Cathy O'Dowd: Beyond The Summit (Physical & Mental Realities Of High Altitude Climbing)

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Cathy O'Dowd has found a moving woman at 8,600 metres on the North Ridge of Everest — alive, delirious, stripped of her gloves and jacket, tied to an old rope. She and her team spent a long time beside her, running every possible option, knowing that to stay long enough to attempt rescue was to risk condemning everyone else on that slope to the same fate. Eventually, they walked down.
That woman was Frances Arsentiev. Her body is still there.

This is an episode about what high-altitude mountaineering actually costs — not just in frostbite and effort, but in the decisions that no training manual fully prepares you for. Cathy O'Dowd became the first woman to summit Everest from both the north and the south sides, and in this conversation she doesn't romanticise any of it. She talks about the 1996 storm that killed
five people while her team sat dressed in their tent at Camp 4 waiting to see if the canvas tore.  She talks about Cheyne-Stokes breathing, Russian oxygen bottles with a one-in-six failure rate, and the difference between the commercial queue on the Hillary Route and the empty valley on the Kangshung Face side where no one has ever climbed.

Chapters

00:00 Storm at Camp 4 — the night everything changed
01:00 Introduction to Cathy O'Dowd
02:25 Growing up in Johannesburg — finding climbing at Wits University
07:04 The South African Sunday Times competition — and why she entered
09:00 Everest 1996 — a dysfunctional team, $350,000 in sponsorship and a storm
19:53 The summit, the tragedy, and the media firestorm
22:14 The death zone — oxygen, acclimatisation and what it really feels like
27:49 Cheyne-Stokes breathing and why people sleep on trickle oxygen
29:00 Managing oxygen, rubbish and the chaos after the 1996 storm
34:53 Fog of war — yellow tents, frozen zips, and the search in the dark
39:00 Frances Arsentiev — an impossible decision at 8,600 metres
55:00 Commercial Everest vs. alpine-style climbing — where the line falls
01:00:00 Climate change, overcrowding and the future of 8,000-metre peaks
01:02:00 After COVID — sea kayaking, canyoning and new learning curves
01:07:30 Women in adventure — 30 years of change
01:11:30 Everest, race and the story of Black South African climbers
01:13:40 Meeting Nelson Mandela
01:17:00 Call to adventure — try indoor climbing; then take it outside
01:19:49 Pay it forward — Rwenzori Women for Health / Friends of Kagando

She also talks about the other kind of failure — the public kind, when a $350,000 Everest expedition collapses into media infighting and you find yourself, as a fairly private individual, slashed across the front pages of every newspaper in South Africa.

What You'll Learn:
• Why the 1996 Everest storm is so widely misunderstood — and what it was actually like to   be inside a yellow tent at 8,000 metres while five people died outside it
• The physical and mental reality of the death zone: Cheyne-Stokes breathing, grey organs,  and the moment the air starts to feel like it has substance
• How Cathy's team found Frances Arsentiev alive at 8,600 metres — and why there was no realistic option to bring her down
• The difference between commercial Everest (one route, fixed ropes, guided queues) and the 15 other routes where two have never been climbed
• Why switching to new sports — sea kayaking, canyoning, ski mountaineering — after decades of climbing has been the most psychologically refreshing thing Cathy has ever done
• What 30 years of watching women enter the mountains has looked like — and why social media changed the economics of being a female adventure athlete
• The tiny charity deep in Uganda's Rwenzori Mountains that is saving lives with local nurses, scooters, and village insurance schemes

CATHY O'DOWD | Mountaineer, Author & Motivational Speaker
Website: cathyodowd.com
Instagram: @CathyODowd
YouTube: @CathyODowd
Book: Just for the Love of It — her Everest story
Pay It Forward: Rwenzori Women for Health / Friends of Kagando
friendsofkagando.co.uk

ABOUT CATHY O'DOWD
South African mountaineer, rock climber, author and motivational speaker. Cathy became the first South African to summit Everest in 1996, via the South Ridge, and returned in 1999 to summit via the North Ridge — becoming the first woman in the world to climb Everest from both sides. She has since pursued sea kayaking, ski mountaineering and canyoning across Europe and beyond, and has been a professional keynote speaker for over 27 years, presenting in 46 countries
on six continents.

For full show notes and links, visit: adventurediaries.com/go

Transcript

[CHAPTER: Storm at Camp 4 — The Night Everything Changed — 00:00]

[00:00] CHRIS:
The static on the radio was desperately loud. You're barely hearing one word in three through the gobbledygook. And at the same time the wind is slamming into your tent and the snow — this constant, unending noise. We were fully dressed because we were aware that if our tents tore, we'd be in the storm. So in the middle of the night, you really want to sleep, but you're sitting up there dressed, waiting to see what happens.

And then, within 12 hours, a member of our team had been killed on the descent. The media went absolutely crazy. It was just the swing from this wild and unexpected success to this complete tragedy within about 12 hours. And then we had to get ourselves off the mountain.

Physically we had to cope, mentally we had to cope, and there was no support for any of this. Nobody's buying fancy four-by-fours for aid workers. This is local infrastructure — walking into these villages, doing education for the mothers, helping them understand when to bring their children to hospital. And she has managed to do such good work deep in this mountain range via a British society called the Friends of Kagando.

