Ain’t no mountain high enough
Interview: Liz Scarff Explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes does nothing by halves, so to conquer his biggest fear – vertigo – he climbed the Eiger BIVOUACKED on a one-metre-wide, snow-encrusted ledge, above a sheer drop that plummets thousands of metres down into a black void, the intrepid British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes is in his sleeping [...]
Interview: Liz Scarff
Explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes does nothing by halves, so to conquer his biggest fear – vertigo – he climbed the Eiger
BIVOUACKED on a one-metre-wide, snow-encrusted ledge, above a sheer drop that plummets thousands
of metres down into a black void, the intrepid British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes is in his sleeping bag,
tied in place by a rope, settling down for the night.
For the last five days Sir Ranulph and his team
have been battling up 4,000 metres of near-vertical
exposed rock and ice. They have dealt with freefalling
ice axes, the threat of avalanche
and the terrifying exposure of Europe’s
most dangerous peak. Climbing the
north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps
is the latest in his long career of daring
– and dangerous – challenges.
There are many ways you could
describe Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE:
a great British eccentric; an elite SAS soldier; onetime
potential successor to Sean Connery’s James
Bond or, as the Guinness World Records does – as
the “World’s Greatest Living Explorer”.
Over his 63 years, Fiennes has built up an
extraordinary CV. At the forefront of major
expeditions since 1969, he was the first man to visit
both the north and south poles by land and the
first to cross the Antarctic on foot. The Transglobe
Expedition saw Fiennes spend three years, from
1979 to 1982, circumnavigating the globe along
a line of latitude that passes through both poles.
In more recent years, he has run seven marathons
on seven continents in seven days, and made an
attempt to climb Everest. His expeditions have
raised in excess of £10m for charity to date.
Yet Fiennes is not a natural climber. He
has lost half his fingers on his left hand
to frostbite and undergone heart bypass
surgery. He had no mountaineering
experience (attempting the Eiger requires
technical climbing knowledge, whereas for
8,850-metre-high Everest, climbers mainly
need to be physically fit and able to cope
with altitude), and suffers from severe, panic-inducing
vertigo. It was an effort to pick himself up after the
death of his first wife in 2004: climbing the Eiger gave
him something to focus on. The tenacity and grit that
he applies to all his expeditions, plus his ability to pick
a great team, saw him achieve this goal last March.
“I was starting again at the bottom of the ladder.
So whatever I had done in the past, in the polar world, was useless,” says Fiennes. He spent two years
training; first on climbing walls and then in Chamonix
in the French Alps with team leader, Kenton Cool.
“Horrific, hairy and exposed” is how Fiennes
described the climb, which took five days to finish.
He later added: “It was the most terrifying experience
of my life. I really hate it when books, or anywhere
else, use words like ‘terrifying’ because you are in
grave danger of being accused of being melodramatic
– so I steer clear of it. But in this particular case, it is
totally apt; it is the sweaty horror that you do feel.”
The explorer currently lives in Somerset with his
second wife Louise, stepson Alexander and daughter
Elizabeth. The third cousin of
Hollywood actors Ralph and Joseph
Fiennes, his full name is Sir Ranulph
Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd
Baronet, OBE; or Ran to his friends.
Having lived in South Africa until
he was 12, he returned to the UK
and was educated at Eton. He
then followed his father, who died
in action in the Second World
War before he was born, into
the military. After eight years of
service; five of which were in
the SAS, Fiennes found himself in need of a fulltime
career. As he puts it himself: “26 is quite old to start
out in life with no qualifications… I had no business
connections and no sure idea of any particular goal.”
Inspiration came from Virginia (Ginny) Pepper, his childhood sweetheart and future wife; they
remained married until her death in 2004. On a whim, she visited George Greenfield, Britain’s bestknown
literary agent for adventurers. Greenfield then commissioned Fiennes to write about his 1969 White
Nile expedition, a journey done by mini-hovercraft.
Fiennes soon began giving expedition lectures;
mostly, he recalls, in “town halls to ladies over 70”.
It was Ginny who also pointed out that to be
successful at expeditions, the team
must be the first humans, not merely
the first British, to get there. These
beginnings were to set the blueprint
for Fiennes’s career as a record-breaking
explorer and best-selling writer.
Three years ago, Fiennes lost his mother,
two of his three sisters and his first wife,
Ginny, to cancer, over an 18-month period.
“The period after Ginny died was a bad
time for me; a very bad time indeed,” he says.
“I’d been married happily for 36 years; I had known her since she was nine and I was 12, and I’d been
taking her out since she was 13. When she wasn’t there,
after the cancer, I desperately wanted not to succumb
to weed and vegetate, and there was a grave danger
of that. Many people die after their nearest and dearest
die; if they are very close they just lose interest in life.
I wanted something very sharp and very challenging,
to try and snap out of it. The thing I feared worst was
vertigo and it seemed to be a good challenge.”
Fiennes teamed up with top UK climbers Kenton
Cool and Ian Parnell, and decided to climb the Eiger
to raise funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care.
“I don’t do emotion,” Fiennes warned when we first
speak on the telephone during his climb last March.
He may not “do emotion”, but he knows how to spin a
dramatic tale. Perched on a three-foot-wide ledge, he
relays accounts of rocks whistling past his helmet; how
an ice-axe came careering down unexpectedly from
above; how he is trying desperately not to look down;
and how, at one point, Ian Parnell had slipped and
fallen four metres down the face. Terrifyingly, the north
face has claimed the lives of more than 50 climbers.
face has claimed the lives of more than 50 climbers.
I spoke to Fiennes every day during the Eiger climb,
and by the fourth day he sounded exhausted. His voice
began to belie his words as he described the horror of
a very exposed section called “The Traverse of the Gods”.
“Previously, there’s always been a slight bulge
effect,” he said about the rocks that protrude from
the face, disguising the sheer drop. “But that was just
straight down to hell. Had I known that it was part of
the thing, I don’t think I would have done it. I thought
it was going to be just a more difficult version of the
practice climbs I have been doing with Kenton around
Chamonix and the Alps; not the nightmarish thing
that it actually was. My policy of not looking down
just wasn’t possible: I had to look down to find the
next foothold because it is so totally vertical.”
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, the title of
Fiennes’s new book, was the Byronic epithet that
Ginny’s father gave Fiennes when they were younger:
and it seems unlikely that Fiennes has changed much
since then. He cites his next goal as increasing
the amount he has raised for charity to £15m.
But why risk his life by adventuring? Fiennes is
succinct when he says that army training, lack of
qualifications and the need to earn a living led him
to do what he does best: live life beyond the limits.
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Sir Ranulph
Fiennes (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) is available
from 4 October. To support Marie Curie Cancer
Care and Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s Eiger Challenge
visit www.justgiving.com/EigerChallenge
