Enormocast 331: Mick Fowler – Fortune, Turn Thy Wheel

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[00:02:38] [SPEAKER_09] Hello and welcome to the Enormo cast. This is your host Chris Kalous. It is October 14th, 2026, about 1030 AM here in Colorado. And this is episode 331 of the Enormo cast. A conversation with the eternal alpinist himself, Mick Fowler. Yeah, Mick Fowler is revered in alpine climbing scenes, particularly in the UK.

[00:03:04] [SPEAKER_09] For bold ascents, for excellent style, for decades of setting standards, somewhat quietly. Because he also has a full-time job, or had. He's retired now. At the British Revenue and Customs Office, you know, colloquially, he's the tax man. Had a family, raised some kids, and just managed to get a lot, a lot, a lot of amazing stuff done on weekends and holidays.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_09] Keeping in mind that British workers are not quite the wage slaves that we are here in the US. So there's some pretty good perks and time off. But nevertheless, a different path, a little bit undercover, if you don't count the three PLAs. But more on Mick Fowler in a second. I've been going hard with events this fall. The 24 Hours of Horseshoe Hell. The Smith Rock Climbing Festival. I'm a man of the people. I want to be out there, hanging out with you guys, doing the climbing.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_09] Climbing in new areas, meeting new people. And the next thing on the list is heading up to Banff again this year. The Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. Which kicks off October 31st and goes till November 8th. You can go to banffcenter.ca for the info. And that's center spelled the Canadian way. Once again, I will be on the RAB stage at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning. Easy enough to find there on the campus.

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_09] And we just booked Mr. Leo Holding for a live podcast. That's Saturday, November 7th, 10 a.m. on the RAB stage at the Banff Center in Banff, B.C. You can hear the last two back in the feed here on the EnormaCast. The first one with Barry Blanchard. Two years ago and last year with Elias Milrou. Two, both turned out great. Thanks to awesome guests. And I can't imagine Leo will be any different.

[00:04:54] [SPEAKER_09] And is 45 minutes to an hour with Leo Holding enough? Yeah, I don't think so. But a lot of times we can parlay this into a longer, more in-depth sit down later on. So if you're up in Banff or in that area or at the festival, come join us. 10 a.m. Saturday morning. And of course, I humbly suggest that you get tickets and go to all the things that happen at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. It's a blast. It's a blast.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_09] So much culture, good times, interesting people saying intelligent things. But my thing, whether intelligent or not, is free. So come on by. And that's it for me for travel and public appearances until 2027, where I'm already booked for two ice climbing festivals. Midwest ice climbing festivals are kind of my thing. All right. All right. Mick Fowler and his four plus decades of cutting edge climbing.

[00:05:50] [SPEAKER_09] He is resolutely, humbly British and would be embarrassed to hear me say that his climbing is cutting edge. But facts are facts. Ask around. He's a climber's climber. People who know of him and know him will talk about his impeccable style in the mountains, his willingness to suffer, his sort of unstoppable attitude.

[00:06:12] [SPEAKER_09] And the fact that he's a survivor of so many big climbs through several decades where a lot of particularly British climbers didn't come home from the Himalaya. That alone makes it worth listening to Mick. He's also an author of several books, including his latest offering, Eternal Alpinist, A Bottom-to-Top Climbing Memoir. And there's a wry pun in that title that will be revealed in the beginning of the interview. So let's get to it.

[00:06:42] [SPEAKER_09] A conversation with Mick Fowler.

[00:06:48] [SPEAKER_06] Forever is a long time. I mean, I've been on cold, miserable belays that felt like forever. Sat out bad weather that seemed an eternity as the date for your flight loomed closer and closer. And your dream line sat just as unclimbed as when you first showed up with stars in your eyes and the hopes and dreams of a freshly minted weanling. Of course, everyone wants their gear to last forever.

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[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_09] Interestingly, I think because Michael Kennedy, who I'm sure you've probably at least interacted with, he just texted me a couple days ago and he said, Hey, you gotta get Mick Fowler on the show, got a new book out. You gotta have him on the show. So there was an endorsement from Michael Kennedy, who I would imagine you know. And I've met him a couple of times. I'm very flattered. Yeah, that's a good start.

[00:08:34] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah, I tend to try to take Michael's advice on most things. But I'd like to start a little harder here with, I think it's from your biography, No Easy Way. But around 2017, you got an email that I found very interesting from the Daily Telegraph from someone who wanted to update your on-file obituary. And there's a pretty legitimate reason for that.

[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_09] So can you tell me about the origins and the reason for this email? Because it plays well into your latest book, Eternal Alpinist.

[00:09:14] [SPEAKER_13] That was from Tarquin, yes. Yeah, I remember the date very specifically. It was the 5th of September 2017. Yeah, that was the day where the doctors at the hospital told me that I had cancer of my onus, which is not what you want to hear, really.

[00:09:34] [SPEAKER_09] That's some British understatement right there.

[00:09:39] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah, well, I had to cancel the Himalayan trip that we'd organized because I was due to leave in about three weeks' time. So, yeah, it was the start of a period of bad luck in an otherwise very lucky life, really. So what can I say? Yeah, I knew there was something a little bit wrong down there. But I'd taken the sort of traditional male view that it's probably all right and I've got a Himalayan trip to go on.

[00:10:07] [SPEAKER_13] We just monitor the situation and I'm sure it'll be fine. And it was my wife who nagged me to go and see the doctor, who stuck his very large finger up my bottom and shunted me off to the hospital. And the results came through on the 5th of September when I remember the doctor's very carefully chosen words.

[00:10:31] [SPEAKER_13] And he said, you have a few cancer cells there, which was a very English way of saying, shit, you've got a real problem. You've got cancer of the anus and rectum. This is really bad news. So, yes, whether that was what Tarquin had in mind or whether that was before that date, I'm not sure. But I have ribbed him about that since then because he most definitely did ask me if he could update his obituary that he has on file.

[00:11:01] [SPEAKER_13] I suppose I should be flattered to know that somebody has gone to the extent of actually writing an obituary on me.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, you're important enough that they have one ready to go.

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_13] Exactly.

[00:11:15] [SPEAKER_09] I'm sure that one of the things I have written down in my notes is that you said you'd had up to that point a very lucky life. And yeah, you're a survivor. I mean, you've lived through an era, you know, decades rather, not just an era, but decades where a lot of, you know, a lot of mountaineers didn't come home from the type of expeditions that you were pulling off pretty frequently. So I had written just the word survivor in here otherwise.

[00:11:46] [SPEAKER_09] So, yeah, maybe they're, you know, like I said, they've been surprised up to this point that they hadn't need to pull that obituary yet, considering the type of climbing that you were doing. Can you talk a little bit about that idea of a lucky life? Like, you know, I think you seem to have a very positive outlook, you know, like reading the way that you dealt with this cancer thing, which we'll get into more here.

[00:12:08] [SPEAKER_09] But you keep kind of forging ahead and laughing things off with that stiff upper lip and a little bit dark humor and keep going. So what's the lucky life thing all about?

[00:12:20] [SPEAKER_13] Well, I do feel that I have been very lucky in life, really, because I suppose I started off a bit unlucky that my mother died when I was only three years old. But if we ignore that, which was, I was a bit too young then to think of whether that was lucky or unlucky or whatever it was.

