1 Captions by Brittany Stewart. Edited by Richard Edmunds. www.tvnz.co.nz/access-services Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright TVNZ Access Services 2013 Hi. I'm Mark Inglis. NZers have an incredible history of first ascents on Everest, starting, of course, with Sir Edmund Hillary. I'm a mountaineer, so I remember when, in 1988, Lydia Bradey summited Everest. I remember because Lydia was the first woman to ascend Everest without oxygen. Now, some have disputed her solo climb. There have been numerous investigations over the last 20 years, but why don't we let Lydia tell her story of how to fight to get to the top? It was only when I got, uh, maybe 50m or 80m below the south summit of Everest that I suddenly realised that I was going to be able to stay alive for sure. And I was, like, 'Yes! I've climbed Everest.' I grew up in Christchurch with my mother, and she was a solo mother in the days before DPP. My mother and I didn't have a lot of money, so we lived in a one-bedroom flat, and until I was 11 years old I shared a bedroom with my mother. I was pretty good academically, so at` at primary school I got lots and lots of A's academically. Then it would get to phys ed, and I was always super super bad at sports. Sports was terrifying for me, and I would get nauseous. I would actually end up being sick with stress about sports days. And my mother obviously wanted to get me outside and doing something and give me confidence, so she sent me to a` an outdoor instruction course. And near the end we were doing some abseiling, probably about 3m, and Paddy Freaney stopped us all, and he said, 'You know, some of you... some of you guys will go on to be trampers'. And I figured out what a tramper was. And then he goes, 'And occasionally one or two of you will go on to become a climber.' And he said it like that, he goes 'a climber'. And I go... (GASPS) 'I don't know what a climber is, but sounds so good. I wanna be a climber.' Lydia joined the tramping club as a young girl. She was only 14, and she had to get special permission to join the club. Lydia came along, this young, enthusiastic kid ` really enthusiastic. She, uh, just wanted to experience everything and know everything. When I was 17 I went and climbed Mt Aspiring with Margaret, and the night before I climbed Mt Aspiring I had a dream that I've never forgotten. And I was looking down the Aspiring Valley, the west coast side of the Aspiring Valley, and coming up the Aspiring Valley were these angels singing hallelujah. (CHUCKLES) We went up a route called The Ramp, and, uh, with a rope on all the time, and Lydia said, 'Why do we need a rope? People climb without ropes.' And I said, 'No, we don't. We climb with a rope, Lydia.' She belayed me all the way up the steep snow and ice, and apparently the whole time I was going, 'Why do I need a rope?' But it's steep, and if I'd fallen off, I would have died, of course. So she looked after me. And Margaret didn't need a rope, but I did. When we reached the summit, she was so delighted to be at the top that she lay on her stomach, drumming her feet on the mountain, looking down the steep face, saying, 'Yay! My first 3000m peak!' If you look at Lydia, in many ways she's got all the qualities of a perfect mountaineer ` particularly a high-altitude mountaineer. She's lean. She's a bit lanky. She's also very determined, which is the other... it's almost a... obsessive determination. The golden era of Himalayan climbing was, really, in the '50s to the end of the '80s, and why I call this the golden era is because people going climbing in the Himalayas were climbing for themselves, and, pretty much, if you went to the Himalayas in the olden days, I call it, then, uh, you were always doing a first. It was pretty easy, as a female going to the Himalayas, to start looking at doing firsts. So, by 1988, I'd already been on, uh, five Himalayan expeditions, and two to some of the highest mountains in the world. She's always been very good at altitude. Um, high altitude hasn't affected her as much as it affects some people, so she's always been very strong at high altitude levels, and this is one of her great strengths, of course. She clearly has very good oxygen uptake. I mean, it's a complicated business, the business of how big your lungs are, and how much oxygen you can get in and how you can get the oxygen to the muscles. They're the important things, and Lydia's got all of those things. In '88 I had the opportunity to go to Mt Everest. So, the members on the expedition were me, of course, Rob Hall, Gary Ball, and a guy call Bill Atkinson. I've known Rob since I was 15, and we both grew up in Christchurch and went mountaineering, and he was in mountaineering scene, and so that was kind of old friend, if you like. And Gary I only knew a little bit, and he was a mountain guide. And, uh, Bill I knew as, uh, Rob's friend. And, although you have your own tiny four-person team, you also have the greater teams ` the people that you were working with on the mountain. I got on extremely well with the Slovaks on Everest, and we were a joint expedition on Everest. So, the whole eight people go up to do Mt Everest ` four Slovaks, they go up to do the south-west face of Everest; and four NZers, to go up to do the South Pillar, without a permit. We were going to apply for the permit retrospectively, and we had no problem paying, and this actually wasn't that unusual in these days. They were being a little bit naughty, but if you look at it from the Nepalese authorities' point of view, they just wanted the revenue. Actually, they wanted a little bit of control over what people were doing, but the main issue was they wanted the money. So, we all went up to Camp 2, 6500m underneath the south-west face of Mt Everest. We were waiting there, and the next day this big storm came in, and it stormed and stormed and stormed, and then by the