[CHAPTER: Introduction — 01:00]

NARRATOR:
Welcome to another episode of Adventure Diaries. Today my guest is Cathy O'Dowd — South African rock climber, mountaineer, all-round adventurer, and the first woman to climb Mount Everest from both the north and the south sides. Cathy's journey from the flat plains of Johannesburg to the highest peaks on earth is filled with incredible achievements, but also the stark realities of mountaineering in extreme conditions. She has broken records, pushed the limits of adventure, and now inspires people across the globe through her motivational speaking — covering not just the physical heights she has reached, but also the mental and emotional journey along the way. Settle in and enjoy this fantastic conversation with Cathy O'Dowd.

[02:20] CHRIS:
Cathy O'Dowd, welcome to Adventure Diaries. How are you?

[02:20] CATHY:
Great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

[CHAPTER: From Johannesburg to the Himalaya — Growing Up and Finding Climbing — 02:25]

[02:25] CHRIS:
You're welcome. I'm very honoured to have a lady of your talents and achievements on the show. As a short introduction — climber, world-record-breaking mountaineer and adventurer, author, and worldwide motivational speaker. Some of the things I want to navigate today: your summits, being the first South African to summit Everest in 1996, and then again in 1999, becoming the first woman to summit from both the north and the south. An incredible achievement. Rolling back a little bit — you grew up in Johannesburg, a very different landscape from the Himalayas. How did you get from there to summiting the world?

[02:55] CATHY:
It's a good question. Let me give you the key beats. I grew up in suburban Johannesburg — it's high, but it's a huge flat grass plain; not a mountain in sight. My parents didn't do any of this. The most we did were day walks. Step one was summer camp as a young teenager in the Drakensberg. I discovered hiking and camping and thought, okay, this is quite fun. Got to try rock climbing once. I liked it, but there was nowhere to go — this was long before indoor gyms. So I held onto that thought. When I arrived at university in Johannesburg, at what was then Wits University, there was a rock climbing club and I joined. I loved it. The thing is, I was terrible at sport at school. The whole connecting-with-a-ball thing — hockey, tennis, netball — I hated all of them. I was terrible.

[04:35] CHRIS:
So you pigeon-holed yourself as a bit of an academic nerd who wasn't any good at physical activity?

[04:35] CATHY:
Exactly. And then I found rock climbing, and it's not competitive. You don't have to win or lose. It's deeply personal, it's puzzle solving, every climb is different, it happens in beautiful outdoor places. It's individual but you're also part of a tight-knit little team managing the safety. I liked it — this is great. So I got quite quickly into rock climbing. Johannesburg is good for that. And from there I just started on a lifelong journey of curiosity. What would it be like to try a bigger rock wall, multi-pitch? What would it be like to go somewhere with ice? My first expedition was Central Africa, the Rwenzori Mountains. Then Bolivia in the Andes. Eventually I took a year off between my university degrees and spent most of it in the Alps, living on tiny bits of money and climbing as much as I could. My next step — I really wanted to go to the Himalaya, anywhere in the Himalaya. I didn't care which mountain. But I didn't know how to get there. This was long before commercial teams where you could just buy a place. You had to know people who were going. And so that was the problem I was contemplating when I picked up a newspaper in late November 1995. Big headline: the first South African Everest expedition. And they were all men, which didn't even seem particularly surprising. But further down the page was a bizarre offer — a competition.

[07:04] CHRIS:
To find a girl?

[07:04] CATHY:
The headline was something like: "Are you the woman with the balls for the summit?" My God. The men had all been invited based on their CVs and experience. Now they were going to run some newspaper competition to find a girl. It was driven by the newspaper, which was a big sponsor — they just wanted to sex up the coverage. I looked at this and thought, yeah, this is a completely poisoned opportunity. I was doing my master's in journalism, young and feminist and independent. This is not how you include women in teams. But the process was you had to write a motivation — you didn't even have to be a climber. And then they'd take a shortlist of six to Kilimanjaro for what was frankly very early reality television. And I knew I had a good chance because of my experience. There weren't many women with my experience. I could get a free trip to Kilimanjaro out of this. I put aside all my feminist scruples and signed up. And it changed my life completely.

[CHAPTER: Everest 1996 — The Storm, the Summit, and the Tragedy — 09:00]

[09:29] CHRIS:
Were you competitive? Had you always been competitive?

[09:29] CATHY:
No. I'm not. I don't like competition. I don't like losing, I don't like winning, I don't like other people having to lose. I'm completely non-competitive, which is slightly odd given that I now spend a lot of time with corporate executives who are terribly goal-driven. I'm interested in the process, the experience, the journey. The goals give you a direction, but that's not what I'm after. I want the experience.

[09:55] CHRIS:
I've heard you talk about failing successfully as part of a team. Can you elaborate on that?

[09:55] CATHY:
This has been an interesting journey for me. Like a lot of young women, I was a little perfectionist — I didn't want to try something unless I was fairly certain I could do it. Failing was not in my repertoire. I had to learn personally that failure, and public failure, is something that happens if you take risks on big projects. It doesn't end your world. And if you're too afraid of it, you'll never get anything done. But there's a second level to it. On a big expedition, you can't escape failure. You don't get to the top, the media and sponsors call it failure. But as a climber there are two goals: get to the top, come home alive and uninjured. At some point those two goals may drift apart. Summit fever, basically, is when people completely forget about coming home alive and are obsessed by how much they've invested in trying to get to a particular summit. That can lead to very bad outcomes. But if you realise you have to drop the summit and turn towards a safe exit — doing that successfully in a moment of crisis is actually very confidence-building. You know you can see an emergency, switch tracks, hold it together in difficult circumstances, improvise. Afterwards you think: I can do that. Which means I'm prepared to try something harder. So failing has become productive. You will always learn something.

