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

In Adventure Diaries Season 2 Episode 4 with your host Chris Watson, we discuss the extraordinary life and adventures of Cathy O'Dowd. As a South African mountaineer, rock climber, and the first woman to summit Mount Everest from both the north and south sides, Cathy’s journey is both inspiring and harrowing.

From the flat plains of Johannesburg to the icy heights of the Himalayas, Cathy’s story is filled with triumphs and tragedies. She recalls the harrowing experience of a storm on Everest in 1996, where a member of her team was tragically lost, highlighting the mental and physical challenges of mountaineering. "The static on the radio is desperately loud. You’re barely hearing like one word in three through this gobbledy," Cathy recounts, capturing the chaos and danger faced by climbers.

Cathy’s adventures began with a summer camp in the Drakensberg, sparking a lifelong passion for climbing. She shares how she moved from local rock climbing to tackling some of the world's most challenging peaks. "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," Cathy explains, emphasizing the unique mental and physical aspects of climbing.

Despite the inherent risks, Cathy has a philosophical approach to failure. She believes in "failing successfully," an idea that has shaped her resilience and determination. "On a big expedition, you can’t escape failure. You don’t get to the top, the media, the sponsors, they call it failure. But as a climber, there are two goals. Get to the top, come home alive," she notes, reflecting on the importance of survival and safety over summiting.

This episode also delves into Cathy’s broader impact on the mountaineering community, especially for women. She shares her views on the evolution of climbing and the increasing involvement of women in the sport. "More and more women are being able to say, I can do this. And they don’t have to be the cool girl anymore. You don’t have to go into the male culture. You can be out there with your girlfriends in your raging pink climbing vortex and doing cutting edge stuff," Cathy states, celebrating the diversity and inclusivity in modern mountaineering.

Cathy’s story is not just about climbing mountains but also about breaking barriers and inspiring others. Join us for an enthralling conversation with Cathy O'Dowd, a true adventurer who continues to push the limits and inspire others through her motivational speaking and personal experiences.

Transcript

Chris Watson (00:00.046)
The static on the radio is desperately loud. So you're barely hearing like one word in three through this gobbledy. And at the same time, the wind is slamming into your tent and the snow. So you've got this constant unending noise. We're fully dressed because we're aware that if our tents tear, we're in the storm. So at 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. And the media went batshit crazy. And it was just the swing from this wild and kind of unexpected success to this complete tragedy within about 12 hours. And then we've got to get ourselves off the mountain.

Physically, we've got to cope with this mentally and there's 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 to try and help them with the children and help them understand when to try and bring them to hospital. And she has managed to do such good work deep in this mountain range via a British society called the Friends of

Welcome to another episode of the adventure diaries. Today my guest is Cathy O'Dowd, a South African rock climber, mountaineer and all -round adventurer and also 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.

Cathy has broken records and pushed the limits of adventure and is now inspiring people across the globe to her motivational speaking, covering not just the physical heights she's reached but also the mental and emotional journey along the way. So settle in and enjoy this fantastic conversation with Cathy O'Dowd. Cathy O'Dowd, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you? Great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Chris Watson (02:20.238)
You're welcome. Well, thank you. I'm very honored to have a lady of your talents and achievements on the show. So some of which we're going to get into. The purpose of this is really to talk about some of your adventures. And I think just as a way as a short introduction, a climber, world record breaking adventurer and mountaineer as well. You're an author and a worldwide motivational speaker. And some of the things I want to kind of navigate to do.

today is your summits being the first South African to summit Everest in 1996. And then again, in 1999, you know, becoming the first female to summit from both the North and the South, which is an incredible achievement. So, but.

kind of rolling back a little bit, how did that all come to be? So growing up in Johannesburg and where does the, you know, from a very different landscape from the Himalayas, how did you get from Johannesburg to be summited in the world essentially? It's a good question. So let's give you the sort of the key beats. I grew up in suburban Johannesburg. So it's high, but it's a huge flat grass plain, not a mountain in the south.

My parents didn't do any of this stuff. Most we did were day walks. So step one was summer camp as a young teenager in the Drakensberg. And I discovered hiking and camping and thought, okay, all of this is quite fun. Got to try rock climbing once. And I liked it, there was nowhere to go. This was long before indoor gyms and all of this kind of thing. So I held onto that thought. And when I arrived at university in Johannesburg,

what was then Vitz University. There was a rock climbing club and I joined and I loved it. And the thing is, I was terrible at sport at school. The whole connecting with a ball, it doesn't happen. Hockey, tennis, netball, whatever, and all these dreadful team girl sports that my school did. I hated all of them. I was terrible.

Chris Watson (04:35.854)
So I sort of pigeon -holed myself as a bit of an academic nerd who wasn't any good with physical activity. 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 these beautiful outdoor places. It's very individual, but you are part of a tight -knit little team that's managing the safety. So it's kind of got both aspects.

I like this, this is great. So I got quite quickly into rock climbing and Johannesburg is good for that. And then from there, I just started on a lifelong journey of being curious. What would it be like to try a bigger rock wall, multi -pitch? What would it be like to go somewhere where there's ice? There's a tiny bit in the Drakensberg, but not much. Like a proper expedition.

My first one was Central Africa in the Ruanzori Mountains. Then it was Bolivia, so in the Andes. Eventually I took a year off between my university degrees and spent most of it in the Alps, living on a tiny little bits of money and trying to do as much climbing as I could. And my next step, I really wanted to go to the Himalaya, anyway in the Himalaya.

I didn't care where, I didn't care what mountain, but I didn't know how to get there. You know, this is long before commercial teams where you could just buy a place. You had to be friends with people who were going, you had to have the experience to be invited. It made it very difficult to kind of get started. If you didn't have a friend group, you didn't have the experience, how on earth were you supposed to break in? And so that was the problem. I was...

contemplating when I picked up a newspaper in the late 1995 in November, big headline splash, the first South African Everest expedition. I was like, wow, and they're all men, which didn't even seem particularly surprising. But further down the page was a bizarre offer running a competition.

Chris Watson (07:04.142)
to find a girl. And the headline was something like, are you the woman with the balls for the summit? And you're just like, my God. The men have all been invited based on their CVs and their experience. And now they're going to run some bikini parade newspaper competition to find a girl. And it was more or less what they were doing. It was driven by the newspaper who was a big sponsor. And they just wanted to kind of...

almost literally, sex up the coverage, just get more kind of engagement in the story. And I looked at this, I thought, yeah, this is a completely poisoned opportunity. Yeah, I was doing my masters in journalism, you know, I was young and feminist and independent, and I'm just like, hell, this is not how you include women in teams. But, but.