[00:12:42] [SPEAKER_13] But certainly when I sort of finished education and, you know, got good grades at what we call secondary school here in the UK and got useless grades at the next level because I got obsessed with rock climbing at that point. But then I ended up working for the tax office, which was a job that I got simply to tide me over between climbing trips.

[00:13:07] [SPEAKER_13] Because in those days, when I was sort of 18, 19, the usual thing to do was to go out to the Alps for the summer and give up your job to do so and then get a job when you came back and continue the cycle. And I came back from the Alps in 76 when I was 20, actually, and looking around for a job. It was a tax office job that paid the most.

[00:13:30] [SPEAKER_13] So I took that job and when it came to the next June or so, then I said, well, I'm going to leave now because, you know, I need to go out to the Alps for a couple of months. Firstly, they promoted me, which gave us a possibility of more money. And secondly, they said, well, you can just take some extra leave. You know, it's not a problem. And I thought, hmm, this is quite interesting.

[00:13:51] [SPEAKER_13] You know, I can come back from my holiday or my holiday, my climbing season in the Alps and have a job that pays me more money so I can go somewhere further afield next year. And it carried on like that a bit with the tax office, really. The more I went away, the more they encouraged me to have unpaid leave and things. And the more I got promoted and the job became more interesting, even though I'd never actually got a degree or anything like that.

[00:14:16] [SPEAKER_13] I ended up in a job in the tax office where you were supposed to have a degree to have the job that I had. And throughout that time, I was lucky enough to meet Nikki, my wife, to do a lot of wonderful rock climbing, wonderful winter climbing, great trips to the greater ranges, build up a circle of climbing trends throughout the world.

[00:14:44] [SPEAKER_13] And I feel that overall, I was very, very lucky. Yeah, up until the 5th of September, 2017. I just kind of ran out.

[00:14:53] [SPEAKER_09] Your biography shows that you grew up in London, but you did manage to start climbing maybe through your dad and then proliferating through the Alpine clubs and things like that. And there's been a lot made out of this fact that you've been this tax inspector or whatever the real role of it is at the revenue and customs department. Valuer, please.

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_13] Valuer.

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah. Sounds much better. Yeah, value it. The shares and assets valuation division. Okay. But a lot has been made out of that, right? Because it's a different path, you know, and you did it up until you retired, so 40 years or something like that. But, and yet, like, if you looked at your resume, you would seem as though you had been at least, you know, a dirt bag or a professional climber or any of these other kind of normal paths. But people love pointing out the fact that you were doing this on holiday.

[00:15:47] [SPEAKER_09] But the other thing you mentioned is that the Alpine club thing when you were in London, even though you're far away from climbing, it helped, you know, helped you travel, helped you focus. So, I think the hallmark of your climbing career, maybe you can comment on this, is, yeah, this focus. Like, you don't mess around. You have your dates and you have your trips and you're very good at planning them and getting them done.

[00:16:10] [SPEAKER_09] And it just shows that, like, if you get rid of all the, you know, lazing about the meadows and Chamonix or whatever goes with usual climbing life that you get just as much done. You know, can you talk about that in terms of your personality or what you're good at in terms of this focus that you were kind of forced into, but it seemed to be a natural way for you anyway?

[00:16:33] [SPEAKER_13] Yes. I do like to be very organized. It's true. And sort of on top of things. And, of course, throughout the whole period when I was working and the children were growing up, it was a juggling exercise between trying to find enough time to go climbing and enough time to go on family holidays and be there with the family. The tax office job was very good in that I very rarely went away from home, rarely had overnight stays. And so, yeah, I was at home with the family most evenings.

[00:17:03] [SPEAKER_13] With the London scene at the time, it was actually a scene through the North London Mountaineering Club where I sort of first met climbing friends who are still my friends today. And I was just very lucky that there was a very good group of enthusiastic climbers in the North London Club at the time. We all used to go to a pub called The Globe in London on a Wednesday evening. And it was there that we would dream up our plans for the weekend.

[00:17:29] [SPEAKER_13] And the great thing about London then was that wherever you wanted to climb for the weekend or whatever weird interest you had, climbing-wise or probably otherwise as well, there were always other people who were equally keen and interested. So if you wanted to go climbing at Dover one weekend on the south coast of England, then that was fine. You could easily get a car load together. If you wanted to go to Scotland, the north coast of Scotland, the following weekend, then you could easily get a car load together to do that.

[00:17:59] [SPEAKER_13] And I think having like-minded, enthusiastic people around you is essential, really, if you're going to get a lot of good climbing done. We had a lot of good ideas, good routes that we wanted to climb, different sorts of climbing both throughout the UK and ultimately throughout the world. And we lived off each other. Yeah. And yeah, it led to a lot of good climbs.

[00:18:25] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah. And it seems to have broadened your skill set tremendously in terms of like all these different venues, all these different types of climbing, both rock climbing, summer climbing, like terrible choss climbing. All these things kind of, I think, built you as what became a high-level alpinist.

[00:18:46] [SPEAKER_13] I think you're probably right. Yeah. I mean, I've always liked exploratory climbing. I mean, I think when I very first started, like most people, I was interested in what grade I could reach and sort of doing the hardest climbs that I could do. But that moved in as far as, you know, abseiling down climbs, practicing the moves and then leading them. And I quickly decided that was not what turned beyond really. It was a gymnastic exercise.

[00:19:15] [SPEAKER_13] I knew before I started the climb that I could do it. And so the challenge was purely physical. Whereas I much preferred the sort of climbs where you start at the bottom, you have absolutely no idea where you're going and you do your best to get to the top. And a lot of those sorts of climbs in the UK tended to be on big sea cliffs, which were often pretty bad rock, loose rock. Or people would say bad rock.

[00:19:42] [SPEAKER_13] I regarded it as interesting rock, let's say. So I did a lot of climbs like that on, you know, on sort of interesting loose rock. Winter climbing in Scotland, of course, gives you a whole range of experiences on snow and ice climbing. And then I suppose I had the technical climbing already under my belt to a certain extent. And so, yeah, the combination of all of those things.

[00:20:08] [SPEAKER_13] And starting early as regards alpinism, because I did actually go to the Alps for the first time when I was 13. And my father arranged a course with the Austrian Alpine Club. More because he was keen to climb some of the easier 4,000 meter peaks in the Alps. And with my mother having died when I was three, you know, he was a bit bogged down sort of bringing me up.

[00:20:36] [SPEAKER_13] By the time I got to 13, he decided that I was old enough to be dragged along on these things. So it was a big thing for him to pay for this course because he was not well off at all. And that was my first introduction to alpine climbing. And I suppose after the sort of teenage years where I was more interested in girls and nights out in London, I became obsessed with all sorts of climbing, really.

[00:21:04] [SPEAKER_13] And so I had a grounding in the alpine climbing and all of the sorts of climbing that I've been doing in the UK. And that all came together a bit, really, with regards to Himalayan climbing, where you've got a little bit of everything, a little bit of bad rock, a little bit of awful snow, a little bit of really good snow, sometimes hard technical climbing. And also, from the point of view of starting at the bottom and doing your best to get to the top

[00:21:31] [SPEAKER_13] on a sort of major unclimbed feature, that absolutely ticked all of my boxes.

[00:21:36] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah, we'll get to some of these Himalayan feats in a minute. But I want to circle back to this, you know, being raised by your dad. It sounds like he didn't remarry, he didn't have a stepmother. And, you know, you talked about at some point, you know, this whole being, you know, having this full-time job, this regular job. Again, you must have been hanging out with a lot of climbers who didn't live that life, you know, so you saw the other side. But that wasn't the case, actually.