[12:59] CHRIS:
Going back to Kilimanjaro — how did you get to master this philosophy? Is it intuitive, or through years on the mountains?

[12:59] CATHY:
They're two different spaces. I haven't found failing on mountains very difficult because I'm process-driven, not goal-driven. I'm not going to sacrifice everything for a single summit. That does mean I've never been truly world-class as a climber, because I get to a point where I think: hell, no. There are other people still prepared to lay even more on the line. Some of them die. Some end up world-class. But I don't have that level of complete single-minded commitment to any individual objective. I admire those climbers. Part of me is regretful that I don't have the ability to put everything on the line. But if those very successful climbers ever get injured and can't continue, they have nothing else. I've always thought: I could actually do other things. I have other interests. Truly high-level achievement does come with a kind of monomaniacal obsession.

[15:16] CHRIS:
You never set out to take on Everest, did you? Was it the South African Sunday Times competition?

[15:16] CATHY:
Yes — not the Guardian; the South African Sunday Times. And no, I had absolutely no interest in Everest. I'm not just a rock climber — I'm a mountain climber. I'd climbed in the Andes, Central Africa, the Alps. What I hadn't done was go above 6,000 metres. That's a bit of a jump from 6,000 to 8,850. So I joined the Kilimanjaro selection trip. By the end of it, I thought: I'm the only one of these six women who's actually a good contender for Everest. I tried not to be competitive, but I was pretty convinced I was the best choice. And I got selected.

There's a whole extra complication — we did end up with Deshun Deysel, another woman, joining the trip as well. But you don't have the time on this podcast to cover that whole story. So now myself and Deshun are on the Everest team. Of course the men are not happy because we've got far more media coverage. The team is dysfunctional right from the beginning, and that dysfunction dogs us all the way through the climb. So this is where the second type of failure comes in. If the first kind is simply: did you get to the top or did you turn back — the other kind is the big public one. When you're part of a project that spirals into chaos and infighting and disaster, and the media pick over the remnants, and you find yourself as a fairly private individual slashed across the front pages with strangers having opinions. That's a hell of a shock the first time.

Everest wasn't just a bunch of mates going climbing. It was a big business project — $350,000 in sponsorship, legal contracts signed with sponsors and the government of Nepal. None of us had ever dealt with that. We got treated like a national team but with none of the support: no coaches, no psychologists, no PR people. Our team was dysfunctional. Three of them walked out before we got to base camp. The journalist was writing up every single piece of the infighting — of course that makes the best copy. Then we got onto the mountain, those of us that didn't leave, scrabbled all the way up to the top camp at 8,000 metres, and ran into the famous 1996 storm where two international mountain guides died along with three other people.

[19:53] CATHY:
In the complete chaos we retreated to base camp. This was the first year expeditions ever ran websites from base camp — we were all going: the internet, huh? Curious. Websites. Hmm. And apparently our team had a forum. I didn't know what a forum was. Thousands of people were following this car crash. Thank God Twitter hadn't been invented yet. The storm and these deaths made Everest go viral in worldwide media for the first time — it was the first time you had live access to teams. The first helicopters in weren't rescue helicopters; they were Japanese film crews. We were just climbers, completely bewildered. Nevertheless, the South Africans decided to stick around and try again. As the very last team of the season, we got to the top. So you'd think this roller coaster story has ended with a happy ending: I'm standing on the summit of Everest, talking to my mother. Yeah, it was cool.

And then within 12 hours a member of our team had been killed on the descent. The media went batshit crazy. The swing from wild, unexpected success to complete tragedy within about 12 hours. And then we had to get ourselves off the mountain — physically, mentally — and deal with a complete firestorm of media happening out there while we were still communicating by fax. On the edge of the modern era. That's public failure. It was horrible at the time. But in terms of my life journey, it was a really good learning experience. In the wreckage there are still opportunities — a book contract, speeches, sponsors interested in future projects, people on the mountain going: you were solid out there, let's talk about doing more things. In the middle of all that chaos was the start of a whole new life.

[CHAPTER: The Death Zone — Oxygen, Acclimatisation and What It Really Feels Like — 22:14]

[22:14] CHRIS:
What's the experience on the mountain actually like? The altitude, the death zone, the oxygen — I'm never going to do this, so I'm fascinated.

[22:30] CATHY:
To some extent it's slightly less dramatic. The "death zone" is just a catchy phrase that Reinhold Messner came up with to describe 8,000 metres. But the process of acclimatisation — a lot of people will have felt a little bit of it. Anyone who's flown into a ski area that's high, or taken that cable car up to the Aiguille du Midi on the side of Mont Blanc. That slightly woozy feeling, the imminent headache behind your eyes, the feeling that you're a little short of breath and not sure why. And then if you try and do anything — run, walk upstairs — your body just isn't coming through the way it ought to. That's altitude, and that's what we battle all the way up. We do adapt, starting long before we even get to base camp. It's this endless yo-yo: go up a bit until you feel a bit sick, come back down, sleep a bit lower, go back up, come back down. You're also moving equipment and waiting for weather, so all of this is happening at once.

