, and what you do after that is down to you and no one else.
If you put the time and effort in you will walk.
You will And he said, I'm not going to say you're going to climb, but it's down to you and how much energy and bocus you put into your rehab. Yeah, and those two different approaches from those from those two different consultants, that was the tipping point from being in the pit of despair and self woe is me to all of a sudden, actually I can do this, and I will do this and I want to do this.
And that was really powerful. That was for me. And I only realized this years later.
Yeah, of course, not at the time.
Yeah, not not at the time.
Penny finally drops. Doesn't it when you do something you look back and you go wow, if I hadn't That's why I ask you in those moments, you know where your head was at and your mindset. But it's so important for people to realize that we have a choice.
I mean, for a while it was awful. Yeah, we have the choice.
And the other really powerful thing is is like negative motivation and by this, I mean what do you stand to lose? And when that first consultant said to me, you're never going to climb again, I saw my community as I knew it because I was so involved with climbing everything. My girlfriend climbed, all my buddies climb, My whole cohort were climbers. And I stood to lose my community as I knew it. And that really scared me. And that was a huge motivat because I didn't want
to lose that. I thought, I'm going to lose my community, I've got nothing, and that that was one of the big driving forces that was I'm going to get on those parallel bars as soon as I can.
I'm going to do those extra hider sessions.
I'm going to go to the gym in the hospital and yes, pump weights, do the pull downs, do the There's certain exercises I could do build my core so that when I could get back on my feet, recovery is going to be that much quicker.
This is why I really wanted to touch on this because it's fascinating because, like you said, we have a choice, we have a we have a mindset as well, you know, do we do we go down the negative mindset of you know, being the victim, or do we do we really you know, stand up and fight for what we believe in, where we want to be, where we think we should be in life. And yours was on the mountains. Now, what was your first mountain after your injury that you climbed?
Do you remember it? And that was that a moment where you thought, you know what, I'm back on track now?
Well, I suppose there's two things.
One is I got back into rock climbing, so that's something I could do reds as soon as I could. I was actually still in a wheelchair and I used to take myself down to climbing wall in London that was really steep and I could climb up just literally just toe dapping, so just putting a little bit of weight through my feet, you know, and then i'd be lowered straight back down into the wheelchair. So you know, I got back into that quite quickly.
That's hardcore, mate, That is hardcore.
But you say that, but I didn't want to lose a community.
I just wanted to be around you know, my friends, my cohort that those people that sort of elevated me. Yeah, and if you can't go to the climbing wall, if you can't climb, well, now your friends would come out and see you. But at the weekends there or on the Wednesday night, they're all down the climbing wall. And that's where I wanted to be. I wanted to be among those people that uplifted me and supported me as much.
As I could.
So my first proper foray back into the big mountains, it was a dear friend of mine, Alan Powell, had this idea of a new winter line in the Alms and you know, we went down and we started to climb on Christmas Day and it was a hard rough It took us.
I know that three or four days.
I forget now, and the story behind it is all a bit of an epic. But we managed to do it. And that was my first real reintroduction into the mountains and it kind of proved to myself that, yeah, I had to approach things in a slightly different way. I had given myself more time to do the walk ins to get to the bottom. I would always have problems
moving away from a bila. So you strap yourself to the mountain and you wait there for what can be hours where your mate goes up and places all the ropes and things like that, and moving away would be hard because my ankles or my would seize up. So those first movements were very clunky, but you learned to adapt to what you have and that was wow, I can do this and I will do this, and that was the green light and it just started to snowball from there.
When did Mount Everest first come into your mind? When do you think, right, I'm going to I'm going to take on there, I'm going to stand on the apex of the world.
Not for a long time.
I mean it was late two thousand and three, and so so after the accident. What I did, when I realized I could do again, you know, I just was consuming climbing, That's all I did. I was working on building sites and I was just doing multiple expeditions, you know, to green Learn, to the Himalayas, to Pakistan. I just couldn't get enough of it. And it was on the back of a quite a groundbreaking expedition to Nepal in two thousand and three, and we with.