[00:22:05] [SPEAKER_13] Oh, really? No. No. The group of friends I had in London, if I look back, I mean, Victor Saunders was an architect at the time. Mike Morrison was a heating and ventilating engineer. Yeah. Most of the people did have jobs and climbing was their hobby. And maybe that's why they were so keen to fill up their weekends with, you know, with good climbs. Because it wasn't a full-time occupation for them. It was what they did in their spare time.

[00:22:31] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah. And what I was getting at is providing for your family, you know. And I was just right away there thinking like, well, you know, the work or the dedication that your father had must have rubbed off on you in terms of providing for your kids. You have two kids. Is that appropriate to think about that?

[00:22:52] [SPEAKER_13] Oh, very much so. I think I've always felt that it's a parent's responsibility, if you like, to do their utmost to provide for their kids and give them a good upbringing in every possible way. But that wasn't purely down to my income. Because Nikki, my wife, I mean, she's a conservator who was restoring watercolors for the galleries in London. And she had a studio in the house.

[00:23:21] [SPEAKER_13] So, I mean, she had a job as well. So, we were both contributing.

[00:23:25] [SPEAKER_09] I mean, you talk a lot about how it was this huge balance. You know, you had your holidays to go climbing, but there was the family requirements and things like that. I mean, did your obsession with climbing, you actually just used that word a minute ago, and I had written it down as well. Because, I mean, that's a hallmark of all of us, this obsession. It's an obsession.

[00:23:46] [SPEAKER_13] That, for me, was when I was in my late teenage years and early 20s. So, again, my father kept a diary, as such, about his son. And I remember, I think it was when I was 19, and he just put one line. He had made it quite detailed over the years. And when I was 19, he just put one line, which was something along the lines of, Michael has been obsessed with climbing this year. Full stop. That was it.

[00:24:16] [SPEAKER_13] But what happened was, as I gradually got promoted up through the tax office, As with so many things, working for the tax office sounds awful. But the more you're promoted, the more mentally challenging it became, and the more interesting it became. I suppose, after I got married and had children, then, by that stage, I was not obsessed, certainly. But I must admit, you know, I didn't get married until I was 36, something like that.

[00:24:44] [SPEAKER_13] And so, between when I was 17, when I first got a car, and when I met Nikki, when I would have been 32, I think. 33, when she became pregnant. I would have gone away almost every weekend, because I was a single young man. I had girlfriends, but my focus was more on the climbing, yeah. I don't think I was obsessed with the climbing.

[00:25:11] [SPEAKER_13] As I moved through my 20s and such, like, the climbing was something that I was really keen to do at the weekend. But it wasn't something that I wanted to do seven days a week. I didn't want to be a mountain guide or anything like that.

[00:25:23] [SPEAKER_09] So, it seems like you went through the kind of typical stages. You know, you climbed within the UK, started going to the Alps pretty early. That's pretty typical. And then, it sounds like maybe a trip to Peru was a pretty big turning point for the way you thought about mountains and maybe going on larger expeditions and things like that.

[00:25:46] [SPEAKER_09] Or maybe you can fill us in on your progression towards expedition climbing in far off, you know, in the greater ranges, as we like to say.

[00:25:56] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah. I mean, the trip to Peru was a complete eye-opener for me. And it was that which got me hooked on greater range climbing. And it wasn't just the climbing. It was, firstly, we spent a lot of time planning it, a lot of time choosing the objective with the assistance of some others. But we chose our objective. It had been my first time outside Europe, my first exposure to the developing world as such.

[00:26:26] [SPEAKER_13] It was in the middle of the Falklands War back in 1982. So, Peru was supportive of Argentina and our British Airways plane wouldn't fly to Lima. So, we got dumped in Colombo, I think it was, in Bogotá. It was in Colombia. And I remember then we got an Aero Peru plane.

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_13] The plane actually had a proper mechanical emergency, which we couldn't understand because it was in Spanish. But people crying and screaming and wailing on the plane landed somewhere in the middle of a desert or something. Then the whole thing was just an assault to the senses, really. And then when we got to Peru, I'd never been to a place anywhere like that.

[00:27:15] [SPEAKER_13] And I think it helped me to decide that I wanted to experience more culture, understand civilizations more. I'd been brought up on an estate of semi-detached houses in London suburbia. You know, this was all just fantastically new to me. And I think I moved on to sort of having a set of criteria, which I really wanted my climbing trips, or my mountaineering trips at least to satisfy.

[00:27:45] [SPEAKER_13] And that was that I'd be looking for an obvious objective, visible from afar, going preferably to the summit of the mountain. It would be technically challenging, for me at least. Relatively safe from objective dangers in an area that was culturally interesting, preferably that I'd not been to before. Preferably where no climbers have been to before. With a different descent route, it's always aesthetically pleasing.

[00:28:14] [SPEAKER_13] And I think armed with that set of criteria, I researched as much as I possibly could and built up a large box file of objectives, which have served me well over the years.

[00:28:28] [SPEAKER_09] Tell me a little bit about the climb in Peru.

[00:28:31] [SPEAKER_13] It was similar to the sort of climbs that we'd been doing in the Alps. Very, very good rock. Chamonix-style granite rock. So it's a bit of a combination of the kind of winter climbing that we've been doing in Scotland. It was very icy when we did it. So most of it was ice climbing. Thin ice runnels at the back of very steep grooves. I think we were on it for four nights, I think. I remember that that felt a long time.

[00:28:59] [SPEAKER_13] I'd never spent four nights on a route before. I'd been out for that long in the Alps, but in sort of enchainments, if you like. So I hadn't committed myself to a route where we'd spent four nights out on the route before. So that was an interesting experience. The Peruvian snow was a very interesting experience near the top, I remember. It's one of those frightening pitches where we actually got off of the rock and were on snow and ice heading to the summit.

[00:29:28] [SPEAKER_13] Well, we got back down to base camp and the others had run out of food in base camp. We were very much an amateur type team. They'd run out of food and we didn't have anybody at base camp to cook or anything like that. So when they ran out of food, they left us a tin of food, I remember, on a boulder and left base camp. And I remember we got back down to the base camp site. We were just so, so happy.

[00:29:54] [SPEAKER_13] And even now, you know, I can remember most of the pitches, most of the sections of that route. And I can still remember the great feeling of satisfaction, really, in having spent a long time organizing this climb and having achieved exactly what we'd set out to do. So, yeah, I think a love of greater range climbing was born. Who'd you climb that with? That was with Chris Watts.

[00:30:20] [SPEAKER_09] And you just gave out a formula for like your, you know, sort of your perfect objective and the way it should work. And I had actually, again, I'd written that down right here, like formula. But also, it seems as though, you know, you have criteria if it works out for the best type of partner.

[00:30:43] [SPEAKER_09] And what fits into that kind of rule book, if you will, when you're looking for a partner or when you do an expedition and you think, man, that was a great partnership?

[00:30:53] [SPEAKER_13] Well, I've almost always climbed with people that I have a good climbing relationship with in the UK and have done lots and lots of climbs with. So, Chris Watts, he was the manager of an outdoor or the climbing section of an outdoor shop in London at the time. We'd done lots of climbing together in Scotland, rock climbing and winter climbing. And in the Alps as well, we'd done lots together.

