Appendix One

Lessons from the Death Zone

1. Leadership isn’t always about what you want.

Having made it to Base Camp at Dhaulagiri during phase one of the mission, it was obvious that some of the lads in my team were struggling. Physically they were fucked; their morale was broken. Though I felt absolutely fine, having just climbed Annapurna and conducted a stressful search and rescue mission, I knew it wasn’t the smartest move to press on ahead regardless, pushing the others to their limits. Instead, I figured out what was best for the team.

It’s easy to work to your own pace in a group setting, especially if you’re the fastest or strongest in the pack, but the people around you will soon lose faith. They’ll regard you as selfish, overly ambitious and a bit of a dick. The general consensus will be that you don’t give a fuck about anyone else and the efforts of the team will fade away. When you need your colleagues to step up again, they won’t bother.

Rather than pissing people off in that situation, put yourself in their shoes. Figure out how you can compromise: is it possible to work in a way that benefits everybody? In this case, I took the team for a little rest and recovery. Yeah, we had to work through some terrible conditions a few days later as a consequence, but that one action told the team that the mission wasn’t only about me.

As a result, they broke their backs to work for the cause over the next six months.

2. The little things count most on the big mountains.

Over the years, I’ve developed some techniques for lightening my workload when climbing 8,000-ers and one of the most important of these involves my breathing. Whenever I’m at high altitude I wear a buff – it protects my face from the sun and the biting cold – but it’s hard to wear one without fogging up my goggles or sunglasses with the condensation from my breath.

To get over that, I changed the way I inhale and exhale. Pursing my lips, I take air in through my nose and then blow down, away from the goggles. The cold air comes in through the buff, warming it slightly, which protects my lungs from failing in the sub-zero temperatures. It might sound like a minor detail, but that one technique saves my body from hypothermia, because the air I’m taking in is not as cold. It also protects my fingers from frostbite, because I don’t have to take off my gloves to get to my cleaning cloth. (All of which is bloody exhausting above 8,000 metres, by the way.)

Taking care of the little things feeds into the bigger ambition. For you, that might mean knowing the finer details of a contract so you can succeed in a deal at work, or learning why buying the right running shoes for a 10K race can stop you from getting blisters. Much in the same way that a breathing technique, knowing exactly where my energy gels are, or keeping my ice axe within reach, bombproofs me from stress on an 8,000-er.

3. Never underestimate the challenge ahead.

I first learned about the dangers associated with underestimating a climb in 2015, but those lessons were taken the bloody hard way. As an intermediate mountaineer still cutting my teeth, I climbed Aconcagua in the Argentine stretch of the Andes. The mountain is one of the Seven Summits, a peak with a serious reputation, and while not quite an 8,000-er, it is still a challenging test of high altitude at 6,961 metres.

Mountaineers with ambitions of working in the Death Zone often use Aconcagua as an early test of their mettle, and given it is a trek from bottom to top, and nothing is needed in the way of rope skills when working to the summit, a lot of people figure it to be a fairly benign soul.

That was my attitude anyway. Having flicked through a few climbing guides and magazines, and stared at a tonne of photographs featuring kids and old couples climbing to Aconcagua’s peak, my attitude was a little dismissive. How hard can it be? Friends I’d made during my expeditions to Dhaulagiri and Louche East figured Aconcagua would be a breeze for me.

‘You’ll smash it,’ said one. ‘Trek to Base Camp in a day. Then take a day or two to summit and head back. No dramas.’

I was so convinced of my ability, and Aconcagua’s apparently gentle temperament, that I didn’t bother packing a summit suit for my expedition. I was travelling during the summer months, at the start of the year when the weather is fairly warm in the southern hemisphere. As far as kit went, I think I packed some hiking trousers, a waterproof coat, and a pair of mountain boots. But once I entered the national park at Penitentes, snow started to fall.

Aconcagua is a remote mountain, it took a trek of eleven hours to reach Base Camp, and given I was travelling solo, I had to use my map and compass to get there, because the paths normally marking the route up were smothered by the heavy drifts. When I eventually arrived at Base Camp and checked in with the other climbers on the mountain, the mood was gloomy. A number of people had made a push for the summit, but had been turned around by the elements.

‘It’s so dangerous up there,’ said a friend from the International Federation of Mountain Guides. ‘The avalanche risk is high and the weather is seriously cold.’

I figured I knew better. Having snapped up some boots from another climber, a pair far sturdier than the ones I’d brought along, and also borrowed a down jacket, I pushed to the top, the weather closing in tightly around me. What should have been a fairly straightforward trek became as gruelling as my first-ever climb on an 8,000er, and only 300 metres from the peak, I came close to giving up.

My vision blurred. Having climbed without oxygen, and with altitude sickness quickly kicking in, I felt close to passing out. All my hopes of becoming an elite climber seemed to hang in the balance. Fucking hell, Nims, if you can’t make it to the top here, how can you expect to take on Everest? I was shaken.

I took a sip from my Thermos flask and opened up a chocolate bar.

You have the speed to climb super quickly. Use it.

Pushing on to the summit, I couldn’t wait to turn around, having learned another lesson at high altitude: Never underestimate the mountain you’re about to climb – no matter how easy other people think it might be.