next day I go` in my head I go, 'Right, I'm not going to be strong enough to stay here at 6500m, melting my own snow, 'cooking my own food. We don't even have enough food. I'm going to go down to Base Camp again.' And I found out that the Slovaks had also made the same decision to go down, and then I went to see the NZers, and the NZers were, like, 'Nah. We're gonna stay.' And we had an argument, and they said, 'If you go down, then we will be one day ahead of you when the weather clears, 'and so you'll have to climb Mt Everest on your own.' And I said, 'I know.' 1 After I went to Base Camp, the storm was a five-day storm. I had my birthday, my 27th birthday, at Base Camp and had a little party, but not much, cos we were going to the summit, and prepared and got organised. And then the weather cleared, and we went back up to Camp 2 to arrive, and the NZers had just left to climb the South Pillar. So I was at Camp 2, having got there from Base Camp that day, and they came down from trying the South Pillar and saying, 'We're tired. We couldn't summit. We're going home.' So they said, 'You'll have to climb Everest on your own,' and I said, 'Well, OK. I will.' I had it planned, actually, obviously. I had five days to plan it. In any game, really, as soon as you step outside the circle, the understood ground, you leave yourself open for criticism from the people who think they are the establishment. Unfortunately, in Lydia's case, it was a male-dominated activity which occasionally threw up good female performers, but, um, I think the males thought, 'Well, we couldn't do it, so how could a woman possibly do it?' The next day, at 2 o'clock in the morning, I left Camp 2, 6500m, to go to Camp 3, 7300m. I knew that I had to get from Camp 2 to the South Col by midday, because otherwise I would not have enough time to rest and melt water to drink, to rejuvenate, to become strong in order to leave that night to go and climb to the summit. So I had a great sleep on the South Col without oxygen. And then, also, there was a Spanish expedition on the South Col, and they were leaving to climb, and they were leaving, and they were using oxygen. So, we left about 2 o'clock in the morning to climb Everest from the South Col, and we climbed up a slope, and the Spanish team was in front of me. And they drew away slowly. Because they were on oxygen, they could go faster. I start to follow up, and I can see the Spanish ahead, and then they disappear over the south summit. And I'm on the south summit of Mt Everest, 100 vertical metres away from the main summit. I meet the Spanish coming down. So comparatively, they have taken only a little bit longer than me. They are really stressed. They've got one member with frostbite and one member with some cerebral oedema. Immediately, the Spanish pick up their radio and radio to Base Camp what is going on, of course, for them, with their sick person and their frostbite person, and also that they've met me, and that I'm saying that I'm going to go on to the main summit. When the Spanish radioed from the south summit down to Base Camp, and the Kiwis went along to hear that I was on the south summit going for the main summit... When they heard that, I think they were already packed up. They picked up their packs and left Base Camp to walk out to Kathmandu. So, I was on the south summit of Everest. From there, I was really lucky, because the snow was quite deep, and the Sherpas and the Spanish had made big steps in the snow. So I had a staircase to climb to the summit of Everest. That was the only reason I'm sure I made it that day, you know, because I had these steps and I could just go one, two, three. And you go up and along a bit. And you'd get to this section, where you've got to climb what's called the Hillary Step, and that's pretty steep. You've got one foot there and one foot there; then one there and one there. And you can look down, and look down at the Kangshung face of Everest, you know, it's, like, 'Whoa.' But it's OK. And there was a little rope there, and I don't know what it was tied to. I just held on to it with my hand, you know? It wouldn't stop me, really. I'm a NZ mountaineer, and NZ mountains are like mini Himalayan mountains, so we have bad snow and steep drops and, you know, steep little steps and things like that, so we're used to that kind of climbing. It's good old NZ climbing. It took a long time, of course, to go from the south summit to the main summit, and the whole time I was really aware that I didn't know if I could get down, but I thought I could, and then I thought I could and then I thought I could. You know, that's how it went. And when I got to the main summit, people say, 'And were you elated? 'Were you excited?' And... I was exhausted. When I got to the top of Mt Everest, I sat down, and I was really tired. And my guess is that I sat down for 15 minutes. But, remember, I knew I was going to survive only if I got going again. So for me the most important thing was to get there, to tag it, to look around, and then to get going again, cos I was burning with curiosity ` can I do it? Oh, I was totally petrified. I was completely scared about not getting down. Climbing at altitude is super unusual, because going up is really really hard work, and going down is really easy. So I knew that. I had the experience of climbing 8000m, and I knew going down was going to be easy, relatively. At about 8650m, I was able to just relax and know that I could get down. And two things happened. Of course, one, I could go, 'Yes! I've climbed Mt Everest.' But the second thing was this joy of the years I'd put in in NZ of going, 'Ice axe, step, step; ice axe, step, step,' that got me down from the summit of Mt Everest to the South Col. When I got back down to Base Camp, I learnt that the winds had become really strong and things had gotten quite serious up on Mt Everest for the