[00:31:17] [SPEAKER_13] So, we already knew that we had a solid mountaineering partnership and that we could put up with each other for a few weeks. I've really, I suppose, been very cautious with my mountaineering partners. And that's why, as you probably know, I've stuck with a few partners over the years. You know, Paul Ramston, Victor Saunders, Steve Sustad.

[00:31:41] [SPEAKER_13] Once you find a climbing partnership that works, I kind of think, well, why move on? We've both got the same kind of aspirations. We know each other's abilities. We understand each other's strengths and weaknesses. Our judgment is much the same in the mountains. All of those things seem very important. So, we inspire each other well. Well, so, I've stayed with the same partners. Yeah.

[00:32:07] [SPEAKER_13] And always climbing the roots with just one other partner, which I've always found is the most satisfying way for me. I mean, I come back to the fact we were incredibly lucky. We were born at the right time. Because, you know, by the early 1980s, when I was first, you know, thinking about greater range trips, for just about the first time, the cost of travel, international travel, long-haul flights, was coming down to the sort of price that the average person could realistically save for.

[00:32:37] [SPEAKER_13] So, I can remember, I think, I kept the ticket for a long time. But the price of my ticket to go out to Peru was, I think it was 485 pounds. And it stayed at that level for a long, long time. I think even in the early 2000s, the price was still about that. It was just coming down all the time. And from the point of view of the climbing style, I mean, I was brought up in terms of alpine climbing, I suppose, in the Alps.

[00:33:05] [SPEAKER_13] And the obvious way to me, or the most satisfying way, let's put it that way, was for both climbers to climb both all of the pitches on the route, not get involved in jumarring and sack hauling and that kind of stuff. And that was the way we climbed. And so, we then moved to the Himalaya, or to Peru to begin with, and climbed in exactly the same way. And we were in our own little bubble, in a way.

[00:33:32] [SPEAKER_13] I had no idea how other people might tackle these routes. I knew that Himalayan climbing, traditionally, had been about hundreds of porters and fixing ropes up and all of that kind of stuff. And I knew that that was absolutely not the sort of climbing I was interested in. And so, we were choosing lower mountains, but technically difficult climbs of the sort of standard that we were climbing in the Alps at the time.

[00:34:00] [SPEAKER_13] It was really just an extension of alpine climbing, but going to great new, interesting places for all of the reasons that I set out there on our trip to Peru.

[00:34:10] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah, but it's interesting because I think that these routes that you were doing, in the style you were doing them with, lower altitude. I think I read that one of the obvious problems with you trying to do sort of an 8,000 meter peak is you just don't have time to acclimatize in these windows that you had to go climbing. But all these hallmarks of what you were doing, slightly lower altitude peaks, very specific line of technical difficulty.

[00:34:40] [SPEAKER_09] That is, right now in 2026, of all the alpinists I talked to, that's the formula for them now too. And you were maybe not thinking of yourself as a pioneer or anything else, but it's just interesting how that was your criteria and it kind of became the criteria for, I think, a lot of modern alpinists.

[00:35:03] [SPEAKER_09] Is the same idea of line, technical difficulty, and can we do it in this like very encapsulated style?

[00:35:13] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah, I think things have changed a hell of a lot over the years. As I said, we didn't really think about it other than that we would climb in the same way as we climbed in the Alps. And I still do that to this day. And yeah, obviously I'm interested in what other people are doing. Yeah, totally.

[00:35:32] [SPEAKER_09] But it's just, you know, you got this award at some point that I read about, the Mountaineers Mountaineer. It wasn't really an award. I don't know, it was some sort of poll, which was probably embarrassing to you in some way, but also pretty cool. And, you know, I think it fits into that of like people looking back and saying like, wow, Mick Fowler has been doing this thing that we all revere, you know, from the beginning.

[00:35:57] [SPEAKER_13] Well, I think that was a long time ago now. I think that was 1989, something like that.

[00:36:02] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah.

[00:36:03] [SPEAKER_13] So believe I'm right in saying that that was before Alpine style climbing on, you know, the sort of objectives I was really keen on became a very popular thing to do. Because I do know that, you know, back in the early 80s, there were still major expeditions tackling routes with fixed ropes and bolts. And, you know, I can remember in the early PLA door days, there was controversy.

[00:36:30] [SPEAKER_13] I can remember there was a route on Janu, I think it was the Russians climbed. And they were on it for, I think it was 55 days. And I only had a sort of superficial interest in what was happening, really, because it was just so not what I wanted to do. But I think as the years have gone by, you're right, the kind of climbing that I do has become more fashionable.

[00:36:52] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah. And I guess, I mean, even in 89, if that would have been when that, you know, again, it was, I don't know if it was a ward or whatever. But, like, it still is interesting to me that people were recognizing that. And then it's also interesting, I just actually, a couple, I don't know, a month ago, I talked to Matt Cornell, who was on the Alpine style Janu expedition in 2023, which, you know, went up that same face. And I don't know, there's just a progression there that's pretty fascinating.

[00:37:21] [SPEAKER_09] And again, you know, you were sort of somewhat quietly, although you did get some awards in the latter aughts and teens for the climbing that you were doing. But you were just kind of quietly doing your own thing. But it happened to be your own thing was, like, extremely cutting edge.

[00:37:40] [SPEAKER_13] Well, I say cutting edge. I mean, you know, I don't think we're incredibly talented at such. But we were choosing our objectives carefully. I think with the number one objective of satisfying the criteria that I set out earlier and more than anything else, having a good time.

[00:38:01] [SPEAKER_13] But I think that, yeah, the advent of all those awards like the PLA door and grant giving bodies in the UK, because I really should mention bodies like the Mount Everest Foundation, the British Mountaineering Council and the Alpine Club. They have all been instrumental, I think, in pushing ethical standards in the greater ages.

[00:38:21] [SPEAKER_13] So none of those grant giving bodies or the PLA door people, I think, will give grants or awards to teams that carry boats, for example, which is something I feel very strongly about. You know, as the years have gone by, it's become easier and easier to do six, seven thousand meter peaks in the Himalaya. And I have to say, for me personally, that starts to detract slightly because there's more people and it gets easier to do.

[00:38:50] [SPEAKER_13] And some of the reasons for that are there's roads being pushed further and further up into the remote corners of the Himalayas now. So I can remember we did one trip where I think it took us three days or was it four days from the UK to get to base camp. And I worked out that if I'd done that 10 years earlier, it would have taken me about 10 days and I wouldn't have been able to do that with my holiday entitlement from work.

[00:39:17] [SPEAKER_13] So, I mean, that's made getting to the objectives easier and easier. The flights, the cost of getting there in relative terms has got easier and easier. And finding the objectives has got easier and easier. And we've now got Google Earth where you can fly around the Himalaya and actually look at all of the climbs before you even get there. And of course, that's meant that it's easier.

[00:39:45] [SPEAKER_13] And so more people have got interested in doing it. And that detracts very slightly to me. I'm still searching for those objectives where there's nobody there. Nobody's ever been there, hopefully.

[00:40:01] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah, I mean, I've been on this thing talking about weather actually lately too, about just the fact that you can get instant weather reports. They're very good. You told some stories of your partner Vic using the sat phone to talk to Jack Tackle, I think it was, in Montana while you were on the route.

[00:40:22] [SPEAKER_13] I mean, how mad can you get? Yeah. And you can just carry on your normal daily life. If I remember, there's one other route because Victor's into his technology. As you'll have gathered from the start of this interview, I'm bloody useless on technology. And Nicky and I have a no contact arrangement. When I'm away, we don't get in touch at all. There's Victor having lovey-dovey conversations on the belay with his girlfriend at home. There's one expedition I remember.