The process was you had to write a motivation. You didn't even have to be a climber. You just had to write a motivation why I want to climb Everest. That's so crass sounding, isn't it? But then they'd come up with a short list of six and they'd take them to Kilimanjaro for what was frankly very early reality television. We won't even use the word yet. And the six woman would get a free trip to Kilimanjaro.

as part of a sort of selection expedition. And I knew I had a good chance. Well, I thought I did 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 about the whole thing and went like, okay, I'll sign up. And yeah, it changed my life completely.

That's incredible. So, were you competitive? Were you always been competitive at that point? 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 not competitive, which is slightly odd given that I spend a lot of time now either with climbers who can be very goal driven or frankly with corporate executives, given my motivational speaking work.

Chris Watson (09:29.166)
Who are terribly goal -driven? And here I'm going like, no, no, no, it's the process. I'm interested in the process, the experience, the journey. You know, the goals give you a direction to move in, but that's not what I'm after. I want the experience. I've heard you talk about failing, but failing successfully as part of a team. Can you elaborate on that? Yes, this has been...

an interesting journey for me because I think like a lot of young women I was both a little perfectionist. I didn't want to try something unless I was pretty certain I could do it. And I was a bit... Timid isn't quite the right word. But I wasn't running out there doing crazy stuff.

And I was, I didn't want to be seen to fail. I've been academically successful. I was a good girl. The teachers liked me. Failing was not in my repertoire. So 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.

which I realised through climbing.

Chris Watson (10:57.358)
On a big expedition, you can't escape failure. You don't get to the top, the media, the sponsors, they call it failure. But as a climber, there are two goals. Get to the top, come home alive, and uninjured. That would be good. Clearly, you want both, and at some point, they may drift. And now which one do you choose? And summit fever, basically, is when people completely forget about coming home alive.

and are just obsessed by how much they've invested in trying to get to this particular summit. And that can lead to some very, very bad outcomes.

But if you realize you're going to have to drop the summit and turn towards a safe exit for goal number two, come home alive, that can be very interesting because it's going to happen in a moment of crisis, whether it's storm or avalanche or illness or injury. So it's going to be stress, difficulty, limited options, people are going to be tired.

And now you have to dig into all that emergency training that you don't get to use normally. And in these difficult circumstances, try and execute a withdrawal. And if you do it successfully, it's actually very confidence building. You're like, yeah, I can see an emergency. I can realize when I need to switch tracks. I can hold it together in difficult circumstances. I can improvise because you never know exactly what the disaster will be. So you can't have a pre -

planned exit, exactly. So I took my skill set and improvised my solution and afterwards you go like, okay, I can do that. Which now means I'm prepared to try something harder because I have greater confidence in my ability to exit if I have to. So that's become a productive way to think about failing as well. You will always learn something.

Chris Watson (12:59.214)
That's very philosophical. Going back to, so that Killam and Jit, so how did you master all that then failing successfully and that, is that quite intuitive or is that just through the days and the years on the mountains and have you always had that type of view? Well.

They're kind of two different spaces where you might be failing. I haven't found failing on mountains to be very difficult because as I said I'm not actually goal driven, I'm process driven, I'm interested in the journey which means I'm not going to sacrifice everything for a single summit. I'm just not, I'm too sensible. That does mean I've never been truly world -class as a climber because

I get to a point where I'm just like, hell no. And there are other people who are still prepared to lay even more on the line. Few of them die. Some of them end up in world class and win the Pia Littor. But I don't have quite that level of complete single -minded commitment to any individual objective. And I mean, I kind of, I admire them.

And part of me is regretful that I don't have the ability to put everything on the line. But on the other hand, some of those very successful climbers, they have nothing else. You sit in a tent with them for a week in a storm and they have nothing to talk about that isn't just about the goal pursuit in climbing. And you think if these guys ever get injured and can't continue to climb, they have no life. They have nowhere else to turn.

was I've always thought, you know, I could actually do other things. I do have other interests. So I think, you know, truly high level achievement does come with a kind of monomaniacal obsession as well. But anyway, I think we got to the end. No, no, that's okay. Is there maybe, so you never set out to conquer, well conquer, I hate that word actually. You never set out to conquer. Yeah, you never set out to.

Chris Watson (15:16.302)
take on Everest, did you? Obviously, you've been into that competition essentially. The Guardian, was it? Was it the Guardian newspaper? No, it was the South African Sunday Times. was it South African? Not the same as your UK Sunday Times. Yes, so from that then to Kilimanjaro then, was it on to the base camp before you got to... So was it ever in your plan as a rock climber to take on Everest at some point? No.

I had no interest in Everest, none. And remember, I'm not just a rock climber. I'm a mountain climber. I've climbed in the Andes, I've climbed in Central Africa, I've climbed in the Alps. That's not rock climbing. That's mountaineering. What I hadn't done was go above 6 ,000 metres. So that's a bit of a jump from 6 to 8 ,850.

So the next part of the journey, I get on the Kilimanjaro trip and again, I'm essentially just interested in the Kilimanjaro experience. Although that being said, by the end of the trip, I thought I am the only one of these six women who's actually a good contender to go to Everest. So I was trying not to be competitive, but in the back of my mind, I was pretty convinced I was the best choice. And I got selected.

to join the Everest trip. Now there's a whole lot of extra complication about this and we did actually end up with Deshaun Desil, another woman in the group, joining the trip as well. But you do not have the time on this podcast to cover that whole part of the story. So now myself and Deshaun are on the Everest team. Of course the men are not happy because we've got far more media coverage for this whole, you know, circus.

then they're getting pre -Everest because South Africans aren't that invested in Everest as a concept. So it's not particularly warm welcome. The team is dysfunctional right from the beginning. And that dysfunction will dog us all the way through the Everest climb. And so this is where the second type of failure comes in, which is actually the question I got sidetracked.

Chris Watson (17:35.438)
If the first kind of failure is just straightforward, climbing to the mountain, do you get to the top, do you turn back? There's another kind of failure, which is the big public one. When you're part of a project that spirals into chaos and infighting and disaster, and the media just pick over the remnants, and you find yourself as a fairly private individual, just slashed on the front pages and strangers having opinions, that's a hell of a shock the first time it happens to you.

and that I really, really didn't like and wasn't prepared for. Because Everest wasn't just a bunch of mates going climbing or even a few people who know each other vaguely from a club. Everest was a big business project. There was $350 ,000 in sponsorship, legal contracts signed with all sorts of sponsors and then with the government of Nepal.

requirements in terms of media coverage in return for money and so on. None of us had ever dealt with that and we got treated like a national team. But with none of the support of a real national team, you have coaches and psychologists and PR people and media managers. We had...

