To Reach the Highest Mountains

Introduction:

Honoured guests, Head Table guests, members of The Empire Club, ladies and gentlemen.

Our speaker today is the first Canadian ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest. And if any doubt the magnitude of that climb, contemplate that it took five years to plan, $3 million dollars to finance and 27 tons of equipment to outfit. That and the challenge of a summit more than 29,000 feet above sea level. Is it any wonder that Everest is synonymous with the height of excellence?

Laurie Skreslet reached the top, blissfully ignorant of the words of Sir John A. MacDonald. He spoke of mountains in another way. He told a British Columbia audience, "Here, with the grand memorials of the great Creator surrounding me, I could spend the rest of my days content". But that's not the way Laurie Skreslet sees it. His background includes sailing on a four-master, working as a merchant mariner, training Outward Bound volunteers, travelling the world, and climbing its highest mountains. These experiences gave him the program he uses to teach the drive to excellence and the dedication to inspire it.

Teamwork, planning, organization and preparation made the assault on Everest successful. The same words, the same technology and the same teacher are teaching Canadian business leaders the way to reach their corporate "highest mountains". Today we won't go to the top of Everest. It took him three months. But we will see and hear how he makes the word mean excellence.

Laurie Skreslet:

It's going to be a challenge in the next 20 minutes to try to condense the feeling for Everest in 1982 and when we subsequently returned four years later to do it again from the Chinese side. I don't know if I'm going to be able to accomplish that in 20 minutes, but I'll try.

I think perhaps the best way to begin would be to admit to you that the only area I can claim any expertise in, in all honesty, is in my field of endeavour which is mountaineering. I've never considered myself to be the best in my profession at any time, no matter whether it was when I stood on the ' summit of Mount Everest, because the reality of that climb was that is was an exercise in teamwork from its conception in 1977 until October 5th when we placed the first three members of our team on the summit. I was lucky enough to be one of those three and then three days later, another three men made it to the summit--two Sherpas and another Canadian, Pat Morrow.

I know, having been involved in that trip and the one four years later, how much of an exercise in teamwork it is. It's one of the fallacies and it's one of the sad points for the uninitiated in terms of mountaineering that they tend to think because you make it to the pinnacle of a peak that you're the one who did it all. Nothing could be further from the truth in terms of how these trips work. I'd like to give you a few examples of what I mean in terms of how I think there are similarities between our two worlds--between the world of business where most of us are involved down here in the normal world, and the world of mountaineering. When we, as a group of mountaineers, try to tackle a difficult peak, be it perhaps one of the 14 peaks in the world that are over 18,000 metres in height, one of the first things we do, obviously, is try to get together the most talented, the most skilled, the most qualified people we can find for that particular task. That isn't normally the hardest part. The hardest part is trying to get these skilled people to coordinate, to cooperate, to focus their energies towards a common goal. And when we try these mountains, such as Mount Everest, it's interesting when you see them for the first time because the scale of mountains in the Himalayas where these peaks are located, the big ones, dwarfs anything that we can compare them to here in North America. Kanchenjunga for one, which is the third highest mountain in the world, has a base of over 22 kilometres. I mean, that's the bottom of the pyramid of that particular peak. And these mountains for the most part take more than a few days to climb.

For the peaks that I've climbed in the Himalayas and for the majority of climbers that I know and associate with, usually the trips that we go on involve a lot of preparation and a lot of time on the mountain. Everest, as one example, took us 56 days to climb in 1982 and four days to come off of it and it took us 72 days of climbing in 1986 to make it to the summit and eight days to clear the mountain. Now, that's because being so high--going to 29,000 feet--you have to allow time for your body to adjust. In 1982 we calculated we needed six camps on Everest so we could make an attempt for the summit and have a reasonable chance of getting there. Well, when you calculate all this equipment and the number of people you're going to involve it usually ends up taking about 60 to 70 days on a mountain. You have to take the time to put together your plan.

Our expedition in 1982 cost $3 million--it was very expensive. Most expeditions now are being put together for much less than that, but that was our first serious attempt to climb Mount Everest and I think the attitude was one of, "we're going to give it our absolute best shot". It took five years of preparation--that is, of soliciting the help and the support of over 160 Canadian companies--to get us there in 1982. It's worth noting too that over two-thirds of the funds generated were used for communication, to transmit live television pictures from the mountain back here to North America. The actual last $1 million was used to climb the mountain.