You can acclimatise fairly solidly up to about 6,500 metres. When I was on the Mazeno Ridge of Nanga Parbat, we were camping at 6,900 metres for six or seven nights and then higher. So you can adapt to somewhere close to 7,000 metres. But after seven, you just feel worse and worse. It's quite personal — different people react differently. Some people climb Everest without oxygen, and that seems to be a combination of the right genetics — maximising your ability to move oxygen — and your mental make-up. The sheer mental grit to keep going.

[25:22] CHRIS:
Do you think that's irresponsible, climbing without oxygen?

[25:22] CATHY:
Not at all. What's irresponsible is not giving up at the right moment. All the serious climbers, anyone who's winning the Piolet d'Or, is not using bottled oxygen. So top achievers — it's not happening. It's certainly possible. On Everest it's been done by all sorts of people. But without oxygen, you are physically slower, so you're up there in the danger zone for much longer. And your thinking capacity is even further reduced — so it's even harder to make good decisions, even harder to know when to turn around. For someone like me — I've been up to about 8,300 metres without oxygen and found that really hard. Eventually the air feels as though it has substance, you're actually having to push through it with every step. Each step is so slow and heavy.

[27:49] CATHY:
And it's not just movement. Cheyne-Stokes breathing is horrible. At night, when you're lying down, normally your breathing gets shallower. But at very high altitude your breathing can get so shallow that you stop altogether. It's not the lack of oxygen that your brain is measuring — it's the build-up of carbon dioxide. When you have too much CO₂ that you haven't expelled, that's when you wake in a complete panic, convinced you're suffocating. You've got to get the carbon dioxide out first to get in a new breath, which of course has much less oxygen than you want. And if you're not careful, you go straight into hyperventilating, which completely fails to get you the oxygen you need. If that happens every time you fall asleep, it can be really tough. That's why a lot of people sleep on just a trickle of oxygen through a mask — much lower than you'd climb with — just to take the edge off that horrible night.

[CHAPTER: Managing Oxygen, Rubbish and the 1996 Storm — 29:00]

[29:05] CHRIS:
How do you plan for those levels of supplies? The oxygen must be complex to manage.

[29:05] CATHY:
Oxygen is heavy and expensive — expensive not just to buy but to fly into the country and then physically carry to base camp. That's why oxygen teams are almost always Sherpa-assisted, because there's all this extra stuff to carry. When I was on Everest, we were using stuff that came out of Russia, and you could expect around one in six bottles to simply not work. These days, when there are a lot of teams, there's a brisk trade: "I've got too much of this and I've run out of that."

After the big storm of 1996, let me take a step aside about oxygen bottles and rubbish. Every team has a liaison officer, and there's a head liaison officer for the whole base camp. Your liaison officer has the serial numbers of your oxygen bottles. You've paid an environmental deposit — if you don't bring back your rubbish, you lose your deposit. But some teams are so wealthy they don't care if they lose their deposit. And in the storm of '96, two leaders had been killed, three other people had been killed, complete panic. Those teams abandoned a lot of their stuff at Camp 4. Not surprisingly — they were trying to get very injured people down. We were at the top camp through the storm. We ran through almost all our oxygen just surviving it — I think three nights up there before we managed to get back down. So we'd run out of oxygen but wanted to stay and have another try. These other teams had oxygen at 8,000 metres that they were legally responsible for, and nobody wanted to go back to fetch it. So that's where you start trading: "If you give us your bottles at 8,000 metres, we'll take over your legal responsibility to get the empties back down again." That's how we got ourselves enough oxygen to make a second attempt.

[32:38] CHRIS:
What happened to the teams during the storm? Was it an avalanche?

[32:38] CATHY:
The fatalities weren't my team — my team was at 8,000 metres, waiting. What happened was four teams arrived on 10 May with a satellite weather report of stable weather — although satellite forecasting back then was nothing like what we have now. We got up there and it was snowing lightly, windy, cold — not what we'd expected. And we'd never been above 8,000 metres. We were climbing by sight; there were no fixed ropes the way there would be now. So our team decided not to go. We'd wait 24 hours and see if the weather stabilised. Three other teams went, including the commercial teams led by Scott Fischer and Rob Hall — two very, very good climbers. It was a hell of a thing to sit in your tent watching some of the best climbers in the world head out into cloud for the summit. "Are we being stupid? Shouldn't we just follow these guys?" But we had agreed we wouldn't climb in poor visibility in ground we didn't know. So we stuck by that agreement. They got to the summit — we heard it on the radio. "God, we should have gone." And then as they descended, the storm came in. Now they're above the top camp on this knife-edge ridge and this huge mountainside in snow and cloud and howling wind and very cold temperatures, trying to find their way back to camp. And of course one leader was dead by then and one was dying — unable to move high on the mountain. So everybody else was every man for himself.

[34:53] CATHY:
And this is where you finally understand what soldiers mean by "fog of war." Everybody was like: but you could have done this, why didn't you do that? Really? We had no idea what was going on. It was the middle of the night. We had very limited battery power on our radios — you could only open your radio to base camp for very short, important calls. The static was desperately loud; you're barely hearing one word in three. The wind was slamming into the tent and the snow — this constant unending noise. We were fully dressed in case our tents tore. You wanted to sleep but you were sitting up there dressed, waiting to see what happened. We eventually got asked via the base camps if we could send someone to check whether the missing people had made it back — maybe they were back at camp with dead radio batteries. Our team leader went out.

