View from the top
Highlife Magazine - Oct/Nov 2018
Tim Macartney-Snape has twice stood on top of Mount Everest and climbed many other high-altitude peaks. The acclaimed mountaineer, who has lived in the Highlands for 26 years, tells PETER MEREDITH what drove him to such heights.
AS A BOY GROWING UP on his family’s organic farm in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania), in east Africa, Tim Macartney-Snape would contemplate the surrounding hills and wonder what it would be like to stand on their summits. What would he see from there?
There was only one way to find out. “I spent my life outside,” Tim says. “I was always climbing trees and sometimes falling out of them. And the hills around home, I walked up them because I always loved the view from the top.”
In his 40-plus years of mountaineering, Tim has stood on the summits of many of the world’s highest peaks. He is renowned for his lightweight Alpine climbing style, which means carrying no bottled oxygen and backpacking all his own gear. He has pioneered new routes up Himalayan mountains, made the first Australian ascent of Everest and, on his return to that mountain, he became the first in the world to climb every metre of its full height from sea level. His two Everest climbs in 1984 and 1990 earned him an OAM and an AM respectively.
Tim has lived on his 16-hectare bush block outside Colo Vale since 1992, having moved to the Southern Highlands for the climate, scenic beauty, access to bush and climbing sites, and proximity to Sydney and relatives. His partner Stacy Rodger joined him in 1994. When I visit him, I’m keen to learn how the energetic, outdoorsy kid graduated from those Tanganyikan hills to the world’s highest mountain.
As he steps forward to greet me, he strikes me as extraordinarily tall. In fact, at 188 centimetres, his stature is not exceptional; he’s simply so lean and upright that he looks that way. I can picture him moving up a sheer rock face with the ease of a huntsman spider.
In a spacious living area, as we sit at a dining table surrounded by expanses of glass that look out to a bushy garden, Tim tells his story. His family left Africa in 1967, when he was 11, and settled in Victoria. At 13 he started at Geelong Grammar School, of which his most vivid memories are of his year at the school’s Timbertop campus. “I was taught map reading, survival techniques, emergency first aid and how to avoid hypothermia,” he says. “It reinforced my love of mountains. I loved being free in the hills around the campus. That really steered me in a particular direction for the rest of my life.”
In 1975, aged 19, he started at the Australian National University (ANU), in Canberra, aiming for a Bachelor of Science in biology. He chose ANU because it was close to hills. “Among the first things I did there was join the mountaineering club, the canoe club and the cross-country team.”
Through the mountaineering club he met Lincoln Hall, a fellow ANU student who was to become a regular climbing companion. In 1978 both took part in the club’s expedition to Dunagiri, a 7066-metre peak in northern India. It was a pivotal learning experience for them.
“It was my first time at high altitude and in the Himalaya,” Tim says. “Coping with altitude is a very big hurdle because it’s such a shock. No amount of reading can prepare you for its effect on your body. If you do anything, you’re soon breathing hard, which is very weird, especially if you pride yourself on your physical fitness, as we probably all did.
“You’re also afflicted with intense lethargy because of the lack of oxygen. And you may feel nauseous and have a headache. The trick is to slow down, readjust your pace. After a couple of weeks at base camp it starts to feel a bit more normal.”
Tim believes that being thin and having good lung capacity serve him well. “I seem to be in the upper level of people who cope with altitude. I still get altitude sickness like everyone else, but less so.”
During a break in foul weather, Tim and Lincoln made a dash for Dunagiri’s summit, though in the end only Tim reached it, becoming the first Australian to scale a Himalayan peak higher than 7000 metres. On their way down the pair were caught in a storm. Suffering frostbite, Lincoln was helicoptered off the mountain and later lost some toes.
The second Himalayan peak Tim tackled was 6812-metre Ama Dablam, a precipitous pyramid of rock, ice and snow within sight of Everest. It was there, in 1981, that the itch to get to the top of the world’s highest peak insinuated itself into his brain. “I remember clearly being on Ama Dablam and looking across at Everest and thinking: the view is good here; imagine what it must be like from up there. It was an extension of my thoughts as a little boy looking up at a hill.”
The itch grew into a dream and the dream became persistent. “I kept thinking, wouldn’t it be good for Australians to climb Everest in good style without oxygen and by a new route. And the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced we should be those first Australians at the top of Everest, because we were, at that stage, the most experienced Australians in the Himalaya.”