Now, when I talk about going to do a mountain like Everest, if you know what the odds were you might wonder even more than now perhaps why people try to do that. When we went in 1982, there had been only 115 people in the 62 years of attempts on that mountain--it was first attempted in the early 20's--that had successfully reached the summit. A sadder side was the fact that 67 people died in those attempts. I tried to be realistic when I approached the mountain in '82 and I felt that if you're going to try to get to the top, you had better look at those who made it to the summit relative to those that didn't come back. That means that for every two that get to the top, facts have shown that one person doesn't return. That might make a normal person wonder, 'Well, why in the world would you want to get involved in an activity in which the odds are like that? The odds are worse that when you go to Vegas:

I can't explain for the other members of our team why they went. I have my ideas, but it wouldn't be fair to give their explanation. I can tell you why I went though in 1982 and that was connected inherently and innately with my association with Outward Bound. Outward Bound is an organization I became aware of when I was a young boy--14 years old. I read an article about it in a Reader's Digest magazine. It was entitled, 'You'll Never be Afraid to Try Again' and it was about a school run in North Carolina. Well, you go through a pretty rough four weeks in back country and they teach you how to rock climb and learn how to navigate in the wilderness, but what they really try to do is teach you how to try. l was so interested in it that I decided to save up my money--it took a year and a half to afford to take the course--and when it came time, I was 16. My father didn't want to let me go because he thought it was a waste of money. It was quite expensive. So, when I found I couldn't go, I wrote to Ottawa for my passport and once I got that, I left home and started working as a merchant seaman. I worked for a number of different ones--the American Merchant Marine, and the Norwegian.

I travelled for quite a few years looking for something that I never really found in my travels, although I went to some exciting places. I never really found the satisfaction I was looking for. It wasn't until I returned to Canada later and started working back home in Calgary that I remembered Outward Bound, and I decided to take a course there. I decided to take a course at the Colorado Outward Bound School. Outward Bound is an organization that was started during World War Il to help teach merchant seamen how to survive at sea. They were finding a need for this because they saw that when these merchant vessels were taking supplies from Canada and the United States to Great Britain and were sunk, a higher percentage of the young men were dying in relation to the old while awaiting rescue. Common sense made people assume that is should've been the young and the virile and strong who survived and the older who died soonest. But that is not what was happening. When they investigated it more, they began to realize that these older men were lasting longer than the young because when the ship, the symbol of security to these young sailors, was taken away, the sense of self-confidence was broken, and their will to struggle to the bitter end was weakened. They tended to give up in their minds and it wasn't soon before their bodies followed. Now, the older men, who weren't necessarily tougher physically, had, through years of working on the ocean, developed tenacity and mental toughness to the hardships of life. It was that mental tenacity that allowed them to hang on, not to give in, and survive. So, they started this organization to teach men how to survive at sea. The motto of the school was "to serve, to strive and not to yield", basically to teach people the willingness to keep fighting without letting the thought of the bitter end so intimidate them that they gave up before it even arrived.

It proved so successful that when the war finished, there seemed an interest in this sort of confidence-building organization and the schools prospered after the war finished, spread throughout the Commonwealth, and now we have probably 50-60 Outward Bound schools throughout the world. The motto still remains the same--to serve, to strive and not to yield--and if that rings a bell, it could be from the recent popularity of the movie 'Dead Poets Society' where that quote is brought up again in the film. The quote comes from the poem by Tennyson called "Ulysses". It's about an ancient Greek mariner who is retired to an island with his wife. His children are working in the government. They're grown up and he is reminiscing about his life. And I guess he's coming head-to-head with accepting the fact that he's grown old and he's reflecting on the adventures he's been through in his life. It's interesting the way he sums it up at the end of the poem, because he says at the end, "Although we are not now of that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are we are." He summed that up as being "one equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to serve, to strive, to seek and not to yield." Outward Bound felt that was an ideal way of conveying what they were trying to teach and that was the motto still to this day in the Outward Bound schools. When I decided to take the course when I came back from my travels, I took a course in Colorado and there they use mountaineering as a tool to bring across these ideals. Having enjoyed my course, working for the school for a number of months in the States until my visa expired, it was upon my return to Canada that I discovered mountaineering.

Now, mountaineering for me has been the motivator, the initiator, that keeps me from falling asleep in life. I say that because I tend to find, now I've turned 40, myself getting into this waking sleep that I notice a lot of people do down here. I think we all need initiators or motivators to remind us again and again what we're capable of and to remind us of those ideals that we hold close to our hearts. The end of that poem was about this man trying to clarify what the ideals were that were close to him. I think at the end of the poem, he was trying to say that although our bodies show the ravages of time, the ideals by which we lead our lives do not have to become rusted and tarnished with misuse or lack of use; that if we continue to live our ideals clearly, they can be as shining, as bright as the day we discovered them. I believe that's what Outward Bound was trying to teach us. I should know because I've worked for them now for over 18 years. In mountaineering--and this is what led to Everest--I found the initiator that would support me for the rest of my life, at least to this day that I'm speaking to you.

