Up: My Life’s Journey to the Top of Everest

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For the last six years, I’ve been working on a TV series about people who have dropped out of society and started a new life disconnected from the state. They have cut themselves off from ‘the grid’, severed their connection to electricity, water, gas, phone and in some cases money.

For me, expeditions have been my own, short-term opportunity to live off the grid. Expeditions have given me a chance to test my resolve and pique my resourcefulness. When I’m back at home, a cultural lethargy envelops me. When something goes wrong with the electrics or the car or the drainage, I will, by default, call in someone else to help.

The fully functioning circular economy relies on everyone having a skill. We have become reliant on a collective taskforce in which we all have mono skills rather than the universal multitasking multi-skills of old.

My late grandfather built his own house on the shores of a Canadian lake. He dug the foundations, installed the pipework and the electrics. He cut the wood, roofed the house and fitted the windows.

I like to think of myself as a well-rounded individual, but I wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to building a house. I can sail, scuba dive and speak fluent Spanish, but I don’t understand electrics and I can’t even hammer a nail properly. Which set of skills are more useful? The latter of course; the problem is that society no longer requires them and we have lost the connection to our basic knowledge.

The wilderness requires resourcefulness; it forces us to connect with an inner self that once relied on survival skills to exist. When pushed, it’s amazing how adaptable we can become. The problem is that so few of us ever get a chance to test ourselves. We tend to take the easy option and avoid hardship. For me, expeditions have always been a way of reconnecting with my inner wildman.

The first time I really challenged myself was when I was marooned for a year on a remote corner of a windswept, treeless island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I had volunteered to be a castaway for a year on the island of Taransay, as part of a unique social experiment by the BBC to celebrate the millennium.

A group of 36 men, women and children were given 12 months to become a fully functioning community. We were given all the materials we would need to build accommodation, install water piping, a wind turbine and fencing. We put up polytunnels to grow fruit and veg in the inclement Scottish weather and we reared pigs, sheep and cattle. We built a slaughterhouse, harvested crops and became a simple, thriving off-grid community.

I learned so many new skills during that year: farming, building, teaching. In many ways, it converted a group of underskilled urbanites into a well-rounded, multi-tasking community, in which we all shared our different skill sets and knowledge for the betterment of the whole.

We became a very happy little settlement. I think we reintroduced lost values into our little community. We cared collectively for one another. There was no place for materialism. Our community was based on subsistence. We worked with what we had and maximised our efficiency. After 12 months, we were a happier, healthier, more efficient group of people.

In some ways, I have been chasing that beautiful, simple life ever since.

Castaway for a year on an island, rowing the Atlantic, trekking across Antarctica … all of these experiences have had a profound effect on me.

But it was Everest that changed me for good.

This seven-week expedition into the death zone was a life-changing, life-enhancing adventure. I walked the fine line between life and death. I experienced feelings and emotions that I’d never had before.

I never planned to write a book. After all, thousands of great mountaineering books have been written before. What would make my story so unique? Well, I hope you will read this book, not as an ego-chasing journey to the top of the world, but as a life-affirming lesson.

Humbled and enlightened, I hope these words jump out with the intensity of my own experience. I hope the positivity and the happiness and the joy overshadow the obligatory danger, fear and suffering that comes with a high-altitude mountain adventure.

I hope this book will inspire you to climb your own Everest.