[00:40:52] [SPEAKER_13] There was a problem on the roof of his house that he was sorting it out from the bivvy. I go on these trips to just enjoy the mountains.

[00:41:02] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah, right. You're from the one postcard era of like you write a postcard before you get on the approach and then it arrives when you get home or whatever.

[00:41:13] [SPEAKER_13] Oh, no, no. You only send postcards after you've done the route. Oh, right. I can remember after we did a route on a mountain called Spantic back in 1987. I can remember sitting in Gilgit and I had five or six hours before the minibus. And I can remember writing all of my postcards and writing exactly the same thing on everyone. Stick them in the postbox. Job done.

[00:41:35] [SPEAKER_09] And like I said, then you get home and they get there. So, you know, after you got home. So, well, cool. There's two things I wanted to tease out in there. One is Vic and Mick, Victor and your partnership. But you also just mentioned Spantic and the golden pillar. It stands out in your career as I think just one brilliant ascent.

[00:41:59] [SPEAKER_09] And looking at the photos of it, your criteria, you said, I mean, just screams from that particular ascent. But of looking at a photo and seeing the objective, like just glaring at you. Can you talk a little bit about that expedition and how that worked?

[00:42:16] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah. Well, actually, the seeds of that started three years earlier on my first ever Himalayan expedition. Yeah, that didn't go so well. No, it didn't. But that was in Hunza. And yeah, we'd learned an awful lot. I think we were probably a bit big headed when we came back from Peru. And I had a trip out to Kilimanjaro or somewhere like that in 83.

[00:42:41] [SPEAKER_13] And then 84, we went to this mountain, Bojahaga, Bojahaga Duonaseer, which I think means boldly go where only the devil's horse may go. I mean, Hunza. And it was 7,300 metres. And we'd never been to that altitude before. And we didn't have a clue. Now, Victor and Phil Butler, who he was climbing with, they did have a clue.

[00:43:09] [SPEAKER_13] They would have got to the top if Phil Butler hadn't started to get frostbite. Perhaps I was playing with Chris Watts again. And Mike Morrison was playing with a chap called John English. And at the end of the day, the four of us suffered with the altitude. We'd learned an awful lot, but we never actually tied onto the rope. But what we did do was take photographs looking to the south.

[00:43:35] [SPEAKER_13] And the view to the south was dominated by this obvious line leading to the summit of a mountain that we discovered was called Spantic. And then it was Victor's fault, really. And a few years after that, three years later, actually, well, it'd be two years when he actually contacted me. And he said, look, I really think we ought to go out and try and climb this mountain, Spantic. And I can remember saying to him, yeah, Victor, I absolutely failed to walk up Bodra Hager.

[00:44:05] [SPEAKER_13] But we decided that maybe we'd be better at pitched climbing than walking. Because I am very useless at walking. And so that was what led us to go out to Spantic. It's my second Himalayan trip.

[00:44:19] [SPEAKER_09] And describe this route. You know, it has this awesome name, the Golden Pillar. And then when you see a picture of it, you're like, oh, yeah, that's the Golden Pillar.

[00:44:28] [SPEAKER_13] Well, the rock is a sort of golden marble. Yeah. And it does catch the evening sun, that sort of golden hour sun. And it does clint very nicely in the evening sun. It fitted exactly the kind of criteria that I love. So it was an obvious line. We knew that from our photographs. It wasn't in an area that I had not been to before, which was a bit of a detraction. But I mean, you can't have perfection on everything.

[00:44:59] [SPEAKER_13] It was obviously technically challenging. We didn't know whether we'd be good enough to climb it. So there was a huge and healthy dose of uncertainty, which is essential for an adventure, I think. Can I say there was an obvious descent route, a different descent route, which had not been climbed because the mountain had not been climbed from the north side before. Culturally, we did know that the people from Nagar were very, very different from the people from Hunza.

[00:45:27] [SPEAKER_13] I think, I don't remember what had happened, but they did have a very dodgy reputation. And somebody had been shot, I think. I can't remember, is there another porters? I remember when Doug Scott did an expedition to a mountain there called Duran, and they had terrible problems with the porters. And I think he ended up getting some of the porters put into prison or something or arrested.

[00:45:56] [SPEAKER_13] They were really, really awkward problems. And I remember that was an interesting challenge right from the outset. Yeah, they were great days to look back. And I remember there was one porter who seemed to be a much respected elder. And he didn't wear boots. He just had strips of leather, long strips of leather that were about 12 or 15 feet long, which he wrapped around his feet.

[00:46:23] [SPEAKER_13] And they were his shoes to walk all the way up to Spantic Base Camp across the glacier. And I can remember we made a really good effort to be really nice to him and foster good relationships with these porters who were quite difficult. And we did manage eventually to get them, to persuade them to carry all our kit to base camp. So there were lots of issues before we even started climbing. With the benefit of hindsight, I love that, really.

[00:46:53] [SPEAKER_13] If everything just goes boringly according to plan, then perhaps you haven't got so much to remember about the trip. But on that trip, you have lots of problems to get to base camp. Then we started up the route. The first half, I suppose, is easy, easygoing. It's just the upper section of the pillow that gets more difficult. The weather was pretty grim. I remember we spent, I think it was five days, just sat in a little tent together.

[00:47:21] [SPEAKER_13] I was so bored, so bored. And I'd just given up. Honestly, I thought we're never, ever going to get going anywhere. And we went down to base camp and the weather changed that day. And we had to go all the way back up again through the deep snow. And then the weather was reasonable. And off we went. And it was just fantastic climbing.

[00:47:45] [SPEAKER_13] And what a great feeling to just gradually get higher and higher on a feature that you've looked at photographs of so many times over the previous 12, 15 months. And in the end, achieve exactly what we'd set out to achieve. And that's what I go climbing for. That was great. I remember being so satisfied. We got back down to the base camp on the Thursday. And I was due back at work in London on the Monday.

[00:48:14] [SPEAKER_13] And yeah, it was a massive effort. And I made it. And I was so pleased. Yeah. It was brilliant.

[00:48:24] [SPEAKER_09] That's so awesome. You checked in on Monday. You know, like. Well, otherwise you lose days of annual leave.

[00:48:31] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah, but you lose days of annual leave. You see, that's no good.

[00:48:37] [SPEAKER_09] That's awesome. What a trip. Now, what did you do different about the altitude? Or was it just because it was a slower approach and climb? Or what did you learn?

[00:48:49] [SPEAKER_13] I think we learnt what we kind of already knew. We were much better at moving one at a time. And when you're moving one at a time on ground that you're finding difficult, it takes quite a long time. And so you gain height gradually and you acclimatise on the route. And on that particular route, we'd been halfway up it before. In fact, I think we went halfway up at this snow slope when we were acclimatising. I can't remember now.

[00:49:19] [SPEAKER_13] It was a long time ago. But we spent five days, I think it was, in the little tent at what must have been 5,000 metres, a bit over that. And then beyond that, we were probably only going up at 300, 400 metres a day. And so the altitude, well, obviously we felt it, but it wasn't a huge problem. We acclimatised on the route, basically.