And our team was dysfunctional and three of them walked out before we got to base camp. And the journalist was writing up every single piece of the fight because of course that makes the best media copy. And then we got onto the mountain, those of us that didn't leave and scrabbled all the way up to the top camp to 8 ,000 meters and ran into this, the famous storm of 1996 where two international mountain guides died along with three other people.

And in the complete chaos, we retreated back to base camp. And this was the first year that Expeditions ever ran websites from base camp. We were still just kind of going like, the internet, huh? Curious. Like websites. Hmm. And our team had a website, and apparently it had a forum. I didn't know what a forum was. And I had no idea that the

Chris Watson (19:53.326)
Thousands of people were now following this car crash on the forum. And I have no idea what that meant. Thank God Twitter hadn't been invented yet. But, and you know, this huge, it wasn't just us, the South Africans, the storm and these deaths made Everest go viral in world -wide media for the first time. It was the first time you had live access to teams. And the first helicopters in weren't rescue helicopters. It was...

Japanese film crews, television crews. And we're just climbers completely bewildered by this. But nevertheless, the South Africans did decide to stick around and try again. And as the very last team of the season, we got to the top. Which makes you think that this roller coaster story has now ended with a lovely happy ending. I'm standing on the summit of Everest. I'm talking to my mother.

Yeah, it was cool. And then within 12 hours, a member of our team had been killed on the descent. And the media went batshit crazy. And it was just the swing from this wild and kind of unexpected success to this complete tragedy within about 12 hours.

And then we've got to get ourselves off the mountain physically, we've got to cope with this mentally, and of course there's no support for any of this. And then we have to deal with a complete firestorm of media that's happening kind of out there because we're still sort of communicating by fax. We're on the edge of the modern era. So you kind of know that there's a fire running out there, but you also aren't hearing it quite live, so you don't know what's being said and you don't get to reply to it. Yeah.

That's public failure, walking into that kind of, and it was horrible at the time. But in terms of my life journey, it was a really good learning experience. Because you tried your way through it. And in the wreckage, there are still opportunities. There's a book contract, there are speeches. There are sponsors, believe it or not, interested in future projects. There are people you've met on the mountain who are going like, yeah, you, you would.

Chris Watson (22:14.99)
you were solid on the mountain, let's talk about doing more things in the future. So in the middle of all of that chaos was the start of a whole new life, which I've been living ever since. That's incredible, Cathy. So what's it like when you get to that? What's the experience on the mountain like from base camp to high altitude to dealing with oxygen? Because I'm never going to do this ever. I'm just so intrigued.

someone that's a mountaineer that gets up to those high elevations, the dangers, the death zone, the oxygen, everything that goes with it, what is it like? Well, 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 meters. But the process of acclimatization...

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 very slightly woozy feeling, that sort of imminent headache behind your eyes, the feeling that you're a little short of breath and you're not sure why. And then if you try and do anything, run, walk up a flight of stairs, the feeling that your body just isn't coming through the way it ought to. And you're not...

don't get it. That's altitude and that's what we battle all the way up and of course we adapt. So we start to adapt long before we even get to base camp and it's this endless yo -yo process. Go up a bit till you feel a bit sick, come back down a bit, steep a bit lower, go back up, come back down, go back up, come back down and of course you're also moving equipment and you're waiting for weather so all of this is happening together.

and you can acclimatize fairly solidly certainly up to six and a half thousand meters. And I mean when I climbed Nanga Parbat, well no, when I was on the Mizehno ridge of Nanga Parbat, the Mizehno ridge which took us like seven days to traverse sits at nearly seven thousand meters so we were camping at six thousand nine hundred meters for six or seven nights and then higher.

Chris Watson (24:36.526)
as we got around to the mountain. So you can adapt up to somewhere close to seven, but after seven, you just feel worse and worse. Now it's quite personal, different people do different things. And obviously some people climb Everest without oxygen. And that does seem to be a combination of having the right genetics, you'll be able to max your ability to move oxygen and your mental makeup as well. Just having the sheer mental.

grit to keep that. Do you think that's irresponsible doing that without oxygen? No, not at all. I think what's irresponsible...

Chris Watson (25:22.574)
is not giving up at the right moment. So I mean, you know, it's a no. All major climbers now do not use oxygen. So anybody who's done anything that's getting respect, that's winning the Pirellet d 'Or is not using bottled oxygen. So let's be quiet here. Top achievers, it's not happening. And it's certainly possible.

On Everest, it's been done by all sorts of people, men and women, different nationalities. But it is a pretty elite group that have the physical and mental capacity. And there's no doubt that 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. It's even harder to...

work through when you need to turn around, when it is just too dangerous to keep on trying to do this thing. So for someone like me, I've been up to about 8 ,300 without oxygen. I found that really hard. Eventually the air feels like it's actual, it has substance. You're actually having to push through it with every step. Each step just feels so slow and heavy.

When you try and shoot video of people at high altitudes, you're just like, Jesus, get on with it. You look like you're moving in slow motion. This is not exactly high -polar video. It's hard to move. I mean, I have enormous admiration for the people who are doing the Everest speed ascents, both various of the Sherpas and a local one to me, Kilian Jornet, to move at that speed at that altitude.

That's impressive. But for the rest of us, yeah, we need that trickle. We're getting through the oxygen model. And it's not just movement during the day. Chainstokes breathing, horrible. So at night, when you're lying down, normally your breathing gets shallower. You know, it's part of relaxing and going to sleep. But at very high altitude, your breathing can get so shallow that you stop altogether.

Chris Watson (27:49.806)
And it's not the lack of oxygen that your brain is measuring, it's the build up of carbon dioxide. So when you've got too much carbon dioxide that you have not expelled, that's when you wake up in a complete moment of panic, convinced you're suffocating because you have no oxygen and 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 that's just horrible because you wake up panicking,

And if you're not careful, you go straight into hyperventilating, breathing much too fast, which completely fails to get you the oxygen you need. And if you have that happening every time you fall asleep, it can be really tough. That's why a lot of people will actually 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 sight.

How do you plan for that level of those types of supplies and the oxygen? Because you must have to take into account things going wrong or weather patterns where you're hunkered down for longer periods of time. And then I suppose the balance of what you have to carry or take with you, is that a bit complex to manage and plan? Yes, it is complex and oxygen is heavy. It's expensive.

It is expensive not just to buy it, but you've got to get it both to fly it into the country and then move it physically just to base camp. All of this costs money. And then you've got to start moving it up the mountain and somebody's got to carry it. Yeah, that's why oxygen teams are almost always Sherpa assisted, just because there's all this extra stuff to carry. I just, I expect that modern oxygen bottles are...

better made, but when I was on Everest, we were using stuff that came out of Russia. And you could expect, say, one in six bottles to just not work. And yes, it's possible to run through your bottles and just not have anything left. These days, when there are a lot of teams, there's certainly a brisk trade in, I've got too much of this and I've run out of that. Can we talk? After that big storm that I mentioned in 1996.