The three of us, and we climbed this big new route.
I think it was the second or third descent of Annapurna three, so just under eight thousand meters. We were on it for ten days. We ran out food, we ran out of fuel, and you know, it took it took all of us to a super dark place and
it actually it was really interesting. It actually affected our friendships because we went so deep that when we came out of it, we had issues sort of connecting with one another again because we all had our own journey in the darkness and that was that was quite enlightening on how relationships can be affected by personal journeys. Even though we were three of us together and in theory going through the same journey, it was very very different for three of us. Anyway, we got quite a lot
of the claim for that. And on the back of that, one of the British guiding companies who I was already working for, wrung me up and he just said, would you entertain going to ever It's for us And I had to think about it for about a nanosecond and I just said yes, And that was the starting starting point of it. I mean, Everiest had been beyond my financial capability, and to be honest, it was something which didn't interest me because it wasn't technical hard climbing.
It was just never in my in my wheelhouse.
And then it became so obvious that, you know, show me one climber who can, honestly, hand on heart say that at some stage in their career or their life they haven't thought about going to Everest. And that was probably November December two thousand and three. And I found myself on the mountain for the first time spring two thousand and four, feeling very out of my depth, not
quite knowing how it all works. Having a great Surdar, Yeah, Surdar is like the head Shirpo, kind of tells you how it all works.
And I loved it.
I absolutely adored it, and I just wanted more.
My next guest, faced unimaginable heartbreak, was doing the sport he loved. Jim Davison was climbing Mount Rainier in nineteen ninety two with his best mate Mike, when tragedy struck. He shared what happened on this horrific day with myself.
So we're moving together, and I was probing with my ice x as we had been for tens of thousands of times over the last three or four days, and I I probed a head, and the snow looked solid, and it felt solid, and I stuck my axe in it. It firmed up in the snow. But when I took that next step and put my foot forward, my foot sank in up to my shin and then up to my knee. And at first I thought it was just soft snow and it'll firm up underneath my foot, But
that's not what happened. Suddenly I started accelerating and I realized I was no longer standing on a solid glacier. I was standing on a big, weak snowbridge going across a huge crevasse, and that snowbridge was starting to collapse beneath my feet.
And that happens within the split second, right split second.
Absolutely, I didn't even think about it. I just I actually heard myself yelling falling. That would give Mike a chance to drop to the snow and dig in with his ice axe and catch my fall. But I couldn't even turn around because this was all happening so fast. And immediately I sunk up to my waist and I tried to slam my axe onto the surface of the snow, and the pick went in all the way to the head of the axe, which means a really deep burial
in the snow. But it's about noontime now on June twenty first, the longest day of the year, and the top snow was all wet and soft, and my ice axe pick just cut right through the snow like a like a knife through butter. And I realized I couldn't stop myself. And then all of a sudden, my head went underneath the snowbridge and everything went dark, and I realized I was inside the crevasse and accelerating into the mountain.
Wow.
So this happens in a split second. I know it all too well. Your goes in, you go down to your knee, and you just think, do you know what, I've got a bit of tough snow in front of me. I'm steady, I'm just going to plow through. Then whack. Before you know it, you're completely covered. So you're in the crevass and you're completely covered. How do you communicate with Mike?
Well, at this point, we're in two different worlds. I'm inside the crevasse and there's just a little man size hole about two feet across that had collapsed beneath my feet. The rope goes up through that hole and back to Mike. So I'm plummeting vertically into the darkness. I'm swinging my ice ACKs around trying to hook the side walls, and I couldn't reach either sidewall. And I realized, oh, this
is a big crevasse. And I knew my partner, Mike would be digging in because he's so well trained, and I know he was digging in. I wasn't going super fast, but my brain started guessing how far and I'd gotten. I couldn't talk to Mike because he was above the snow and I'm below it. And I started picking up speed, and my brain guess I'd gone twenty feet in thirty feet in, and I thought that's not right. Mike should have stopped me by now. Then my brain guesses forty feet.