And another: Be confident, but show respect.

From then on, I did my due diligence on every expedition. I readied myself for the challenges ahead and told myself that any mountain had the potential to be my last, if I didn’t handle it with care. As a reminder of the pitfalls of what can happen when you let your guard down, I briefly underestimated Gasherbrum I during phase two of the mission and it kicked me in the arse.

Whatever you’re doing, treat your challenge with respect. You won’t suffer any nasty surprises that way.

4. Hope is God.

Brother, you’re not going to get to your dream by just fantasising about it. But if you make it your ultimate goal, or god, and give yourself to it entirely, there’s a good chance it might come your way.

As a kid, I got so pissed off at being beaten by a runner from another school in the district champs that I started getting up in the middle of the night in secret training sessions. I took that same attitude into the Gurkhas. If we were required to run thirty kilometres in training, I’d tack another twenty kilometres on at the end to push myself even harder, because I knew I wanted to make it into the Special Forces. The job had become my church and I invested all my efforts into it.

So rather than thinking, praying and waiting for your next project or challenge (and not doing it), commit to serious action instead.

5. A person’s true nature shows up in life-or-death situations.

A lot of soldiers talk the talk. On the base they act like big heroes, happy to gob off about gunfights that they may, or may not, have been involved in. But the minute it kicks off for real, when bullets start flying and people are getting shot around them, they hide in the corner or panic.

The same attitude can be found on the mountain. At Base Camp, when the weather is sunny and warm, climbers take selfies and mess around, talking about how they’re going to conquer the mountain. Once the bad weather whips in, and it becomes important to stay focused and super-disciplined, they freak out. Then their true personality emerges: they act selfishly, their work rate slacks off, and the safety of others is sometimes disregarded.

It’s possible to learn a lot about someone when the chips are down.

6. Turn a nightmare situation into something positive.

During my first climbs of Everest, Lhotse and Makalu, my oxygen was stolen on the mountain. I’d asked for cylinders to be left at a number of camps, but as I arrived at each one, it became apparent that the lot of them had been swiped. At first I was furious, which was a very understandable reaction given the circumstances, but it was important to stay calm. Losing it would cause me to waste energy and maybe succumb to HACE in the process. As I explained in Lesson 2, the little things count most on the big mountains. A negative response, like a minor tantrum, would only cost me dearly later in the expedition.

I calmed down and mentally turned the situation around. Rather than stewing in my own anger, I told myself that the air had gone to someone who needed it more than me.

‘Maybe someone had severe altitude sickness and needed my cylinders to save themselves,’ I told myself, knowing it probably wasn’t true. ‘In which case, fair enough.’

Yeah, this was a lie in some ways – though it was a very different one to the type discussed in Lesson 8. However, it was a vital self-defence mechanism. If I’d sulked and moaned about the circumstances surrounding my missing air, I would have wasted vital energy, when I should have been concentrating on the mission ahead.

Thinking positively is the only way to survive at 8,000 metres. Nobody cheats death by wallowing in self-pity.

7. Give 100 per cent to the now . . .

. . . because it’s all you’ve got.

There were moments on Selection when a programme of gruelling work was laid out ahead of me: weeks of drills, marches and exercises in unpleasant conditions, where I’d have to push myself to breaking point. It would have been easy to feel overwhelmed by the intimidating workload, or stressed that day one’s thirty-mile run might burn me out for an even longer run on day two. Instead I gave everything to the job in hand and dealt with tomorrow when tomorrow came around. It was the only way to handle an intimidating challenge.

The same attitude applied to my mission to climb the fourteen Death Zone peaks. While working across a mountain, I tried my best not to think about the following expedition, because I knew I might not make it if I took my eye off the adversary ahead. To be focused on Broad Peak while scaling K2 would cause me to lose focus. And keeping energy in reserve was pointless. I had to give the day my all, because I knew the consequences if I didn’t.

Tomorrow might not happen.

8. Never lie. Never make excuses.

There were times when I could have cut corners on the mountain. Following the G200E in 2017, when Nishal offered me a helicopter ride from Namche Bazaar to Makalu’s Camp 2, I turned him down. With his help I’d have become the first person to climb Everest twice, Lhotse and Makalu in a single climbing season, but it wouldn’t have been done properly. Sure, nobody on the planet would have known, apart from Nishal. But I’d have to live with the knowledge for the rest of my life.

It’s easy to make excuses. You might be trying to give up smoking or alcohol. A sneaky beer, or a puff on a cigarette, is easy to shrug off as one of those things. But it’s not one of those things. By lying to yourself, you’re only consigning your goals to failure. Lying, or making excuses for your sloppy actions, means you’ve broken a promise to yourself. Once you do that, you’ll fuck up, over and over again.

For example, it would have been quite easy for me to give up on K2, because so many people had tried, and failed to climb. Had I abandoned the project because of a lack of funding, nobody would have blamed me, but there was no way I was going to let myself off the hook with a convenient get-out clause.

If I say that I’m going to run for an hour, I’ll run for a full hour. If I plan to do three hundred push-ups in a training session, I won’t quit until I’ve done them all. Because brushing off the effort means letting myself down and I don’t want to have to live with that.

And neither should you.