Chris Watson (30:14.894)
Let's take a step aside about oxygen bottles and rubbish. Every team has a liaison officer, an individual per team, and then there's a head liaison officer for the whole base camp. This is on the Nepalese side. Your liaison officer has the serial numbers of your oxygen bottles. You have paid an environmental deposit. If you don't bring back your rubbish, you will lose your deposit. So they do try to enforce...

you know, environmental rules. There are some teams that are so rich they don't care if they lose their deposit. And there are times when things go wrong. So that big storm of 96, two leaders have been killed. Three other people have been killed. Complete panic. Those teams abandoned a lot of their stuff at Camp 4. Not surprisingly, they're now trying to get very injured people down as well as just deeply traumatized.

team members. We are actually at the top camp through the storm. We run through almost all our oxygen just surviving the storm. It was been I think three nights up there before we managed to get back down. So we've run out of oxygen but we'd like to stay and have another try. These other teams have oxygen up there at 8 ,000 meters that they're legally responsible for and nobody wants to go back to fetch it. They all just want to go back to the top camp.

home. So that's where you start trading. If you give us your bottles at 8 ,000 meters, we'll take over your legal responsibility to get the empties back down again. And that's how we actually got ourselves enough oxygen to make a second attempt. What happened to your team members on that then during the storm? The fatalities? Was it avalanche? What happened? Just trying to keep the

Facts clear, not my team. My team is at 8 ,000 meters. What has happened is four teams have arrived on the 10th of May with a satellite weather report of stable weather, although remembering that satellite weather back then wasn't what we have now, not nearly as good.

Chris Watson (32:38.062)
We get up there and it's snowing, lightly, but it's windy, it's cold, it's snowing. This isn't what we expected. And, you know, we haven't been above 8 ,000 meters. We're climbing by sight, basically. We do not like the idea of climbing where we've never been before, in cloud, with bad visibility. Remembering again for people who follow modern Everest, no fixed ropes. We climbed to the summit of Everest solo.

We're not following a line in the mist the way they would do now. So our team decides not to go. We're going to wait 24 hours at Camp 4 and see if the weather stabilizes. Now three other teams go, including these two commercial teams led by two very, very good climbers, Scott Fisher and Rob Hall. And it's a hell of a thing to sit in your tent watching some of the best climbers in the world.

head out into the cloud for the summit of Everest. You're like, are we being stupid? Shouldn't we just be following these guys? Who are we to think we know better? But we had agreed that we wouldn't climb in kind of poor visibility and unstable weather. Not into ground, we didn't know. So we stuck by that agreement. They got to the summit of Everest. We heard it on the radio. Like, God, we...

We should have gone. We've blown it. And then as they descended, the storm came in. And so now they're above the top camp on this knife -edge ridge and then this big mountainside trying to get down to this huge area, say, I've got no idea, four football pitches maybe in size, but then drops off on either side. And in...

snow and cloud and howling wind and very, very cold temperatures. These team members are, these people from these other teams are out there wandering around trying to find their way back to camp.

Chris Watson (34:53.806)
And of course, one leader is dead by now and one is dying, unable to move very high on the mountain. So everybody else is kind of unorganized, every person for themselves just traveling their way down the mountainside. And this is where you finally understand what soldiers mean by fog of war.

because everybody was like, but you could have done this and why didn't you do that? And I, really? We've got no idea what's going on. It's the middle of the night. We've got very limited battery power on our radios. We can't recharge our batteries. So you can only open your radio to your base camp for very short, important calls. The static on the radio is desperately.

So you're barely hearing like one word in three through this gobbledygook. And at the same time, the wind is slamming into your tent and the snow. So you've got this constant unending noise. We're fully dressed because we're aware that if our tents tear, we're in the storm. So at the middle of the night, you really want to sleep, but you're sitting up there dressed, waiting to see what happens. We eventually got asked...

via the base camps if we could go and send someone to see if these missing people were back because maybe they're back at camp and their radio batteries are dead. You know, maybe everybody's worrying for nothing. How do you know? And our team leader went out. And again, this is things people don't think about.

Yellow tents. The colour of the season. Everybody had yellow tents. So somewhere out there on this rocky plain with huge drops off the edge and no railings are yellow tents belonging to different teams. And the ice and the snow was so strong you basically needed clear sunglasses like cyclists might wear but we didn't have them. You can't open your eyes and look because it's coming straight into your eyeballs.

Chris Watson (37:11.726)
You've got a head torch, that's your only source of light and all it's doing is just lighting up the cloud and the snow. And so you go out into this and the wind is swirling, so it's not easy to keep a straight line. You find a yellow tent. You bang on it. There's no reply. You try and open it. The zips are frozen. You know, you're wearing several pairs of gloves. How many pairs of gloves do you take off to attempt to open the zip?

And eventually you stick your head in, you find some guy who's fast asleep because he's exhausted. He stumbled in a few hours ago. And you're like, which team are you from? And you know, maybe it's the Taiwanese and they're English. They're just so tired, their English has gone completely. And like, who else is missing? It's like, I don't know. No idea. Go away. I'm going back to sleep. Okay. You know, how much information have I found? And you come out of that and you're like, okay.

That was a yellow tent. Let's find another yellow tent. And then you go like, and where's my tent gone? In the darkness, in the swirling wind. You know, how exactly, you start thinking, how am I going to find my own camp? And you know, and so Ian tried and I don't think he got any terribly useful information because we were so confused. Everybody who was up there was so confused.

And it was just so hard to get any information. Sorry, that's a bit of a rant, but I think often you really don't get the amount of niggling detail that makes a situation much more difficult than they are now. I mean, I think you've really brought that to the fore. I think it's an unforgiven and hospitable place to be at the best of times in the middle of the night, indescribable. It's just, yeah, it's...

I mean, you're putting you and your own team at risk, I suppose, as well, aren't you, by overextending yourself? And I think what you said about knowing your limits and when to fall back a little bit, that should not be overstated. I do think this is, we'll skip a minute to modern Everest, or say modern 8 ,000 -metre climbing.

Chris Watson (39:37.326)
This is fairly badly misunderstood when people see reports of some guy was dying on the mountain and why didn't other people do more to help him?

Chris Watson (39:48.494)
your ability to help can be severely limited. And when most people imagine that I'd help, what they're imagining, you know, honesty, is pulling out their mobile phone and calling 112. That's how we help in the modern world. We bring in the professionals as quickly as we can, they take over, and maybe the guy dies in the back of the ambulance on the way to hospital, but we don't see it. So wouldn't that, Cathy, yeah, that...

