Life lessons for many of us can be prolonged tortuous introspections, often repeating the same mistakes until finally we recognize, oh yes, yes I see – that’s where I keep going wrong. But when you climb Earth’s highest mountain you learn those lessons fast, or else… well you die actually.
Luckily for us, Bonita Norris shares what she learned during three months of accelerated life education in her book The Girl Who Climbed Everest. Published in 2018 by Hodder Paperbacks, the book follows the climb eight years earlier when the then 22-year-old became the youngest British woman to climb the 29,029ft (8,848m) peak.
Having only learned to climb two years prior to the ascent of the world’s highest mountain, Bonita writes in absorbing, cringe-inducing detail of the challenges faced, including being rescued close to death on her descent, and how she overcame them.
Never fear
Fearful of crossing an icy metallic ladder bridge across a yawning crevasse wearing cumbersome teeth-laden crampons and on reaching the other side with shaking legs, Bonita reflected: “That’s the thing about leaps of faith. Before we take them, we believe we are facing the most terrifying situation in the world. When we look back once they are over, we often realise that we were more than capable once they are over.”
“If climbing has taught me one thing, it’s that I won’t ever overcome fear; fear will always be with me. But what I can do is block out fear, by focusing on something that doesn’t scare me, by focusing on the process and the details of the next small step. Climbing has taught me that when I’m most scared, I should stop thinking and just do.”
Not only was Bonita a relatively inexperienced climber, she had also overcome an eating disorder, which the once anxious teenager conquered after discovering a passion for climbing. One of the consequences of climbing Everest was that she learned to appreciate her body for what it could do for her.
On the first look at her body ahead of her first shower after the climb Bonita was shocked. “My ribcage looked enlarged in comparision to my tiny waist, which had been constricted by my backpack waist strap for so long.
“I felt as though I owed it [her body] an apology – it had served me so well, and the whole time I had no idea how much it was suffering, buried under layers of clothing for so long. I couldn’t believe I’d done this to myself.”
“The mountain had eaten me alive.”
Turns out, there is something to these instagram motivational quotes we all post, after all, they’ve been tested to the absolute limit by people like Bonita.
Test of time
The notoriously fickle weather systems add to the physical and mental test climbing the mountain also known as Sagarmatha (Nepali), Chomolungma (Tibetan), Zhumulangma (Chinese) or the not-quite-so-glamorous Peak 15 prior to its Mount Everest emergence in 1865 ‘thanks’ to the Royal Geographical Society. Even something as simple as making a cuppa requires stamina and patience, as Bonita details.
“Lynette began boiling water at 5.30am, and more than once a freak gust knocked over the stove, spilling precious liquid everywhere. We could just about hear each other over the roar… Just stuffing my sleeping bag into its stuff sack at 6,000 metres took me about 15 minutes, as I needed so many breaks to catch my breath.”
Exposed to the elements in one of the most extreme environments in the world for weeks on end, acclimatising to lower levels of oxygen, above 8,000 metres, your body is slowly dying due to lack of oxygen. So a lethal game of snakes and ladders ensues as mountaineers go from Base Camp to Camp 1, and back again. Then Base Camp to Camp 2, then back again. By the time they’re ready to summit from Camp 4, it’s a race against time to complete the climb before they, well die actually. (A recurrent theme when climbing Everest, you’ll find). It is not a comfortable experience.
A detailed climbing manual this is not, but a life explored through extremes.
“A few days later I was toiling up the Lhotse face, headed towards Camp Three at 7,100 metres and not feeling at home by any stretch of the imagination. With every step, my body felt as though it was being split in half.
“The pain as I stabbed my boot into the ice exploded up my bruised and blistered toes, through my aching knees and ripped up through my body, shuddering on my hip bones as the waist strap from my heavy pack rubbed my skin raw, and then a searing pain flooded into my upper back and my shoulders collapsed forwards, shutting my lungs off from being able to breathe properly.
‘I knew this, but I just couldn’t find the strength to stand up straight. Instead I was bent double, gasping and dribbling into my hands as I grasped the fixed line and held on for dear life. A throbbing headache behind my brow, and salty sweat running into my stinging eyes topped everything off.”
Food for thought
Oh but being able to eat high-calorie foods while expending so much energy. A dream, no? No.
“I told myself that for breakfast I would have a cup of tea and four custard cream biscuits,” writes Bonita. “I managed three, my appetite had disappeared completely. Extra blood was being diverted to my brain, a survival mechanism that kicks in at altitude.
“Our brains need a constant supply of oxygen, whereas other organs, our stomachs in particular, do not. Thus, our bodies cleverly divert blood supply from less vital areas to the brain, to keep feeding it the large amount of oxygen it needs. With not enough blood oxygenating my stomach, I couldn’t digest food.
“This adaptation led to me being sick at the sight of food and not able to feel the hunger I should have felt after a five-hour climb the day before and only a few mouthfuls of soup for dinner. Climbers lose on average 10 per cent of their body weight during an Everest expedition. I lost that much in the first two weeks.”
Fast-track learning
Not all the book is focused on the mountain that rises majestically from the Himalayas on the border of Nepal and Tibet. Further to detailing her troublesome teenage years, Bonita relives an additional, more technical climb than Everest, which turned out to be more of a challenge in relation to other climbers.
Bonita found herself in a less supportive environment than the ‘You can do this’, experience of the more popular Everest trek. Challenges from herself, as much as from others, as to whether she was proficient enough to even try this climb, clouded Bonita with doubts.
Other people on the mountain thought she was mad to be there so she felt much more isolated but she remembered her one step at a time and learned to follow her instincts.
“I looked down the Lhotse face and could see my little footprints, which had zigzagged upwards for nearly 400 metres. They do add up, I told myself. They’re not pointless. I just had to trust the small steps. I had to stop focusing on how much I had left to do, and put all my faith into the next moment. Everything will sort itself out.”
Bonita adds a further revelation: “The difference between thinking we had to get to the top and thinking we’ll just see what happens is amazing. One was paralysing and overwhelming, the other offered a chance to take a deep breath and say, ‘One more step, no big deal’.”
Having lost her confidence during her eating disorder, knocked again by a fall towards the end of her Everest climb in which she needed to be rescued, Bonita says that ultimately, the mountains taught her we shouldn’t be afraid to fail. That not taking the first step is the biggest failure of all.
(Pics courtesy of Bonita Norris)
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Bonita supports Play For Change, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of young people through sport and education.
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