I thought forty feet were only separated by about fifty feet of rope. I thought, come on, Mike, stop me, stop me. I felt the rope jerk once and I slowed down and I almost stopped, and then I accelerated twice as fast into the darkness. Now I didn't know what that meant at the time. I was just overwhelmed with the sensations, and I couldn't figure out what was happening. But I know now what happened, which was my partner.
Mike did his job, and he dug in to the snow and slowed me down for the first fifty feet as I fell into the crevas But as I went deeper, the rope pulled Mike closer and closer to the lip of the crevasse, and the same wet snow that caused me to fall into the carvas first place wouldn't let Mike stop, and he got pulled over the lip of the crevass, pulled into the crevas and tied together. The two of us sailed deeper inside the mountain, into the darkness.
So when you're falling and Mike is obviously on the other end of the rope, do you then see Mike go past you in the crevass or do you stop together? How does that pan out when you now know that actually Mike is in the crevas with me.
Yeah.
When I thought I'd been falling first in the first fifty feet because it felt fast to me, But once Mike got pulled in and gravity had a full grip on us, I just kept accelerating even faster and faster, and that's when I knew that he had to be in there with me. We were both free falling, and I thought for sure we'd be dead. There's a word for this, as you know, and climbing. When you're falling
a crevasse. Crevasses get skinnier and skinnier, narrow and narrow as you go down, and when you fall in with great velocity, you can get stuck in there, wedged in like a cork in a wine bottle. And I thought, man, we're going to get corked at the bottom of this thing. And I hit one wall lightly with my shoulder and I began to ricochet from one wall to the other, getting beat up as I went, hitting my head, hitting my back, and that probably took a little speed off me.
But all of a sudden I slammed to a stop. The air burst out of my lungs kind of, and you know, I lost my breath, and I looked up and I saw a little point of light, and I couldn't understand what the light was. In fact, it was the surface of the snow far above my head. And then all of a sudden, wet snow started falling on my legs, and that was the snow bridge that collapse, and the snow that might had sort of snow plowed
into that little hole. So all this huge, massive snow, like a truckload of snow started falling down, started burying me for my feet upwards. I panicked and tried to sit up, but my pack was wedged corked between the two ice walls that were about a foot and a half apart from one another, so I couldn't sit up,
and I couldn't stand up. I was stuck facing upward, lying down towards the surface as the snow just piled up on me and up and up, and I was afraid I was gonna get totally buried, so I put my hands over my head like I'd learned an avalanche survival class. And then a big impact hit with a lot of weight. I figured out later that was Mike
and his pack and more snow. Mike landed on me, and more snow fell on and if someone had been standing there when it all stopped, it would have just probably been a pile of snow with a little rope and a little bit of gear sticking out. Because both Mike and I were buried.
Wow, let's give me goose bumps, because I've done you know, crevass training, and you know it all you know comes together in training because it's all in a controlled and safe environment. When everything comes to a holt and you're there in complete silence, what's your next thought process? What is going through your head in that very moment once everything sort of stops and you realize, actually, I'm in a real bad situation here.
Well, it was so overwhelming because it had all happened in just a second or two. Falling through the crevass, falling through the air, landing in the snow, the snow falling on me. I thought to myself, I can't believe this. I just survived the fall somehow, and I can still think. Yet I'm trapped. I'm buried. I tried to push with my arms and legs and I couldn't get out, and that's when panics starting setting and I thought, I've got
to get out. I can't breathe. I had managed to keep one hand in front of my face and I had a small air pocket about the size of a football. But I knew that wouldn't last very long. So I'm trying to push and push, and I'd heard in the avalanche survival class and avalanche training classes that if you get buried by avalanche de breath, it's like being held down by a thousand cold, wet hands, and that's what
it felt like to me. I could feel the cold and the wetness and the moisture, but I was panicking so bad on my chest because I knew that I needed air any second now. And I pushed and pushed, and eventually my good right arm burst out of the snow and I swept away a little snow. I only had about maybe ten inches of snow pile up on my face, so I swept the snow a little bit and spit out a snowball that had jammed in my mouth and caught a few rushed breaths, and I realized
I was okay and I could breathe. But I was buried right up to my chin, and I could see a little bit of Mike's yere nearby, but in the darkness, I couldn't see where he was. I knew he had to be nearby because I knew he fell in with me, and I yelled, Mike, Mike, where are you pull me out before it freezes, because I'm thinking we're trapped in this wet snow and this ice on both sides of us, the glacial ancient ice. It's going to freeze the whole
thing in on a massive ice pretty soon. And I'd hope that he'd go, oh, there you are, jam and pull me out. But that's not what happened. When he answered back, he didn't answer back with words. He answered with a groan. I knew my friend and partner was hurt really bad.