Are you comfortable talking about the story of Francis Arsenev? Francis Arsenev? Yeah, because I think what you were just about to touch on there is very important in terms of, yeah, so if you could maybe just tell us in your own words about that. I mean, I know the story, but for maybe people that don't know that and just, you know, yeah, just talk us through that. So this was by Second Attempt Renewalist.

I was like, hang on, this woman said like 10 minutes ago she didn't want to climb Everest the first time. What's this about? So very briefly, I actually wanted to climb K2, but I didn't have the experience yet. K2 is a very serious mountain. And so myself and my climbing partner were like, okay, we want to go to another one of like the top six. We couldn't raise the money. Still based in South Africa.

Nobody was interested, you know, Katchanyunga or Makalu or beautiful mountains. Nobody cared. But it quickly became apparent we could actually raise sponsorship for Everest. Like we've done it. What's the point? But, you know, people are sheep and they said the last Everest trip got lots of media. The next one must be going to be the same. Like we'll pay for Everest. God. So a lot, frankly, of

adventuring is meeting passion, what you really want to do, with pragmatism, what you can pay for. So, where's the crossover? The other side of Everest. So before we have climbed on the Nepalese side, now this is going round into Tibet, onto the north face, actually the North Ridge route. And this mountain is enormous. And these two routes,

Chris Watson (42:10.99)
literally meet right on the summit. You don't even get to see the same view until you step onto the summit. So from our point of view, it's like a completely new 8000 metre mountain, which meets what we're looking for, which is to gain experience. From the sponsors, it's Everest. So that's why I'm going back to Everest even though I didn't mean to. So great team.

much smaller, lower budget, much less media and it was all working out really nicely all the way up to our summer day. The only mistake we make is we leave late. We kind of plan to leave at midnight but it just doesn't come together and we leave at about two o 'clock.

Chris Watson (43:09.102)
Now as far as we know, we're the only team at the top camp or above the top.

Five of us, three Sherpas, two Westerners. Now you climb up the last bit of the north face and you get onto the ridge line between the north and the east faces. And then this ridge line has three famous rock steps, the first, the second and the third. The second is very famous.

and we're approaching the bottom of the first step. The sun has not yet risen, but you've got that gray early morning light. So you can begin to see some kind of distance. It's not just the torches.

and I've got the first step looming on my side and I see off to one side a body. Now this is not common, you're not stepping over bodies, but nevertheless there are a few and I have seen a couple in my time on these big mountains. So, and honestly they look like they're asleep because the place is a giant deep freeze. They're not rotting or anything.

They look like they're asleep so I always just think empty suitcase. The person has gone however that works and you know this is the suitcase. And then this body move.

Chris Watson (44:39.246)
Okay, that doesn't...

Chris Watson (44:45.134)
So I went across, I was in front, I went across to have a look and I found a woman. Now, I had met her before, I did not recognize her, but because there weren't that many women on the mountain, it meant that I did have a guess that it might be Frances. But I wasn't sure, she looked so different. I'd only met her once before. And Frances is...

She's tied in to her harness on an old piece of rope. She has fallen backwards, so she's in this awful U -shaped upside down position with her waist high up and lying backwards. She's pulled off her gloves and her jacket, all of which, so a lot of this tells you now acute hypothermia. When people start to get hot and undress themselves. No muscle control at all to be lying in that position.

But she does recognize that somebody is there and she starts to talk. It's like, okay, this is a lot better than I thought because when I was approaching I thought this person is dying, you know, this is. This is not someone who's going to be rescued. And then she starts to talk and I'm like, hang on, maybe I'm wrong.

And then the rest of my team joins me, we try and get her to sit her up, we try and get some more clothes on her, we try and give her something to drink. It becomes very clear that she's not actually with it. She's not focusing, she's not responding to us. There's some awareness that people are there, but there's nothing beyond that. And she's only saying three things, and she says them over and over.

you know, sporadically, you know, like a repeating record. And it's like, okay, there's no mental awareness here that is going to help us help her. And there's absolutely no muscle tone. You can't even try and stand her up. She can't even support it. Her legs just don't carry her weight at all. So this is a dead weight risk.

Chris Watson (47:09.166)
And so this is where it gets tricky. Because like, okay, you must come to the rescue. All right. There are five of us. We are using oxygen. So we're not acclimatized to be at 8 ,600 meters without oxygen. And we have no spare masks.

So the first thing is like, give the woman oxygen. Who takes their mask off and goes off oxygen themselves?

Then there's the next one, when we climb, we use oxygen, I mean this is back in the day, I don't know what they're doing now, but back in the day, three liters a minute, which means your bottle lasts, I don't know, five or six hours maybe? But when they give oxygen, say a base camp, in a medical emergency, they put it on full flow, and full flow will run through a bottle in half an hour. So,

If we put this woman onto medical levels of oxygen, we'll have run out of oxygen, all out of oxygen, within a few hours. There's nobody else out there. There's no one to call to come and help. There is no stretcher. So this is the next one for the you must rescue at all costs people. Go and find yourself a six foot guy.

and try and carry him down the road for 10 minutes. And all you've got is your rucksack and the clothing you're wearing. See how it goes. It is very difficult to stretch or carry victims. This is why professional rescue teams have professional stretchers and they have, you know, six people minimum and they rotate them out like every five minutes to give them a break.

Chris Watson (49:04.462)
And we've got to climb down a slope like this, near the north face of Everest. It's these drops, like kind of knee -high, up -to -thigh -high little cliffs of rock, and then these narrow ledges. And it's all covered in this shattered rock, so it's like climbing up on ball bearings. You know, what are they? Crampons. And then in between all that shattered moving rock and the rock steps are sheets of ice.

you are not going to do some kind of improvised stretcher carry of a victim down the slope. So yes, it would be possible to rope her down. It's going to take days and she is not going to live.

We cannot keep her alive during the amount of time it's going to take for us to get her down that slope. Because the only way of keeping her alive is to take us all off oxygen and we aren't going to be able to do the rescue because we don't have that physical capacity.

And the trouble is you can know this and she isn't dead yet. And you know you can't say.

And then you run into the next problem, which is...

Chris Watson (50:27.118)
What do you do? And it's like, you stay with her, of course you stay with her, no one should die alone. Like, okay, it's freezing cold. We're still in the shadow of the mountain, we're not getting any sun, the wind is howling. We've already been with her for quite some time as we run through all these different ideas. And could we do this, could we do that? Why wouldn't this work? And we're going like, no, no, no, no, no. I have never been so.

I mean, I've been cold. And I've had that thing they call the hot aches when your fingers warm up again after ice climbing and it hurts like hell and stuff. But this... I had this weird mental image that my organs in my core were grey. Why grey? I have no idea. But it's just, this is what my brain was giving me, that they were in there, that they were grey and that they were just so...