The logistics of organising an Everest expedition were labyrinthine and expensive. It wasn’t until 1984, the year after Tim climbed 7937-metre Annapurna II, that the expedition got under way. Pioneering an unclimbed North Face route on the Chinese side, having lost his climbing boots and other gear in an avalanche and wearing only cross-country ski boots, he stepped onto the summit, 8848 metres above sea level, with team-mate Greg Mortimer at sunset on October 3, 1984.
Was the view from there anything like he’d imagined it?
“It was,” he says. “You feel much higher than you think you would be when you’re down looking up. Everything looks so far below-the complex and steep terrain of the foothills to the south, the jagged peaks and deep valleys leading off into the blue haze of the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
“But I didn’t expect to get there at sunset. That made it so much more spectacular. Oh, it was amazing. All the peaks, all the snow, were pink, and the sky was a very dark blue, and you could see all the stars and planets. And your shadow is not grey or black on the snow; it’s electric blue.”
As Tim wrote later, the memories of his 20 minutes on the summit that evening remain the most vivid of his life. In 1990 he made his second Everest ascent after walking some 1000 kilometres from the Bay of Bengal on what became known as the Sea to Summit Expedition. Although he climbed the last leg on his own and unsupported, he wasn’t alone on the mountain. There were hundreds of people at Base Camp and a conga line of climbers up the mountain, Tim says. Among all the refuse and human waste there were even dead bodies high up.
“It was quite a different experience. I go to mountains for a wilderness experience, being out in the wild,” he tells me. “Sadly, Everest doesn’t offer that any more. It’s open slather now, every man and his dog are up there. Overcrowding is devaluing mountains.”
On the summit Tim unfurled four flags. One was the flag of the Australian Geographic Society, a major sponsor of the expedition. The second was the flag of a body named the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood, the brainchild of scientist-turned- philosopher Jeremy Griffith. Then came the Australian and Nepali flags.
Griffith founded his organisation in 1983. Tim met him in 1987, was drawn to his ideas and became involved with his work. Today the foundation is known as the World Transformation Movement and Tim is a founding member and patron.
Griffith’s philosophy proposes that at the heart of the human condition there is conflict between primal instinct and intellect, between a capacity for evil as well as a capacity for good, between angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour on the one hand and cooperative behaviour on the other. Shining a scientific light on this conflict and thereby understanding it is deemed to be the key to redeeming and transforming the human race.
After the Sea to Summit expedition, Tim’s views on mountaineering underwent a gradual change consistent with this philosophy. Increasingly he came to see the climbing of ever-higher mountains as an ego trip.
“You climb something and everyone pats you on the back and says, That’s great! What’s next?” So you realise you have to do something next, and it has to be bigger and better. That’s a dangerous frame of mind to be in.”
Although he did climb two other high mountains after Sea to Summit, he’s happy now with lesser heights. “I love climbing, that’s the thing. I love all aspects of it - the thrill of getting up to a view, of finding a way up through uncharted terrain, of challenging myself. I still climb, but not to extreme altitude.”
Highlands climbing sites, such as Mount Alexandra and Mount Gibraltar, offer challenge and satisfaction, he says. To keep physically fit for the task, he goes to a climbing gym or practises on his own climbing wall at home. He also has a hang board installed in his house, enabling him to hang by his fingers to strengthen them.
“I’m climbing better than ever,” he says. “That’s because of technique. Strength is important, but technique much more so. I only really understood that latterly. At 62, I’m climbing harder than I climbed at 20 because my technique is so much better.”
As he has for decades, Tim divides his life between climbing and related activities such as teaching, lecturing, advising, leading treks, and training guides in Nepal. Last year he divested himself of his interest in the successful Sea to Summit outdoor gear company, which he founded in 1990 with fellow climber Roland Tyson.
Neatly symbolising this duality in his activities, the day after our talk Tim is due to go climbing in the Blue Mountains before flying to New Zealand to teach a snowcraft course.
Tim Macartney-Snape has published three books: Everest from Sea to Summit, an account of his 1990 climb, Being Outside, a manual for outdoor people; and Mountain Adventurer, a climbing textbook for upper primary students.