[00:49:45] [SPEAKER_09] You know, we started with this cancer diagnosis, and that's really the meat of the new book, Eternal Alpinist. But I want to go back one other thing before we kind of get into that is the sea stacks. And this is a little non-sequitur because we're in the Himalayas right now, but these sea stack things, and you mentioned them earlier, and kind of just like odd, sort of adventurous, a little bit strange objectives is also a hallmark

[00:50:15] [SPEAKER_09] of your climbing, at least when you're back home in the UK. So tell me about the draw of these sea stacks, or the thing you started the book with is climbing these little man-made old towers that, I can't remember what the name of them are. It's very British, very like... Yeah, Follies. Yes. Yeah. Follies, which is a great name.

[00:50:37] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's... The criteria that I'm looking for in the Himalayas are reflected to a certain extent on those sea stacks and towers, if you like. They're obvious objectives. Let's take the sea stacks. They're obvious objectives. Visible from afar. Challenging to get to. It's surrounded by the sea. We bought a little boat to actually get ourselves out to these sea stacks.

[00:51:07] [SPEAKER_13] Unclimbed. A lot of them were unclimbed. There was a real attraction of an unclimbed summit. They were technically challenging, and they just made for great little adventures. And that was what attracted me to them, really. And, you know, the most famous sea stacks in the UK, things like the Old Man of Hoy. No, Chris Bollington and them did those back in the 1960s. And then there's a chap called Tom Patey, followed in that vein. But he died on a Scottish sea stack, actually, in 1970.

[00:51:38] [SPEAKER_13] And then nobody had really paid that much attention to the sea stacks. I mean, most climbers, of course, like to climb on conventional rock, on existing routes. And so when I started to look at sea stacks, there were lots of them around the coast of the UK that were unclimbed. I mean, we are very lucky in the UK. It's a very diverse coastline. So from chalk stacks to sandstone stacks, yeah, there's some pretty spectacular and challenging objectives.

[00:52:08] [SPEAKER_13] And, yeah, our little London scene was quite fired up by them. So, as I said, we did buy, I think it was a 16-foot inflatable with our little 2.8 horsepower engine on the back. And off we went. Nautical chats would probably say irresponsibly. Launching the boat and heading out to these sea stacks. And, I mean, just great days out.

[00:52:31] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah, I mean, you tell a story in there of like you're puncturing the boat and, you know, trying to get back on shore. And, you know, as it's filling with water and people are gazing on you like a bunch of idiots from the coastline or whatever. Ah, yes. Yeah, it seems like that's probably fraught with that kind of misadventure.

[00:52:54] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah, let's say fraught with that kind of memorable happening. And if it's not memorable, you might say, well, what's the point in doing it in the first place if you don't remember it? We do it for the memories.

[00:53:09] [SPEAKER_09] Okay, well, let me ask you then about Vic and Mick. This climbing partner that you had early on and then there was a pause kind of in your relationship as life took over and Vic moved to Europe. And then you guys got back together and reuniting of the two of you in older age to sort of kind of keep the dream alive. So tell me a little bit about that relationship, the Mick and Vic relationship.

[00:53:37] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah, well, it probably got off to a very bad start indeed in Chamonix High Street back in, I don't know if it was 1976 or 77. And I remember, I think I had just climbed what was probably my first TD or whatever grade it was, Alpine Route, the Sessionel Nomine on the Eckphilae Buttress on Mont Blanc. And I was probably swaggering along the high street, you know, with my big teenage head on.

[00:54:04] [SPEAKER_13] And Victor stopped me and just assaulted me with numerous questions about this. And I think what happened afterwards, I wrote in a book that I'd found Victor to be an irritating little squirt. And he wrote that he found me to be an arrogant twat. So we didn't get off to the best start. But Victor was in the North London Club, very much on the North London scene.

[00:54:33] [SPEAKER_13] And we gradually realised that we had the same kind of aspirations in winter climbing in particular, but rock climbing as well. And so we started, it would be in the late 70s, climbing in Scotland together. And we did some great routes in Scotland. I remember things like Shield Direct on Ben Nevis. And we were looking for new, exciting routes in Scotland. And again, I keep coming back to it.

[00:55:02] [SPEAKER_13] We were so lucky because in those days, you could go into some of the more remote quarries in Scotland. And there were still obvious ice streaks, you know, winter, obvious winter lines that were unclimbed. And so we would go up every weekend. And Victor was one of the most enthusiastic people on the scene at the time. So we would frequently go up together.

[00:55:28] [SPEAKER_13] And gradually, you know, we appreciated each other's strengths, each other's weaknesses, put up with each other, formed a good friendship, a good climbing partnership. And that led through the years to, I suppose, he didn't go to Peru. He could easily have come to Peru with us, but I was climbing with Chris Watts that year. He was on the Bojahagger trip, although we didn't climb together.

[00:55:55] [SPEAKER_13] And I think perhaps after the Bojahagger trip that Victor was a bit disappointed that he felt that he couldn't carry on because it was Phil Butler who got frostbite. I felt a bit disappointed that we'd all been so kind of disorganized. And basically, we decided that we should climb together on a Himalayan objective. And that's what drew us together to climb Spantic. And then after a few years, Victor decided that he would give up his architect job and become a guide, a mountain guide.

[00:56:28] [SPEAKER_13] So he moved out to Chamonix, became a mountain guide. And of course, he was then guiding all the time out there. And he gradually got into guiding on 8,000 meter peaks. I think he took his own clients six times up to the top of Everest, for example. That became his bread and butter way of earning some money. And inevitably, we drifted apart. He was climbing with people in Chamonix in his spare time. And yeah, I was climbing with all my old friends in the UK.

[00:56:58] [SPEAKER_13] And then climbing partners like Paul Ramson, Dave Turnbull, Pat Littlejohn, Steve Sustad. All old friends of mine. And then what happened, it must have been 2015, something like that. There's a chap in Chamonix, Eric Vola. And he decided that Victor and I, we were very contrasting characters in our writing, certainly. And that we had both written books by that point.

[00:57:26] [SPEAKER_13] And we'd covered some of our climbs together in those books. And he thought it would be very interesting to draw our written work together into one volume. And so he translated them from English into French and published it as the Tribulation de Mick et Vic. And I've got to admit, I just thought this was a rubbish idea.

[00:57:52] [SPEAKER_13] But it went on to win a prize, the grand prize, no less, at the Passy Book Festival, which just goes to show how little I know about what makes a good book. But the point was, in doing this book, it inevitably brought me and Victor back together. We were reading the proofs together. We got together. We did a bit more climbing together. We remembered what great time we'd had back in the 80s.

[00:58:21] [SPEAKER_13] And so in 2016, we organized a trip together. And we went out to a mountain called Sursank in India, which was unclimbed and had a very fine buttress on the north face. And I think it was over seven or eight days we climbed this. And by now, Victor would have been 66 and I was 60. But yeah, it was just like the old days. We were probably a bit slower. We were probably finding it a bit more difficult.

[00:58:50] [SPEAKER_13] But it was absolutely fantastic. It was just about at the time when I'd been climbing with Paul Ramston for a long time. And Paul is 13, 14 years younger than me. And he's too fit and fast. And he was going to... It was obvious that our Himalayan relationship, climbing relationship, wasn't going to carry on forever. We're still very good friends. We climb a lot together. But it was very obvious that Paul needed a younger partner.

[00:59:20] [SPEAKER_13] And I needed an older partner. Victor was the perfect older partner. And so, yeah, we're still doing the same kind of climbs. We just go much more slowly. And it suited both of us wonderfully. And Sursank, it was just a great route. Now, in its way, it was every bit as good as doing things like Spantic so many years before. I can remember there's a little video clip of Victor arriving at the top.