Yellow tents. The colour of the season — everybody had yellow tents. Somewhere out on this rocky plain with huge drops off the edge and no railings were yellow tents belonging to different teams. The ice and snow were so strong you basically needed clear cycling glasses to keep your eyes open. You've got a head torch, and all it's doing is lighting up cloud and snow. The wind is swirling, so you can't keep a straight line. You find a yellow tent. You bang on it — no reply. You try and open it; the zips are frozen, you're wearing several pairs of gloves. Eventually you stick your head in, find some guy who's fast asleep because he's exhausted. You ask: "Which team are you from?" Maybe it's the Taiwanese team and their English has gone completely from fatigue. "Who else is missing?" "I don't know. Go away. I'm going back to sleep." How much information have I found? And then: where has my tent gone? And you think: how exactly am I going to find my own camp? So Ian tried, and I don't think he got any terribly useful information. Everybody up there was so confused.

[CHAPTER: Rescuing Frances Arsentiev — An Impossible Decision at 8,600 Metres — 39:00]

[39:37] CHRIS:
I do think this is fairly badly misunderstood when people see reports of someone dying on the mountain and ask why others didn't do more to help.

[39:48] CHRIS:
Cathy, are you comfortable talking about the story of Frances Arsentiev? I know the story, but for listeners who don't — could you talk us through it?

[39:55] CATHY:
So this was my second attempt on Everest. We wanted K2, but we couldn't raise the money for anything except Everest — people are sheep; the last Everest trip got lots of media, so sponsors will pay for Everest. So a lot of adventuring is meeting passion with pragmatism. The other side of Everest: before, we had climbed on the Nepalese side; now we were going round into Tibet, onto the North Ridge. This mountain is enormous. These two routes literally meet right on the summit — you don't even get the same view until you step onto it. From our point of view it was a completely new 8,000-metre mountain. From the sponsors' point of view it was Everest. Great team — much smaller, lower budget, much less media. And it was all working out really nicely all the way up to summit day. The only mistake we made: we left late. We planned to leave at midnight but it just didn't come together and we left at about 2 a.m.

[43:09] CATHY:
We climb up the last bit of the North Face onto the ridge between the north and east faces. This ridge has the three famous rock steps — the First, Second and Third. The Second is very famous. We're approaching the bottom of the First Step. The sun hasn't yet risen — you've got that grey early morning light. I see, off to one side, a body. This is not common; you're not stepping over bodies, but nevertheless there are a few on these big mountains. And honestly they look like they're asleep — the place is a giant deep freeze; they're not decomposing. I always think: empty suitcase. The person has gone and this is just the suitcase. And then this body moved.

[44:39] CHRIS:
Okay, that doesn't...

[44:45] CATHY:
I went across and I found a woman. I had met her before but did not recognise her — she looked so different. Because there weren't that many women on the mountain, I did have a guess it might be Frances. Frances was tied into her harness on an old piece of rope. She had fallen backwards, in this awful U-shaped, upside-down position with her waist high and lying backwards. She'd pulled off her gloves and her jacket — which tells you: acute hypothermia. When people start to get hot and undress themselves. No muscle control at all. But she did recognise that somebody was there and she started to talk. I thought: okay, this is a lot better than I expected. This is not someone who's going to be rescued — or so I thought approaching her. And then she starts to talk and I'm thinking: hang on, maybe I'm wrong.

The rest of my team joined me. We tried to sit her up, get more clothes on her, give her something to drink. It quickly became very clear she wasn't actually with it — not focusing, not responding. Some awareness that people were there, but nothing beyond that. And she was only saying three things, over and over, like a repeating record. No mental awareness that would help us help her. And absolutely no muscle tone — you couldn't even try to stand her up. She couldn't support her own weight at all. A dead weight.

[47:09] CATHY:
And so this is where it gets tricky. You must come to the rescue, right? There are five of us, and we are using oxygen — so we're not acclimatised to be at 8,600 metres without it. And we have no spare masks. The first issue: give the woman oxygen — who takes their mask off and goes off oxygen themselves? Then the next: when we climb, we use oxygen at three litres a minute, which means a bottle lasts maybe five or six hours. But in a medical emergency you put oxygen on full flow, and full flow runs through a bottle in half an hour. So if we put this woman on medical levels of oxygen, we will all have run out within a few hours. There's nobody else out there, no one to call, no stretcher.

Go and find yourself a six-foot man and try to carry him down the road for 10 minutes, with only your rucksack and the clothing you're wearing. See how it goes. It is very difficult to carry or stretcher a victim. Professional rescue teams have proper stretchers and six people minimum who rotate every five minutes. We had to climb down a slope near the North Face of Everest — knee-to-thigh-high little rock cliffs, then narrow ledges, all covered in shattered rock like climbing on ball bearings, with crampons, and in between all that: sheets of ice. You are not going to do an improvised stretcher carry down that slope. Yes, it would have been possible to rope her down. It was going to take days, and she was not going to live — we couldn't keep her alive during the amount of time it would take to get her down. The only way of keeping her alive was to take us all off oxygen, and then we wouldn't have the physical capacity to complete the rescue.

[50:27] CATHY:
And the trouble is you can know this, and she isn't dead yet. And you can't say. And then: what do you do? You stay with her, of course — no one should die alone. Okay. It's freezing cold. We're still in the shadow of the mountain, getting no sun, wind howling. We'd already been with her for quite some time, going through all these different ideas. I have never been so cold. I had this weird mental image that my organs were grey — why grey, I have no idea, but just so cold. And the minute I lost full body heat, we'd have another victim. Potentially that was going to happen to all of us. So if we stayed, other members of the team were at serious risk of collapsing from hypothermia.