So you're literally eighty feet in this crevass. Just describe the environment. So you've managed to dig yourself out of. I can only describe it as an ic coffin. You're now free up to your waist. Mike is obviously at arm's length away from you. Is that correct? And is there? Can you see any light when you look up or you completely in the darkness.
There was a little bit of light. I could see shapes pretty well, and I could see a little bit of colors. But the thing is, when sunlight goes through the ice, the ice filters out the reds and yellow and green wavelengths, so the only light that gets through is blue and the deeper you go into crevass, the bluer it gets. And this is the bluest crevasse I'd ever seen. It was a deep, dark blue, deep dark shadows everywhere, and I could feel the fear above me.
I could feel something looming above me, but frankly, I was so focused on Mike. I didn't have time. And I also think then I didn't have the courage to look up. I knew that there was something really bad up above our heads, but I had to keep doing CEPR and Mike. So I was doing compressions on him, and I was trapped behind him. I was basically reaching with my arm around him from his back and touching his chest with the palm in my hand. And I
knew it wasn't the right way to give compressions. I was supposed to be above him to get both palms and my body weight into it, but it's all I
could do. So I was behind him. I kept pressing his chest back against my own and sort of squeezing him between my one hand and my own breastbone, and I kept it up for a long time, and then I'd give him some breaths, and I cleared his airway and I gave more breaths, and I kept it up for a while, and I was starting to panic because I was hoping that I would just give him two or three breads and that he would suddenly wake up and go, oh, I'm fine, Thanks for doing that, Jim.
But that's not what happened. And after maybe another twenty minutes of CPR, I realized it wasn't coming around, and I knew I was supposed to keep up going to keep him alive, but also I knew I couldn't keep it up forever because I'm still trapped in the snow and it's going to freeze solid, and one person can't do CPR for hours or days. It just doesn't work.
But I kept going for a while longer, and I checked vitals the second time, and I still didn't feel anything, and I finally had to stop, and I knew my good friend and partner Mike was deceased, and my head just dropped onto his chest. My chin started quivering, and fear and water started filling my eyes up, and I was just ready to give up. I thought, Mike's the better climbery ear. If he's dead, I'm going to be
dead soon too. And I felt like just given up before I could even get the courage to look up and see where we.
Were and WCE, all, this is happening. You're still attached to him on a rope. Aren't you us still attached together like an umbilical cord was you're giving the CPR while you're doing everything.
Is that correct?
Absolutely, we're still a team. We're still tied together. And that rope was all weaving in and out of the snow pile that Mike and I were still buried in, and he was sort of on top of me. But the rope goes in and out of the snow, and it's all starting to get wet from water dripping from above, and I can feel the cold emanating out of the ice walls. They were only about two feet apart where
we were. We were in a little pile of snow about six or seven feet long and about two feet wide, and I assumed we were on the bottom of the crevass, because that made sense. We fell to the bottom, And even though I was ready to give up and start crying, I had a little voice in the back of my head that was like, you've got to get out, get out of the snow before you freeze in, and I got this rush of panic again. So I started thrashing at the snow and I dug my way out. It
took me twenty minutes. I tried to rush at my knee torqued. I was buried underneath a piece of ice and the pack. And as soon as I got out, I got above Mic and I could do impressions the right way. So I started in again, but it had been I don't know, forty minutes by now since i'd heard her breathe, and it didn't bring him back. Then again my head dropped on his chest. And then I began to think about the question that you asked, Where
are we? What's above us? And I was very fearful, but I kind of sat up on my knees and started looking up, and the ice walls were about two feet apart were where we were. Then they spread out to about three and four feet apart from one another, and the angle was about seventy degrees and then eighty degrees, and then I looked up up and up the walls were dead vertical, and they got out to about six feet apart from one another. And then I looked up up up and way up top the walls started overhanging
to come back together. And that's where the snowbridge was at the top of the crevasse, and that hole in the snowbridge, that way back to the world was about eighty feet above our heads. And I said, in a quivering voice, So, man, Mike, we are in trouble. We are in big, big trouble. I had no idea how we could ever get out of that.