I'm losing my full body heat. And the minute that happens, we've got another victim. Now we've got somebody else who can't walk because they are so cold. And that's potentially going to happen to all of us. So if we stay here with...

potentially somebody else will die. And certainly other members of this team are now put at serious risk as somebody else collapses from hypothermia. You can't do it.

Chris Watson (51:58.03)
So we didn't. I went down, I mean, I just couldn't refocus. Three of us went down. And two, two of the Sherpas, who frankly thought the whole thing was a waste of time right from the beginning. They were like, this woman is gonna die. This is a waste of time. They went on to some success. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an incredibly...

I mean, it's an incredible situation. And I mean, for someone like me or anyone outside, we can't cast aspersions or judge on that. We've got no right to do that. It's an unforgiving environment. You can't, you know, my only view on it is you can't put yourself and your team at risk by taking undue risks. You know, the way that you describe the mountain, you know, the, I mean, by all accounts, you know,

what would you be saving if you managed to try and get, if you even attempted to that, you know, it's just so unfortunate. I mean, I think it's worth just for the listeners who don't know the story to give a little bit of context of why Frances is there alone. Frances was American. She was trying to be the first American woman to climb Everest without oxygen. She was there with her Russian husband.

Now he was 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. So it's just the two of them. No team, no Sherpas, no backup, nobody else. They had already spent some time at the top camp waiting for weather, without oxygen, 8 ,300 meters. So they spent longer than most people would have thought advisable, waiting.

Then they tried their summit bit. This is kind of known because Russians back at base camp could see them by telescope. So we have a little bit of information. So they then made their summit bit, got to the top, took a very long time to get to the top, longer than most people would consider advisable. They were seen on the summit by telescope by the Russians at base camp. Then they started...

Chris Watson (54:17.134)
on their way back down and it would appear that she collapsed. He then presumably clipped her onto the safety rope where we found her, left her while it seems to go looking for help and he disappeared. His body was found several years later and he clearly found her.

So yeah, no oxygen, no team, no backup. And they spent a very, very long time, very high altitude trying to get to the top.

What lessons can be learned from that? I mean, I suppose it's a very different time now, isn't it? I suppose the commercialization of it, like you said, about the ropes and the oxygen and the groups of people that are going up and down and the overcrowding, it's probably a very different experience. But in terms of like the duties from one climber to another on these mountains and your perspective, are there any lessons that can be taken from that? I'm not sure that there are.

I mean, so you tell the story and it ended badly and it's very easy to go like, ooh, ooh, they made their own choices. But I was part of the team that did the first ascent of the Mizzouna Ridge, well of Nanga Parbat via the Mizzouna Ridge. And four of us, so this is full alpine style. It's not siege, not fixed ropes, there's no oxygen.

Four of us bail after the first summit attempt. We've got 10 days of food. We made the first summit attempt on day 11. So we are seriously running out of food. And four of us decided this is now too risky, myself included. Two of them, Rick Allen and Sandy Allen, decide to have another go on their last bottle of gas and with some energy bars and some biscuits. They get to the summit at 6 p on day 14.

Chris Watson (56:16.174)
They get to base camp having Travis Nanga -Parbat on day 18. Now, they win the Pialetta all for this. It's in all the record books. You know, it was a career -defining achievement for both of them. But one storm while they were trying to descend, when they were sleeping in snow holes with no food and no water, hallucinating, exhausted with frostbite.

one bad weather day, they'd both be dead. And we'd be having a story about, well, that doesn't sound like it was good decision -making. The cutting edge stuff, it's a very fine line between outrageous risks that work and dead. And I'm not going to judge people for choosing to be in that space. Can I say something else? I think it's really important.

There are two different things right now. There's commercial climbing, which was Everest with the Qs we've seen, and now they're doing it on K2. And they're basically doing it on every single one of the 8 ,000 metre peaks. They take the easiest route, they put a fixed safety line from the bottom to the top. They have sherpas available to tell you which way to go, to carry all your gear, to tell you what to do. You pay a guide who's done all the organising, and all you've got to do is the physics.

Chris Watson (57:47.918)
But that's completely different from cutting edge alpine climbing, which continues. There are still small teams out there trying to do new routes, trying to do winter ascents. And you can do this on Everest. You don't have to be in the queue. The queue is one season, which is spring, on one route, basically. 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, there is no queue but they don't because it's too difficult and there are at least two routes that have never been climbed both on the east side the fantasy ridge and a completely ludicrously dangerous line straight up the Cantering face and there you drive for a week to a village because I've been to look I did actually go back to Everest for my sins but I did go and look once.

You drive to a village in Tibet, you trek for a week over a five and a half thousand meter pass, up a valley where there is nobody. There isn't a village, there's nobody. The porters, the yaks leave you at your base camp and they say, we'll be back in six weeks time, good luck. And you are the only people in this valley, you're the only climbers on this wall. This is the true pristine Everest experience, trying to climb a new route. It's there.

but you have to be good enough. And I think what commercial climbing has given us is a lot of people who just aren't climbers. And they climb Everest the same way they take a cruise ship to Antarctica or whatever it is. They're paying for an experience. Yeah, it's over commercialized. And I think you've said that a couple of times, people just want to get there.

selfie or their Instagram snap at the summit and the fact that there's a roped route from camp to summit, it kind of loses a little bit of the... somebody I know who was out there recently said you don't even have to take an ice axe anymore because there is a line from base camp to the summit. You just have to make sure you're clipped into the line and shuffling, you know, up rather than down. Yeah, that's it. The photos, if you look at some of the photos at the minute, if you're dude...

Chris Watson (01:00:11.566)
do some of the searches on Instagram and you look at how crowded and congested and stuff and these people are all jammed into this ridge and the winds are whipping up and they're on this rope and they're all waiting for their turn. It just seems, it seems crazy, honestly. Well, I mean, the funny thing is it actually, it's safer. Like everything, you know, I know more people are dying, absolutely. But it's because many more people are trying.

And in the future trying many more people are being successful. Do you think climate change has got anything to do with this as well? Because I was reading an article where, I can't remember who wrote it, but there was something, some inference that with the over commercialisation, the crowds on this and climate change to a degree is leading to more fatalities. I don't think so. I think, okay, climate change is absolutely making things more dangerous.

Now, I'm not sure how that's specifically affecting the 8 ,000 meter peaks, because in some senses they are so high and so cold. They're a bit isolated from this. I'm much more aware that it's making things much more dangerous in the Alps. They close Mont Blanc increasingly, at least some of their popular routes in the middle of August because of the rockfall. Some of the classic mountains of Peru from when I was young,

are largely no longer climbed because it's too difficult with the glacial retreat and the rockfall and the unstable ice. No, I think there's a slightly Puritan thing that wants to say that these people in those queues are probably going to die and it's irresponsible. I don't think it's actually true. On the whole, I think it's safer to be in the queue because you're on a nice solid safety line that some very experienced sherpa has put in and is maintaining.