[51:58] CATHY:
So we didn't. Three of us went down. And two of the Sherpas, who frankly thought the whole thing was a waste of time from the beginning — "This woman is going to die, this is a waste of time" — they went on to the summit.

[51:58] CHRIS:
It's an incredibly difficult situation. And we have no right to judge it. My only view is you can't put yourself and your team at undue risk. But just for the listeners who don't know the story — could you give a bit of context about why Frances was there alone?

[52:30] CATHY:
Frances was American, trying to be the first American woman to climb Everest without oxygen. She was there with her Russian husband — very experienced; he'd done Everest a number of times. Frances had done quite a lot of climbing, but I don't think she'd ever tried anything quite this hard. Just the two of them — no team, no Sherpas, no backup. They had already spent some time at the top camp waiting for weather, without oxygen, at 8,300 metres. So they'd spent longer than most people would consider advisable, waiting. Then they made their summit bid, got to the top — took a very long time, longer than most would consider advisable. They were seen on the summit by telescope by the Russians at base camp. Then they started down. It appears she collapsed. He presumably clipped her onto the safety rope where we found her, left her while he went looking for help — and he disappeared. His body was found several years later.

No oxygen, no team, no backup. And they had spent a very, very long time at very high altitude.

[CHAPTER: Commercial Everest vs. Alpine-Style Climbing — Where the Line Falls — 55:00]

[55:00] CHRIS:
What lessons can be learned from that? What are your duties from one climber to another on these mountains?

[55:05] CATHY:
I'm not sure that there are lessons to be drawn in a simple way. It ended badly and it's very easy to say: they made their own choices. But I was part of the first ascent of the Mazeno Ridge of Nanga Parbat — full alpine style, no siege, no fixed ropes, no oxygen. Four of us bailed after the first summit attempt. We had 10 days of food; we'd made the first attempt on day 11. So we were seriously running out of food. Four of us decided this was now too risky — including me. Two of them, Rick Allen and Sandy Allan, decided to have another go on their last bottle of gas and with some energy bars and biscuits. They got to the summit at 6 p.m. on day 14. They got to base camp having traversed Nanga Parbat on day 18. They won the Piolet d'Or for this. It was career-defining. But one storm while they were sleeping in snow holes, hallucinating, exhausted, with frostbite — one bad weather day — they'd both be dead. And we'd be having a story about poor decision-making. The cutting-edge stuff is a very fine line between outrageous risks that work and dead. I'm not going to judge people for choosing to be in that space.

[57:47] CATHY:
There are two different things happening right now. There's commercial climbing on Everest — and now on K2 and virtually every 8,000-metre peak. They take the easiest route, put a fixed safety line from the bottom to the top, have Sherpas available to carry gear and guide you. You pay a guide who's done all the organising, and all you've got to do is the physics. But that is completely different from cutting-edge alpine climbing, which continues. There are still small teams out there doing new routes, winter ascents. You can do this on Everest. You don't have to be in the queue. The queue is one season — spring — on one route: the Edmund Hillary route on the south side. There are 15 routes on Everest. People are perfectly free to go and do the other 14, and there is no queue — but they don't because it's too difficult. At least two routes have never been climbed, both on the east side: the Fantasy Ridge and a ludicrously dangerous line straight up the Kangshung Face. You drive for a week to a village in Tibet, trek for a week over a 5,500-metre pass, up a valley where there is nobody. The porters and yaks leave you at your base camp and say: "We'll be back in six weeks — good luck." You are the only people in this valley, the only climbers on this wall. That's the true, pristine Everest experience. It's there. But you have to be good enough.

[CHAPTER: Climate Change, Overcrowding, and the Future of 8,000-Metre Peaks — 01:00:00]

[01:00:11] CHRIS:
Do you think climate change is contributing to more fatalities?

[01:00:35] CATHY:
I don't think so in terms of the 8,000-metre peaks specifically — they're so high and so cold, they're a bit isolated from it. I'm much more aware that climate change is making things more dangerous in the Alps. They close Mont Blanc routes increasingly in August because of rockfall. Some classic mountains of Peru that I climbed when I was young are largely no longer climbed because of glacial retreat, rockfall and unstable ice. I think there's a slightly puritanical thing that wants to say the people in the queues are probably going to die and it's irresponsible. I don't think that's actually true. On the whole, I think it's safer to be in the queue because you're on a solid safety line that experienced Sherpas have put in and are maintaining. The Sherpas go up and down continuously to make sure everything is secured. And it's bad for the guides' business if too many customers die. I think 8,000-metre climbing is actually getting safer and easier because of this infrastructure.

[CHAPTER: After COVID — New Sports, New Learning Curves — 01:02:00]

[01:02:39] CHRIS:
Are you still doing much mountaineering? You're in the Pyrenees at the moment, aren't you?

[01:02:39] CATHY:
Yes and no. I'm not doing a great deal of climbing any more. COVID was probably a bit of a nail in the coffin. Before COVID I'd gone back to rock climbing and actually got myself to my highest grade ever — red-pointing sport climbing. Then COVID hit, my gym closed, I sat on the sofa for a year, and I cannot face clawing my way back. But there was something else interesting. I've always found climbing really interesting, but there's no doubt I feel as if I'm sliding off the back of a lifelong career. I'm never going to be as good as I was at my best.