I want to ask you a really difficult question. You attached to your buddy, you realize that he's you know, he's no longer with you. You look up and you think, right, I've got to get out of it. One, you know, I've got to get out of here, to tell our story to to you know, get to safety so we can potentially get Mike's body back. Three you know, you know, hopefully one of us will live to to live on
the legacy of one another. But that moment when you realize he's gone and you have to unclip from your partner, almost leaving him there, that must have been one of the toughest decisions in your life.
It was. It was the symbolism of unclipping from him was too great partners are supposed to take care of each other in the mountains, in life, in the military, we don't leave people behind. I couldn't bring Mike back from the dad. I knew that, but he was still
my partner and still my responsibility. So as I started slowly trying to figure out how I might be able to climb this wall, I didn't really believe I could because I was a good ice climber, but not world class, and back then in nineteen ninety two, nobody was climbing overhanging ice like that, certainly not me. We had straight shafted and straight pick tools. Back then it was just
beyond even the best pros in the world. So I had to untie him at one point, but I never wanted to leave him unanchored, so I worked the system out of using a second anchor. I put an ice crew into the wall and I anchored his body to that, and then I had to take the rope off him because I was going to need the full rope to climb out. But before I started that climbing, I again
tied Mike back into the end of the rope. So before I even started climbing, I figured I had one hundred and fifty feet rope between my body and his, and we were still a team, and I was going to have to make it out of there on that rope because that's all the rope I had. I refused to start climbing untied to my partner, so that I worked out a complicated system to make sure he was
always secured and that we were still connected. And as you can tell, it's an emotional memory, but I think it was part of what the strength that I needed to start climbing, because I wasn't climbing out just for me. I was climbing out for Mike. Because my friend is just killed his life to save mine. I couldn't not have the courage to even try and finish the job.
So I think staying connected Mike was critical to me starting and later on when I ran out of strength and confidence on the wall, several times I would pull on the rope and feel Mike's body down below, stretching with the dynamic climbing cord, and that would remind me that I was climbing not just for me, but for him too, and for his family, so I could look
them in the eye and tell them what happened. So staying connected with your partners in this case physically through a rope or emotionally is critical to doing your best even after those partners are gone.
My final guest is a man I'm lucky enough to cool a really good friend.
Nin's day.
Perjea and I go back twins two years, and he was the one that actually gave me the nudge to climb K two. Here's a story for my interview with him earlier this year. Let's quickly touch on K two winter, because that was mission impossible and you made it possible. And where when are we going to see that come into light? And when are we going to see that hit our screens?
You know, hopefully hopefully soon.
What we managed to do as a team together but also as a leadership. You know, of course I had all my SAP has really paid well, and arguably I could be the first person to be there, and perhaps, you know, if I plan it for my own glory, on my success, on my name and all that, and that's how the whole expedition has been in the past, you know.
But I'm a man of fairness and I always believe that, you know, since we all are working together. That why we don't take and sere equal success, equal name, equal glory.
And it was the.
Only mountain in the world that was never climbing the winter.
You you named whatever, the best mountaineer in the world, you guys, you name it.
They all have tried it. Nobody made it. You know, it's not accessible.