[00:59:49] [SPEAKER_13] And he says... I can remember what he says. He says, those were six of the best days of my life. He says, because we spent six days on the face. Nice. And it was really rather special. And so, after that, we said, right, we must organize more trips. This is the way forward in old age. And so, we organized a trip the following year.

[01:00:11] [SPEAKER_13] And we were just about to go on that trip when I received the cancer diagnosis, which, of course, caused a bit of a problem and led to a run of bad luck, which ended when we did Yawash Saar together in 2024. By which time Victor was 74, of course. Right. And that was equally good.

[01:00:35] [SPEAKER_13] And, you know, it was just, it felt such a satisfying experience to be up high being successful in the Himalayas again. What's Victor's full name? Anthony Victor Saunders, or Slipper Vic for short.

[01:00:53] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah. So, let's talk about the bad luck. I don't want to talk about that. Because this is the, you know, this is essentially the kickoff of the book is the bad luck.

[01:01:02] [SPEAKER_13] The book covers, that's right.

[01:01:04] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the first couple sentences, you know, go right to the cancer. But what's more, and what's, I think, affected you as a climber, is that you eventually had to have very severe operations to take care of the problem after trying chemo and things like that. So, can you reveal that to us? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:01:33] [SPEAKER_13] Well, to begin with, I was told there was a growth on the wall of my anus. And the doctors were very confident they could just cut it out. And that would be the end of the matter. And they were so confident they'd actually booked me in for an operation before they got the results of the pre-operation scans and all those kind of things. And it was the day before I was due to have the operation.

[01:02:00] [SPEAKER_13] And they phoned me and said, ah, there's a slight technical problem in that the scans unexpectedly show that the cancer has spread. And so, there's no point in just cutting it out and cutting out this mushroom-shaped growth because there's cancer elsewhere and your lymph nodes and all that kind of thing. And so, that was a concern, of course. I'd hope that they would just be able to cut it out. That would be the end of the matter. And then it was, okay, well, we'll put you on chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

[01:02:29] [SPEAKER_13] There's still an 85% chance. What was it? 75, 85% chance. A good chance that this will just cure the problem. You'll be fine. You're carrying on pooing out the right hole. It won't be a problem. So, I did the radiotherapy, did the chemotherapy. And about six months, maybe after the course is finished, I was climbing in the out with Victor. And I noticed a bit of blood in my poo again. When I got back, I was whisked into hospital.

[01:02:59] [SPEAKER_13] And they said, oh dear, oh dear. It seems to have come back. So, I missed climbing in the Himalayas in 2017 because I've just been diagnosed with the cancer. Then they said, oh, we'll have to remove your anus and rectum. I thought, this is really bad news. That means I'm going to miss the Himalayas in 2018 as well. So, on another date when you sort of don't forget, the 8th of August, 2018,

[01:03:27] [SPEAKER_13] they did remove my cancer, move my anus and my rectum, cut out some lymph nodes and gave me a stoma. And there were some worrying times along the way, I can't deny, because they weren't really quite sure how far the cancer had spread and whether or not it was going to be an operation or palliative care. But eventually, I did do the operation.

[01:03:52] [SPEAKER_13] And, yeah, I was left after August 2018 to recover as such and get used to having a colostomy bag. And the most inconvenient thing that I was left with, actually, was difficulty in sitting down. I was told that my bottom was too small for it to be an easy operation.

[01:04:16] [SPEAKER_13] If I had a bigger bottom, then apparently they could have just folded around a bit of surplus bottom into the big hole that was left where they cut everything out. But because it wasn't enough fat. You're too fit, Meg. Yeah. Well, yeah, I thought my bottom was fine, but apparently for the purpose in question, it was not. So, they had to do plastic surgery and cut big pizza-shaped slices out of each buttock and slide them round into the hole,

[01:04:46] [SPEAKER_13] you know, where the anus and rectum was. And that's left me with no padding, and it has left me paranoid about sitting bivouacs, the uncomfortable hanging bivouacs, or sitting on a really stony, awkward edge. I've only ever done one really horrible one since the operation, and it was grim. It was very grim indeed.

[01:05:07] [SPEAKER_09] Well, one, I mean, after you get this operation, and you're talking about, like, being worried that you can't sit on a bivy, but, I mean, one of the major issues, and I think all of us are thinking about, is like, oh, you have to climb with this colostomy bag. And, you know, most of us don't know anything about that, about the hygiene of it, about, you know, the things that can go wrong. But, you know, you must have thought, like, oh, is this even possible?

[01:05:34] [SPEAKER_09] Am I done going on these expeditions because of this one thing? Oh, I did, yeah.

[01:05:41] [SPEAKER_13] Because there was really not very much literature out there that led me to feel positive about climbing with a colostomy bag. I remember Googling Himalayan climbing with a colostomy bag, and the only thing I could find was some chap who'd done Ireland Peak, which was a trekking peak in Nepal, and his bag had leaked, and it has a scraped poo off himself with a stone, and the Sherpas were all very intrigued, and he gave lots of detail.

[01:06:10] [SPEAKER_13] The whole thing sounded horrendous, you know, his bag kept coming off, and there was poo everywhere. And all the literature I'd been given, you know, it was all like old ladies with sort of blue rinsed hair, sort of sitting quietly in a chair with sort of comments like they'd be able to get back to gentle gardening, and after a few weeks you can pick up a full kettle. And I thought, fuck yeah, this isn't very good at all, you know.

[01:06:39] [SPEAKER_13] But it's all rubbish, frankly. But in saying that, I should say, I keep using this word lucky. I am incredibly lucky, because my stoma is right at the very end of my digestive system. So the poo that comes out the front is now the same consistency as what used to come out the back. That means, firstly, my body extracts all of the necessary goodness from the food that I eat, and I take no medication whatsoever.

[01:07:09] [SPEAKER_13] And if the poo does come in contact with my skin, then it doesn't bite into it, like it would do if it was higher up my digestive system, and there were digestive juices in the feces. And I know that would be really bad. And also, I don't have any scars on the front, because it was all done with keyhole surgery, and so the colostomy bags stick well onto my body. I was told they wouldn't stick when it was very cold. Again, that seems to be rubbish.

[01:07:37] [SPEAKER_13] I put them in the freezer at home and stuck them straight on afterwards, and that was minus 18, and they were absolutely fine. So there are problems. I can't deny it. But sometimes there are advantages, actually. I have had very difficult vivowax where it's really awful weather outside, and you're in a little tent or something, and I can just arrange things and change the bag or squeeze poo out inside the tent. And my partner is trying to open the door in terrible weather

[01:08:06] [SPEAKER_13] and drop his trousers and stay tied onto the rope. So there are some advantages.

[01:08:11] [SPEAKER_09] It's like a poop version of a pee bottle.

[01:08:14] [SPEAKER_13] I have, when I've had diarrhea, gone straight into the pee bottle. Absolutely brilliant. My mate has just been going outside the tent having a terrible time. But yeah, there are problems, of course. Firstly, you do have to make sure that you're carrying enough bags. As you get older, it's just yet another thing that you have to worry about. So I have to carry probably at least 10 bags up onto a route to be safe.