[01:03:35] CATHY:
So I switched to other sports in the mountains where I'm back on the learning curve, getting better and building experience. I started with skiing — I picked it up when I moved to Europe in my early thirties. My skiing isn't pretty, but it's pretty good. I've done some big ski expeditions: we did Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada at just under 6,000 metres, and skied off it. Took skiing to big mountains for about a decade — more fun than walking home. Now I'm also doing sea kayaking, which is fairly obvious: not in the mountains, but wilderness, risk management, uncertain environment, lots of ways to kill yourself, individual but still done with a team. And canyoning — which I think is super cool and most people have never heard of. Following a river down a mountainside into canyons where the walls are 50 metres high, it's two metres wide, and there is no way out. Once you're in, you follow the river. You either jump or use ropes to abseil down waterfalls. You have to judge the water flow, because once you're in there's no escaping it. Once again, lots of interesting ways to die, but also lots of technical skill required — water management, rope management, cold management. Wildly beautiful. These are learning curves; I'm still on the way up, and I'm finding that really refreshing.

[01:05:53] CHRIS:
I noticed you've been sea kayaking in Norway — Gudvangen fjord? I've done the same. Fantastic, isn't it?

[01:05:53] CATHY:
Beautiful. I did about an eight-week trip this summer — went north with my sea kayak, met up with a friend with her camper van, paddled in Denmark and then Sweden's west coast. Lots of islands. Then up into Norway. We put the kayaks in on lakes, on the inner fjords — beautiful — and went to the outer coast. We did a circumnavigation of an island called Smøla on the outside coast. Norway is just beautiful. And actually today we've been planning a three-week ski-touring trip for April — north of Tromsø. Right up in the Arctic Circle where the mountains come right down to the sea. You're skiing down with the sea below you. I've been wanting to get up there for some time.

[CHAPTER: Women in Adventure — 30 Years of Change — 01:07:30]

[01:08:18] CHRIS:
Taking a big step back from all your work and achievements — what do you think that's done for women in mountaineering? It's a male-dominated industry, isn't it?

[01:08:25] CATHY:
I'm not going to say that my personal achievements have done anything much. But what I've really enjoyed in my adult lifetime is watching the change, and it's been largely great. A generation before me, it was all-male teams. I was there at the "token woman" moment. Although I got a lot of breaks by being the only woman on many male teams, it was quite constricting in ways we didn't always recognise. You had to be a certain kind of "cool girl" who could hang with the guys — the guys set the tone and you had to fit in. What I've watched over 30 years is more and more women getting into the space, and doing so together. Women's adventure groups, women supporting each other, encouragement, information, ideas, opportunities — women going out into the big mountains in all-female teams, which is great. Women climbing the absolute cutting edge — bouldering, sport climbing, trad, ice climbing, mountaineering, ski mountaineering. It's still male-dominated — maybe as a massive generalisation, men are just a little more risk-seeking, women a little more sensible. It's possible it'll always be slightly more men doing these things.

But more and more women are able to say: I can do this. And they don't have to be the cool girl any more. You can be out there with your girlfriends in your raging pink climbing outfit, doing cutting-edge stuff. You can get out there, be tired and stressed and burst into tears, and nobody's going to tell you you're not good enough — because you'll pull yourself together in five minutes and get on with it. There's much more space to be who you are as a woman and also be a high-achieving athlete.

[01:10:41] CATHY:
Social media has also helped. Not everything — there's still a big push on women to look sexy while also being top-end athletes, which is uncomfortable. But social media has allowed women to prove that they have a following. When I first started, you'd still get: "Ooh, women don't sell in adventure — it's a male audience, a male sport, sponsors want Indiana Jones." Now a woman can walk into the room and say: your adventure magazine has 100,000 subscribers, if you're lucky — I have a million followers on Instagram. It's allowed individual athletes in these strange sports to take much more control over their own career, their commercial value, and how they can raise money.

[01:11:15] CHRIS:
There are a host of phenomenal female adventurers out there. I've interviewed a few and got more coming up. Positive sides of social media indeed.

[CHAPTER: Everest, Race and the Story of Black South African Climbers — 01:11:30]

[01:11:30] CATHY:
Can I tell you a story that relates to Everest, commercialisation and women — and also to something rather different?

[01:11:35] CHRIS:
Go ahead.

[01:11:35] CATHY:
I'm South African, so I grew up under apartheid. Climbing is a very middle-class sport — it's expensive, and it requires your family to think going outdoors is somehow a life value. When I was young, people would have sworn blind in South Africa: "Black people don't climb." And there was some truth to it — when you're only two generations out of poverty, the last thing you want to do is go camping. You've only just managed to move into the city. There's no doubt it's about four generations before you start thinking of camping as romantic and life-affirming.

But when Everest got super commercial, we started to get a couple of young Black South Africans — men and women — pursuing Everest. They weren't traditional climbers; they were in the classic commercial mould, going after records: the first Black African to climb Everest, the first Black South African woman to climb Everest. That got attention and interest. And it got a slightly younger generation of Black South Africans thinking: well, I can't imagine having the money for Everest — but are there smaller mountains? Is this a thing? At the same time we've had the growth of commercial training in South Africa. And lo and behold, if given the opportunity, the role model and the training, Black South Africans absolutely climb mountains. Coming out of the commercialisation of Everest is almost a back-movement into more purist climbing — and young Black athletes beginning to think: okay, the outdoors is a place you can be an athlete. It's not just competitive running and football. The wave has hit the wall and come washing back with some really positive effects.