K two isn't accessible at the best of times, let alone in winter.
You know, even yeah you can't.
Yeah, it's not accessible. Sometimes you can't even access the mountain in summer. What I loved is that viral moment of you on K two winter with your Nippolice team walking to the summit hand in hand, cuddling together, singing the national l anthem.
Is that right.
To the very summit. What a moment, What a life defining, changing moment in the community that Nepole absolutely deservely cherished from that.
Oh bro, you know that was like, you know, I still remember, like, and as we gather around and then our last climber wasn't that far as well, you know, so so we all gather around and.
As we walked to the summit, I think because every soul feel really respected and there was equal zue. I didn't even care about the view.
And it was just that energy, you know, because most of the guys were in tears, you know, when we're like you know, you know, and when we see it, and it was a so much power of spirit, power of happiness, power of fairest, power of serving the zooe.
And that's when we again put Nepal into global map, you know.
So yeah, it was, it was. It was the best thing.
But also what I managed to do here and was when I did the fourteen Pigs squait away. After the documentary, the Western climbers started criticizing me, and I know, quite right, but David Goggin says that you know, if you if you even walk into the water, they will say he's walking in the water because he cannot stream, you know, so anyway, so but it had got to me, so I was like, okay, you know, so at this point, before I did the summit brief, we check the weather.
I read the weather out. Now here's the weather team. We need to go and climb this. But one team member among us has to climb at this one. At this one has to go without oxygen. And I asked individually and the team said no.
And at this point, the team didn't knew what I was going through.
So I had a first bite on, a first snip on my three fingers hair and three fingers heir. But I was wearing small gloves and I was hiding it because as a leader, you want you don't want to show the weakness, you know. But at this point, because you know, little things matter on the big mountains, and those little mindset is the difference between success and the failure, and.
I didn't want it to show them any weakness, you know, exactly.
Exactly, So at this point, for the first time, I take my gloves out and I said, guys, look my three fingers here, three fingers here, I have a first nip. I would one hundred percent go and climb this without oxygen. But if I go without oxygen, is you know, you know your body feel colder, you know, and I already have frost snip. That means you know, I'll go into frostbite and I wouldn't be able to use this hand and I probably die.
So can anybody take this responsibility?
Because I knew that Western community will criticize. Again, we just need to do this clean and cut, no criticize, because it doesn't matter what you did. The Western media is so big that you know you cannot go and keep telling everybody.
So I just wanted one percent. Don't clean so.
So big and so brutal.
Yeah, and nobody again, nobody step up again?
You know.
For me, I was like, Okay, now I have to do it.
And I was so much worried because how I keep up with this guy without oxygen and so that we climb together.
And by this point and I had.
Faced so much the real brutality, the reality of a thousand meters where you know, you don't know who is bought by, who's who's who's there, you know, So I was thinking, if I'm lit by the by the ten meters point, then somebody's just gonna go and take all the glory and the equality.
We're gonna won't be there and you know all that stuff.
So I was like, okay, you know, but anyway, you know, I was right at the front, managed to stop and.
And the first post we made it.
And if this is what the Special Forces teach to anticipation, you know, we we we talked about the team, and the first post was about the team.
And guess what is spread away?
The Western community saying that, oh, it's not a great because it was with oxygen and all that. I'm just waiting there. I was like, okay, and I know even wanted.
To tell this story, but I saw some of the comments me valuing the men, and those people who were criticizing were some of my Western friends who had submitted mountains on the lines Me and you fixed yeah, and it really hurt me.
And and after two days off, you know, like getting criticide to make Mugie, you know, dear brother Kim and Nims. You just need to say it because it's too much now, we just need to kill the negative day. And that's when I said, okay, you I have done with that oxygen. But yeah, this story is so powerful. But it was again with the purpose, you know, So that's what it got us there.
Thanks for joining me for this special best Off episode. I'll be back with new episodes soon, but in the meantime, if you'd like to catch up and hear these three powerful conversations in full, you'll find links to them in the show notes. I'm at Middleton, See you in the next episode.