Because they're going up and down the line the Sherpas to make sure that everything is secured and It's bad for business in terms of the guides if too many of the customers die No, I think 8 ,000 meter climbing is getting safer and easier because of this Infrastructure that comes with the commercialization Okay, so are you still doing much mountaineering because you're in the perineus at the moment on you? That's right, and or us or are you still active?

Chris Watson (01:02:39.406)
Yes and no. So I'm not doing a great deal of climbing anymore. I think COVID probably, it was a bit of a nail in the coffin. Before COVID, I've gone back to pursuing rock climbing and I've actually got myself to my highest grade ever for, you know, red pointing sport climbing. And then COVID hit and my gym closed and I was just, I sat on the sofa for a year and I cannot face clawing my way back.

that. But there was actually something else which has been interesting. I've always found climbing really interesting but there's no doubt that I feel as if I'm kind of sliding off the back of a lifelong career at this point. I'm never going to be as good as I was as my best either rock climbing or mountaineering at this point.

Chris Watson (01:03:35.086)
So what I've done is switched to other sports in the mountains where I'm back on the learning curve, where I'm back getting better and building experience. And I started with skiing, which I picked up here when I moved to Europe in my early thirties. So my skiing isn't pretty, but it's pretty good at this point. And I've done some big ski expeditions. We did Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada.

just under 6 ,000 meters and skied off it. So I took skiing to big mountains and had a really good time with that for kind of a decade. And it is more fun than walking back home. But now, so I'm still doing a lot of ski mountaineering. But since then, I've also taken up sea kayaking, which is a fairly obvious one, 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. When you follow a river down a mountainside. And I'm talking about when they go into like canyons like this and the walls are 50 meters high and it's two meters wide and there is no way out. Once you're in, you have to follow the river.

and you either jump or you use ropes to repel down waterfalls and you've got to judge the water flow because once you're in there, there's no escaping the water. Once again, lots of interesting ways to die, but also lots of technical skill required, water management, rope management, cold management, make changes, conditions change, the weather changes, just wildly beautiful.

Yeah, I don't really know much. These are learning curves. I'm still on the way up and I'm finding that really refreshing. That's fantastic. I don't really know much about canyoning at all. I did see when I was doing a bit of research that you had done that in Zion National Park in Utah. I've done it all over the place. Zion is one of the famous American places, yes, and it's gorgeous. But I've been all over the place. Yeah, incredible. You said sea kayaking and kayaking. That's my, that's why I'm...

Chris Watson (01:05:53.87)
That's my thing. More than, I mean I'm not a climber by any stretch, hill walker, more than anything. But a scene that you kayaked in Norway in the New York fjord, if I'm saying that correctly, in Gudvangen. I've done the same, that's fantastic. How did you like that, kayaking in the fjords? it was beautiful. I took off, I did about an eight week trip this summer.

went north with my sea kayak, met up with a friend with her camper van and we basically paddled in Denmark and then Sweden, the West Coast, which is very beautiful. Lots of islands down the West Coast. And then up into Norway. And we just, we went all over the place. We put the kayaks in on lakes, we put the kayaks in on the inner fjords, which are beautiful. We went to the outer coast. We did a circumnavigation of an island called Smølla on the outside coast.

Norway is just beautiful. That's gorgeous. That's absolutely... I'm pining for it at the minute. I kind of missed the window to go back this year. Actually today we've been planning a probably a three -week ski touring trip for... we'll be looking at April, north of Tromso. So right up north of the Arctic Circle.

These are where the mountains come right down to the sea. You're skiing down with the sea below you. And I've been wanting to get up there and ski up there for some time now. So that's on the plan. Fantastic. Excellent. Cathy, we're almost coming up in time. I want to be respectful of your time. A couple of things I just want to ask you really. Just taking a big step back from all of your work and your achievements. What do you think that's done for women?

in the kind of mountaineering sport, considering the records that you've broken in, and which is a male dominated industry predominantly, isn't it? So what do you think your achievements have done for women and what can they take from that? I'm not going to say that I think that my personal achievements have done anything much for anything, but what I have really enjoyed in my adult lifetime is watching the change and it's...

Chris Watson (01:08:18.734)
largely been great. A generation before me, it was kind of all male teams. I was there at the token woman moment. And although I got a lot of breaks by being the only woman on a lot of male teams, it was quite constricting in ways we didn't always recognize. You did certainly have to be a certain kind of cool girl who could hang with the guys and the guys set the tone and you had to fit in kind of thing. And what I've watched,

over 30 years is more and more women getting into the space and getting into the space together. And it's everything from all the women's adventure groups, not to be on Facebook, women just 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 in all sorts of different areas.

go from bouldering to sport climbing to trad to ice climbing to mountaineering to ski mountaineering. It's still male dominated, maybe as a massive generalization, men are just a little more risk seeking, women are a little more sensible. It's possible that it'll always be slightly more men than women doing these things.

but more and more women are being able to say, I can do this. And they don't have to be the cool girl anymore. You don't have to go into the male culture. You can be out there with your girlfriends in your raging pink climbing vortex and doing cutting edge stuff. You can get out there and 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 time and get on with what you're doing.

There's just much more space to be who you are as a woman and also be a high achieving athlete. The other thing that's been good is social media. Not everything is a big push on women to look sexy while also being top end athletes and that's uncomfortable. But social media has allowed women to prove that they have a following. When I first started, you'd still get that thing like, ooh, no adventure.

Chris Watson (01:10:41.454)
Mmm, women don't sell an adventure. It's a male audience, it's a male sport, they want Indiana Jones. That's who will sponsor. 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 therefore, you know, how they can raise money.

Indeed, and there are a host of phenomenal female adventurers, not just climbers and social media is certainly elevating and I've interviewed a few and I've got a few coming up. So it's great times indeed. The positive sides of social media. Can I tell you just a random...

What I think is a really interesting story that relates to Everest and commercialization and women and... Yeah, yeah, go for it. So, I'm South African. So I grew up under apartheid. And climbing is a very middle -class sport because it's expensive. And it requires your family somehow to, you know, think that going outdoors is a life value somehow. So when I was young, people would have sworn blind in South Africa.

Black people don't climb. This is not a racist statement, it's just a fact. Black people don't climb. And there was some truth to it because 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 and you're very comfortable and you're going to stay there. So there's no doubt it's about four generations before you start to think of camping as something romantic and life affirming.

