Reading "A Mountain to Climb"

Mr David Lim, the leader of the 1st Singapore Mount Everest Expedition, was a guest speaker at our compant's Retreat. Participants of the retreat were given David's book "A Mountain to Climb" to read before his talk.

Like David mentioned early in his book, most people do not understand mountaineering, and I suppose I was also one of the guilty ones who took the Expedition very lightly and viewed it as another one of those wayang things people do to gain attention.

The book is very well written and engaging, and there are many revealing stories on team dynamics which I found to be very true and insightful.

I had a brief chat with David after his talk and I only had time to ask him two questions.

First, the decision to leave out a member of his team Kim after Kim had, on the very last training climb, displayed a uncharacteristic agressiveness and assaulted another team member. This was ironical because Kim was very popular with the rest of the team. Khoo Swee Chiow however was left on the team despite Swee being not a team player and was chastised more than once for selfish behaviour. When asked, David said that the Expedition was called the SINGAPORE expedition and the goal was clear, and that was to send someone up to the summit. David likened Swee as a Diego Maradona -- when there is only 5 mins left in the match, and you need a match winner, you send Diego Maradona in, regardless of whether he is a team player. So he says it is up to the leader to decide whether the benefits of having such a star player outweighs the negativeness or toxicity he brings to the team.

Second, I asked him whether he had any regrets on not summiting himself; only Swee and another person Edwin eventually reached Everest summit. David replied that as the team leader, he had to consider who had the best prospects of summiting and he chose the team based on this. Furthermore, he had torn his cartilage (via sever coughing) so physically, he just was not suitable. He jokingly said that he is thankful (on hindsight) that he never went up because then he did not have to think about climbing down. This may sound strange but after reading his book, I realised that not only were there dangers climbing up, descending was equally if not more dangerous, because it was easy to slip and the climber would have been very very exhausted by then and could make a mistake easily.

The difficulties in climbing Everest is beyond physical strength and endurance which are given requirements. The question mark is whether the climber can aclimatise in those altitudes -- Mt Everest is 8850m above sea level. So the climber has to get to, say 5000m and stay for a few days to adjust, then to 6000m or so until one can endure going up to 8000m. Even then, one cannot stay long at the summit, at most an hour and you have to descend.

The second difficulty is logistics, moving the tons of food and equipment and bringing these up and setting camps and different altitudes, by climbing! So the sequence is like, you bring extra equipment from base camp (BC) and move it to higher ground at Camp 1 then you return to BC. Then you bring more equipment and food to C1 and take some to C2 then you return to BC. So this shuttling of equipment goes on until enough equipment, especially oxygen tanks, is stocked at the last camp before the push for the summit is done.

The final obstacle is the weather which can mean the difference between a successful climb or simply death. David mentions in the book that many bodies are left untouched on Everest because it is just too difficult and tricky to retrieve a body at those altitudes and the uncertainly of the ice and snow.

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The point about team dynamics touched a chord in me. In national service, you see similar types of behaviour especially those individuals who will stop at nothing to do a little less, and if possible, to do nothing at all. They think nothing of taking advantage of others as long as they themselves are not inconvenienced. In the past, I used to wonder how in the world can such people exist but I have come to realise that this is just the way they are. But there is a silver lining in this. It lets you know more clearly which are the people whom you can count on as a friend and reciprocate in return the friendship.