[CHAPTER: Meeting Nelson Mandela — 01:13:40]

[01:13:40] CHRIS:
Am I right that you met Nelson Mandela through some of your endeavours?

[01:13:45] CATHY:
Very, very cool. He had astonishing charisma. The capacity truly charismatic leaders have is that when he was with you, he wasn't projecting his own importance — he, this incredibly accomplished, important man, was like: in these five minutes, I'm all about you. I'm really interested in meeting you and knowing about you. That is quite dazzling on the receiving end. I got my moment — I sat on a sofa with him for about 15 minutes and told him about climbing Everest. I'm sure he didn't care a thing about climbing Everest, but he was totally focused on the story.

He was also actually part of our success. When we tried again on Everest after the big storm — against everybody's advice — he called us on live radio. Just said: "Guys, I believe in you. Good for you for trying again. I think you can do this." Of course he had no idea about climbing, but it was like: God has just called us on the phone. We're going to do what we can.

And I remember once I was at a fancy dinner and he was the guest of honour. There was this receiving line — the poor man had to stand there and shake hands with 200 of the great and good of Johannesburg business society. Most of them were white, given the time. And all the waiting staff and kitchen staff were Black. You could see them at the service door, just peering through, trying to catch a glimpse of him. When he'd finished the receiving line, he said: "Hang on a moment." He walked into the kitchen and shook the hand of every single one of the working staff behind that dinner. His ability to see the people most of us fail to see — and to understand what it meant to give of his time — was remarkable. The greatest gift you can give someone is your time and attention.

[CHAPTER: Call to Adventure and Pay It Forward — 01:17:00]

[01:17:27] CHRIS:
Cathy, this has been an incredible conversation. We have two closing traditions. First, the Call to Adventure — a suggestion to get listeners inspired to go and be adventurous. What is yours?

[01:17:40] CATHY:
I'll give a two-tier call. The climbing-based one: everyone who hasn't tried climbing — go to an indoor climbing gym. Everyone. There's no age limit, no weight limit. It's great fun, it's puzzle solving, it's fantastic exercise — full body movement, mobility, weight-bearing on arms and legs. You do it in a group, you problem-solve together, it's not particularly competitive. Try it if you've never found a form of exercise you really enjoyed. And then, for those already doing indoor climbing — try going outdoors. The two sports are kind of separate now. If you're enjoying it indoors, take it outside and see how it feels on a natural rock face with the wind in your hair and the ground a long way below you.

[01:19:45] CHRIS:
I fancy doing the indoor stuff — might take my little girl.

[01:19:45] CATHY:
It's brilliant for kids. They have such a good power-to-weight ratio. They suddenly go: I can do this thing, I can do it almost as well as my dad. And they don't mind falling off, to be fair — the mat is the fun part.

[01:19:49] CHRIS:
And the Pay It Forward suggestion — a worthy cause or charity project?

[01:19:55] CATHY:
This is very close to my heart. My first expedition — proper glaciers, altitude, ice — was the Rwenzori Mountains, on the border between what is now the DRC and Uganda. A friend of mine, Rita Miller, a British nurse, decided to go out there on the Ugandan side to start doing medical outreach to villages high up in the Rwenzoris, where there are only footpaths. Children — and anyone — can't get to hospital nearly soon enough because it's so difficult. With my help and some other friends, she put together something called the Rwenzori Women for Health project. This is taking small amounts of money and making them as effective as possible — getting nurses out to the road head on the back of little scooters; nobody's buying fancy four-by-fours for aid workers. Local infrastructure, walking into these villages, doing education for the mothers, helping them understand when to bring their children to hospital. They've also started building little village-based insurance schemes — a pot of money when you need to bring a child in, because these hospitals aren't free. They're cheap for us, but they aren't free. And she has managed to do such good work deep in this mountain range with such little bits of money. The fundraising goes via a British society called the Friends of Kagando — I'll give Chris a link for the show notes. The Rwenzori Women for Health project is part of the bigger Friends of Kagando project. If you want to put in a little bit of money that will make a big difference to a small number of people in a very beautiful mountain range, that's the place.

[01:22:13] CHRIS:
Thank you, Cathy. A very noble and worthy cause — and very unique. Sometimes the little charities make the biggest impact in smaller communities. Where can people find more about Cathy O'Dowd?

[01:22:30] CATHY:
There's a website, cathyodowd.com — although that's mostly focused on my corporate speaking work. I'm active on Instagram, fairly close to daily — that's the best place to see where I'm actually up to. Just @CathyODowd on Instagram. And I also run a pretty open Facebook — I think it's Cathy O'Dowd Everest on Facebook.

[01:23:00] CHRIS:
We'll get that listed in the show notes along with all the links. It's been great talking to you, Cathy. Thank you ever so much.

[01:23:05] CATHY:
It's been a great pleasure. I really enjoyed our conversation — it was fun and interesting and went to all sorts of places, which is the best kind of chat.

NARRATOR:
Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. For the show notes and further information, please visit adventurediaries.com/podcast. And finally, we hope to have inspired you to take action and plan your next adventure — big or small. Because sometimes we all need a little adventure to cleanse that bitter taste of life from the soul. Until next time, have fun and keep paying it forward.