Chris Watson (01:12:39.598)
But what happened was when Everest got super commercial, we started to get a couple of young black people, men and women, pursuing Everest. So they weren't climbers, they were in the classic commercial mold. And they went after the records, the first black African to climb Everest, the first black South African woman to climb Everest and so on.

And that got attention and interest. And what it also got was a slightly younger generation of black South Africans going like, well, I can't imagine I'll ever have the money to do Everest. Are there smaller mountains? Is this a thing? And at the same time, we've had the growth of sort of commercial training in South Africa. And lo and behold, if they're given the opportunity and the role model.

and the training, black South Africans absolutely climb mountains. And coming out of the commercialization of Everest is almost a back movement into more purist climbing for the sake of climbing and young black athletes beginning to go like, okay, the outdoors is a place you can be an athlete. It's not just competitive running and football and so on. So that's been interesting to watch.

Like the wave has hit the wall and come washing back again with some really positive effects. Excellent. Just on the subject, so am I right in saying that you actually met Nelson Mandela as well through some of your endeavours? What was that like? Very, very cool. I mean, he's...

He's very genuine. He had astonishing charisma. Yeah. And, you know, it's true. And I think the capacity he had, that the truly charismatic leaders have, is that when he was with you, it wasn't about you being honoured to be in his presence. He, this incredibly accomplished, important man, was like, in this five minutes, I'm all about you.

Chris Watson (01:15:03.214)
I'm really interested in meeting you and knowing about you. That's like quite dazzling, pin at the receiving end of that. And he really did have an eye for things. So, I mean, I had that personal experience. 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.

You were also a part of our success because when we tried again on Everest against everybody's advice after the big storm, he actually called us. And this went out live on radio and just said, guys, I believe in you. Good for you for trying again. I think you can do this. And of course, he had no idea, but it's just like, hell yes. God's just called us on the phone. We're going to do what we can here. But I remember once.

I was at a fancy dinner and he was the guest of honor. And there was this receiving line and the poor guy had to stand there and shake hands with 200 of the great and good of Johannesburg Business Society. Most of them were white, you know, given the time. And obviously being South Africa, all of the waiting staff and the kitchen staff were black. And you can see them at the service door. Just...

peering through the door, trying to catch a glimpse of the guy. And when he'd finished the receiving line, he said, hang on a moment. He walked into the kitchen and he shook the hand of every single one of the working staff behind that dinner. And it was that, his ability to see the people most of us fail to see and to understand what it meant to give of his time, even though he was busy and tired and...

You know, he just, yeah, strobe my man. It's the greatest gift you can give someone is your time and attention. And that's fantastic. Cathy, this has been an incredible conversation. I've thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. We've been up and down the mountains to say. Fantastic. So yeah, again, respectful of your time and coming up to the end. There were two closing traditions.

Chris Watson (01:17:27.886)
One of which is the call to adventure and the other is the paid forward. So call to adventure. I'd like to ask you for a suggestion for listeners and viewers, a suggestion to get people inspired to go and be adventurous, do an activity, go a place. It doesn't need to be the summit of Mount Everest. It could be whatever you recommend. So what is your call to adventure? Okay, I'm going to give a two tier call, a climbing based one.

that everyone who hasn't tried climbing go to an indoor climbing gym. Everyone. And if you're kids from the age of about three or four, there is no age limit, there is no weight limit. Everyone. Because it's great fun, it's a puzzle solving sport, it's incredibly good exercise because it's full body movement, it's mobility, and then...

You know, it's weight bearing on your arms and your legs. And you know, you do it in a group, you problem solve together. It's not particularly competitive directly. So I think it's well worth a try for anyone who's thinking like, I have just never found a form of exercise that I really enjoyed. Try indoor rock climbing. And then for the most of you who are already indoor rock climbers, try going outdoors.

You might not like it, it's very different. But it's, the two sports are kind of separate now, they are two different things. If you're enjoying it indoors, try taking it outdoors and see what it feels like when you're really on a natural rock face with the wind whipping in your hair and the ground a long way below you and see how that feels, just for fun. Yeah, excellent.

That's two great suggestions. I actually really fancy doing the indoor stuff and I might actually take my little girl. That'll be one of our weekends sorted. It's great for kids because they have such good power to weight ratio. They're powerful in the mud. And suddenly they go like, cool, 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 or bouncing on the mat. That's fun. Great. Excellent. So.

Chris Watson (01:19:49.742)
Finally, the pay it forward suggestion again, an opportunity to raise awareness for a worthy cause charitable project or something of that ilk. What would your pay it forward suggestion be? Right, this is very obscure and close to my heart. So my first ever expedition, you know, with proper glaciers and altitude and ice was the Ruinsore Mountains. They're on the border between

what is now the DRC and Uganda. And a friend of mine, Rita Miller, British nurse, decided to go out there on the Ugandan side to start doing medical outreach to villages high up in the Ruins orly mountains where there are only footpaths. There are no roads. So of course, children...

particularly but anyone doesn't get brought to hospital nearly soon enough because it's so difficult. And helped by myself and some other friends who got some money together, she put together a thing called the Ruins Ory Woman for Health. And this is trying to take small amounts of money and make them as effective as possible. So this is getting nurses out to the road head on the back of little scooters, nobody's buying fancy four by fours for aid workers.

This is local infrastructure, walking into these villages, doing education for the mothers, to try and help them with the children and help them understand when to try and bring them to hospital. They've started to build little insurance schemes, village -based insurance. So there's a pot of money when you need to bring the 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. And at this point, the project is the fundraising goes in via a British society called the Friends of Kagando. I'll give you a link to put in the show. So Ruins of the Already Woman for Health is part of the bigger Friends of Kagando project. And that's the place to put in the money.

Chris Watson (01:22:13.934)
So if you want to put in a little bit of money, that's going to make a big bit of difference to a small number of people in a very beautiful mountain range. I think this is a lovely little charity. Thank you. And we will indeed. And we'll get that listed in the show notes. It sounds a very noble and worthy cause and very unique and very different. Sometimes it's easy for guests and people to give the...

the Red Cross or the British whatever foundation, but these little things should not go unnoticed. They sometimes make bigger impacts in smaller communities. Thank you, Cathy. Where can people find more about Cathy O'Dowd and all your adventures and all your motivational speaking and everything that you're up to? So there's a website, CathyO'Dowd .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 Cathy O'Dowell on Instagram. And I also run a pretty open Facebook. And I think it's Cathy O'Dowell Everest on Facebook. Excellent. We'll get that listed along with a lot of other bits and good nuggets from this into the show notes as well. It's been great talking to you Cathy. Thank you ever so much. And yeah.

Have a good evening. It's been a great pleasure. I've really enjoyed our conversation. It was fun and interesting and went to all sorts of places, which is the best kind of chat. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. For the show notes and further information, please visit adventurediaries .com slash 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.