Czechoslovakians. We had radio contact with the Czechoslovakians until 5.30, and then they began to lose each other, and then we lost radio contact with them. So it was` my time at Base Camp, my arrival at Base Camp, was a mixture of joy and a mixture of extreme sadness. The team's reunion with family and friends in Christchurch ended an expedition dogged with controversy and disaster. The four Czechoslovakian members were caught by savage conditions on Mt Everest and vanished. In earlier bad weather, the NZers decided to retreat, but Lydia Bradey defied team discipline, setting out on a solo climb for the summit on a route forbidden by the Nepalese authorities. When she returned to the team claiming success, she was not believed. Uh, you have to realise that, uh, at 8000m above sea level, without bottled oxygen, funny things happen to the brain sometimes. Once I got to Kathmandu, I was visited pretty quickly by our liaison officer, who showed me the letter that Rob Hall and Gary Ball wrote and signed that they'd said that they didn't believe that I climbed Mt Everest. Why? Why would you do that to somebody? My immediate thoughts when I saw the letter was disbelief. I just felt that obviously something... some big mechanism was going on that I couldn't stop, but I had to do something about. But I also knew that I probably didn't have the skill to do that much about it. In the past, Nepal has banned climbing teams that didn't obey the rules. The NZ team has asked authorities there to consider Lydia Bradey's controversial climb the action of one individual. If you climb a route without a permit in Nepal, you generally get a ban for five, but mostly 10 years. I didn't want to get banned for 10 years, and that was my goal. My goal was to keep climbing. So I said that I was on the wrong route because I was taking photographs and I went too high, and I never said I didn't summit. It was possibly the wrong thing to do, but I didn't know what else to do if I wanted to avoid being banned. I heard it over the media, and my first concern was to speak to Lydia. So I phoned` When I knew she was back in Kathmandu, I phoned her in Kathmandu to` to talk to her and support her. At this point in Kathmandu, the phones were ringing all the time. The landlines, remember. Graeme Dingle, who I didn't know, was offering his support, and I really wish I had taken it and he'd been there to help me. Margaret Clark would have come over and help me out. And so there were lots of people who were going 'What's going on?' But I was essentially completely alone. Christchurch climber Lydia Bradey arrived home today. It was hoped she'd be able to shed some light on her claim to being the first woman to conquer Mt Everest without oxygen. But she refused to discuss the matter, and a news conference conducted by the manager of the expedition only helped to confuse the story. The height Lydia reached is uncertain, and there is some doubt that this high point was indeed the summit of Mt Everest. There's a code amongst mountaineers that, no matter how close you get to the summit of a mountain, if you don't actually climb it, you don't claim you've climbed it. There's no point in claiming you've done something when you haven't done it. Mountaineering is what Lydia Bradey lives for, and she was relieved to learn she had only been banned for three years by the Nepalese authorities, and not 10. Lydia stands by her claim to be the first woman in the world to reach the Everest summit without oxygen. People can choose whether to believe me or not to believe me. As far as I'm concerned, I summited. If I had been hallucinating, I would not have come back, because my judgements would have been such that I wouldn't have been able to make it down. I had no doubt from the beginning that she had summited, because I simply put the facts together. The time she reached the south summit, the time that she still had to reach the main summit, knowing her determination, the fact that the Spanish had got there when they weren't in particularly good condition. Everything added up to her being successful. After Everest, there were two big investigations done by a guy called Richard Cowper, who is a journalist for the Financial Times. And one of the other ones was a Spanish journalist, who I didn't really know anything about. But he was a climbing historian, and he did lots of research, because I think... he was really interested in my story. I think part of it is that we're a curious nation with an inferiority complex, and we often have the answers here, but we don't believe them. So we look to overseas, and when people like Christian Bonington and Doug Scott said, 'We think she made it,' then people started to believe it. Three years ago, NZer Lydia Bradey claimed she scaled Mt Everest without oxygen. At the time, there was considerable disbelief, much of it from some of our top mountaineers. But today, the president of the NZ Alpine Club called for Lydia's feat to be officially sanctioned. The change that's now come through makes it very very easy to accept that Lydia, in this case, is more than likely to have climbed Everest, and there is no` no grounds for any doubt at this point. Lydia hasn't been celebrated the way she should have been. If you look at our history in high-altitude mountaineering, it was Ed Hillary first on the summit of Everest. It was Norm Hardie, first on the summit of Kangchenjunga. Lydia Bradey, first on the summit of Everest without oxygen. It seems that everyone accepts that I climbed Everest without oxygen. And, because I've been there, I'm happy that I climbed Everest without oxygen. But it is very nice to be, uh, appreciated that your climb did exist. It is important on a personal level, but it's not the reason why I climb. I wanna be the best 154kg athlete there is, and I'm sure I could be a world champion at that category. Copyright TVNZ Access Services 2013