[01:08:44] [SPEAKER_13] And every now and then, it will leak. Abseiling in particular, because my harness does go straight the way across the stoma. And abseiling does seem to put a particular strain on things. And occasionally, you can feel that it's leaking. So what? It's a bit of poo. You know, worse things happen in life. And so, much as it's been uncomfortable on occasions, and perhaps unpleasant on occasions,

[01:09:13] [SPEAKER_13] I can't blame it for slowing me down. I can only blame old age and general incompetence for that. But anyway, yeah. So after 2018, that was a sort of recovery path. We got obsessed. We broke our rules, really. And Victor and I got obsessed with a mountain called Chombu in Sikkim, which we went to three times. We went there in 2019, pre-monsoon, because we were both retired by then, we had the time.

[01:09:43] [SPEAKER_13] And what happened? The weather was just absolutely awful. We didn't get anywhere. We were told that post-monsoon might be better. So we went back post-monsoon, and we got very high. In fact, I think we'd overcome all of the difficulties, which were very considerable, actually. And then we poisoned ourselves on freeze-dried food.

[01:10:08] [SPEAKER_13] And I don't know if you've ever poisoned yourself on freeze-dried food, but it was utterly grim. And there was so much shit everywhere. And we were so utterly wasted.

[01:10:18] [SPEAKER_09] I mean, freeze-dried food sort of semi-poisons me every single time. So actual poisoning is probably...

[01:10:26] [SPEAKER_13] We were utterly, utterly wasted. And that was one of the most disappointing experiences in my Himalayan life, certainly, in that we looked up. We reckoned it was a day and a bit, perhaps, of easier ground to the summit. And it was a longed-for summit. It was our second trip there. And we just felt that it wasn't sensible to carry on. And we descended. And I was so tired from the time we got back down to base camp,

[01:10:55] [SPEAKER_13] that I think it was the right decision. We've always said, really, in our sort of chats between climbing partners, that what we really need in a climbing partner is to have the same judgment about when you should go down. And our criteria there is always, when we get back and sleep in our bed at home, will we look back on it and be comfortable with the decision that we made?

[01:11:22] [SPEAKER_13] And on that occasion, we were comfortable that we made the right decision. But it left Chombo still unclimed. So we broke all our rules. And we decided to go back again for a third time. So we organised it all for 2020. And then, bad luck again, COVID came. And we weren't allowed to go because of COVID. So we failed before we even got there. 2021, we sorted it all out again.

[01:11:50] [SPEAKER_13] And arranging a climbing trip to go to Sikkim is a bureaucratic nightmare. It's very satisfying when all of the hurdles are overcome. But when you're actually trying to overcome them, it is incredibly stressful. We overcame that all again in 2021. And then COVID stopped us. COVID outbreaks in India. No international flights allowed. So we failed in 2021 as well. Bad luck continuing. I mean, 2022, we went through the whole process again.

[01:12:20] [SPEAKER_13] We got back. Overcame some hurdles that I never, ever thought we would overcome to actually get to the mountain. But we got there. We were acclimatising. And Victor was crossing a boulder field of huge boulders. Three or four metre diameter boulders. And one of these huge boulders rolled over as he was standing on top of it. And it flung him forwards and down a gap between some other boulders. And he cut his hand really badly.

[01:12:50] [SPEAKER_13] I mean, so badly that if it had been me, I'd have been concerned about my hand and just wanted to go home straight away. But Victor is a resilient man. And we got it patched up. And we went up to try and climb the mountain. And how we were supposed to climb it with Victor with a sort of boxing glove type bandage on his hand. I do not know. But we got to the foot of the difficulties. It snowed. And we just spent another few days just sat in our tent, listening to the avalanches.

[01:13:21] [SPEAKER_13] Until it became clear that our permit time had run out. And we just weren't going to do it. So we wasted, well, three years, or three, trying Chombu. Two years wasted with COVID. Eventually, we decided to go to Yawash Sa, which had always been in our objectives box in 2024.

[01:13:48] [SPEAKER_13] And, yeah, finally achieved the sort of longed-for success in our old age, post-cancer, and post-various health issues for Victor as well. So it was a particularly satisfying trip. And that's where the book ends, with the two contented old men.

[01:14:09] [SPEAKER_09] It's funny how you just deflected my question about being obsessed with climbing. Oh, man. And yet here you are in your 60s, Victor in his 70s, just throwing yourself at this mountain over and over again, despite all the warnings against it. And, I mean, just thinking about that, him being tipped off that boulder. We're talking about a guy in his 70s, you know.

[01:14:35] [SPEAKER_09] And it's like, yeah, it's pretty incredible that you guys, your ambition and everything else that, like, has, you know, continued through what you guys were putting up with. And I've always used, you know, the, I think it's Dylan Thomas line, you know, do not go gently into that good night. And, I mean, it seems to really exemplify that.

[01:14:57] [SPEAKER_13] Yeah, I think it's not really a matter of being an obsession. It's a matter of, as you get old, you either use it or you lose it. And we both still love being up in the mountains. And I think we've both said that we probably won't go with a different partner now. We just carry on until either, for one reason or another, one of us is unable to go. Or we stop enjoying it. I can't quite imagine us stopping enjoying it.

[01:15:26] [SPEAKER_13] It's going to be ultimately that we can't do it for one reason or another. But for the time being, it's all good. So we're off, well, next month. And, I mean, well, Victor's now 76, which is pretty remarkable, I know. Yeah, I'm a mere fledgling at 70.

[01:16:14] [SPEAKER_09] All right, folks. Thanks for listening. And thanks to Mick for connecting. Look around for his book, Eternal Alpinist. It's out right now. Look for his other books too. Vertical Pleasure, On Thin Ice. Maybe those two would be a little hard to find. No Easy Way, a memoir published in 2018, which means he was probably about done with it right when he got his cancer diagnosis. Hence the need for a memoir part two.

[01:16:41] [SPEAKER_09] And look, if you have even a remote interest in alpine climbing and have only sort of heard of Mick Fowler up until now, well, Google him or look at his Wikipedia. The list of Alpine ascents is astounding. You scroll for a while down that page. So check him out. He also has an Instagram. Not so up to date. I think his latest post was 13 weeks ago. If he was more on it, I'd be a little disappointed, frankly.

[01:17:11] [SPEAKER_09] But it's there. All right, folks. I hope you're having a good time out there in Rocktober. And of course, don't forget to check your knots.

[01:17:55] [SPEAKER_02] The major assault on the Uxbridge Road has been going on for about three weeks, really, ever since they established base camp here at the junction of Wilsdon Road. From there, they climbed steadily to establish camp two outside Lewis's. And it's taken them another three days to establish camp three here outside the post office. Well, they've spent a good night in there last night in preparation for the final assault today. The leader of the expedition is 29-year-old Bert Tang, a local headmaster and mother of three. Bert, how's it going?

[01:18:25] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, it's a bit gripping, is this, Chris. I've got to try and reach that bus stop in an hour or so. And I'm doing it by... I'm doing it by layback up this gutter. So I'm kind of guttering and laying back at the same time and philosophising. Bert, some people say this is crazy. Oh, well, they said Crippin was crazy, didn't they?

[01:18:50] [SPEAKER_04] Well, Crippin was crazy. Oh, well, there you are then.

[01:18:53] [SPEAKER_05] John, I'm sending you down this carabiner on white. Lemon? No, he's putting in a peg down there because I'm quite a way up now. And if I come and stalk her here, I go down quite a long way.

[01:19:08] [SPEAKER_04] Such quiet courage is typical of the way these brave chaps shrug off danger. Like it or not, you've got to admire the skill that goes into it. AHHHHH!