I found in mountaineering an activity, a way of life, a lifestyle that was appropriate for my type of personality, because I tend to be lazy, but not incompetent. l found in mountaineering a hard taskmaster. I found in mountaineering a way of living in which it was easy to get into situations that invariably were going to be difficult to get out of and, once in those situations, once involved, if you failed, the result was either physical injury or death. For me, I need no better motivator than the threat of death or physical injury to make me try a little bit harder at doing what I did best, which was to express myself in a physical way. I learned more in mountaineering in these 20 years, I think, than I've ever learned in the years before and I expect to climb until I can't move any more. Climbing means a lot to me. Climbing is the instrument which has allowed me to see this cage that I carry still to a degree around with me, this cage made up of self-imposed limitations, and it also gives me a tool that allows me to break and in some cases bend and remove those bars of cage that I carry around with myself. I mention it, not assuming that you people are restrained by any imaginary cages made up of selfimposed limitations, but I'll tell you this--most people in this world are. That's the biggest lie that saddens me--the people fall for the lie, thinking they can't go beyond what they've done in the past, because more than anything, that's what Everest was about in 1982 and 1986. It was about ordinary people voluntarily putting themselves in situations in which they were willing to give more than they'd ever given in the past.

I think it has contemporary value even though it's eight years since we did Everest back in 1982. A lot of people have probably forgotten us, except those that were involved with us when we came back and I think they'll always remember the association with the members of our team or those of us that they got to know. But I think the message is still as real now as it was then, that we can all try harder than we do most of the time. For me, the people that drove it home more than anything else were Terry Fox and Rick Hansen. First, it was Terry Fox, who I first saw in an advertisement on TV running down the highway and then I saw Rick Hansen, and saw footage of people crying in cities when he'd go through. That was the realization that that man there, Rick Hansen, was trying for what he believed in. It made me ask myself the question, 'Am I trying as hard as I could for the things that I believe in?' To me, that's what Everest was about and the few slides I'm going to show you right now are what I hope might remind you in the days or the years ahead of a time in our history when a group of us went over to the other side of the world and stuck our necks out a bit. A lot of people think it wasn't worth it because four of our men died on that expedition. Half the team decided that it wasn't worth it and they returned to Canada. A small group of us stayed on the mountain until the climb was completed.

It's interesting to note, and I think credit should be given, that those people who walked off in the middle of the trip decided to go back again. I joined them and returned again in 1986 to attempt Everest from the north, from the Tibetan side, and although the climb took a lot longer and was much more difficult, the climb is notable because a young lady named Sharon Wood, at 29 years of age, became the first woman on this side of the world, North and South America, to ever climb Mount Everest, the sixth woman in the world to stand on its peak. That brought a lot of pride for me because I felt proud of the fact we were able to make history twice on two different Everest climbs.

We called our trip 'Everest Light'...and I might just add with a great deal of frustration tried to find a brewery that would support us. They thought the name was great, but nobody was willing to put their money where their interest was. So we went without getting the support of any beer companies. We funded our trip for $300,000 instead of $3 million in '86. We went with 11 people instead of 65. We took five tons of gear with us instead of 27 tons of gear which we took in 1982. We attempted a route that had never been successfully climbed before, from the Chinese side as opposed to the route we did in '82 which was a repeat of the original route on the mountain, and nobody got killed and nobody got injured on our climb in 1986. I'm very proud of that trip, not just because Sharon made it to the summit, but because I feel it was a good example of what many of us are trying to do and will be called upon to do in the years ahead down here, which is simply'do more with less'.

The key to being able to do more with less is learning how to use our greatest resources more efficiently, predominately the people that make up our teams, whether they're a climbing team on a mountain or whether they're an organization down here and how to use the heart resources more efficiently. The bottom line of it all is learning how to do it right the first time. That seems to be the key--a message I hear all the time down here in the business community. Here, you have to drive it into people's minds. In the mountains, it's a lot simpler. If you use an excuse in the mountain, chances are, you're going to get killed because excuses carry absolutely no weight in the environment that I spent a lot of my time in. There, you learn how to do it right the first time because your life's on the line and it's interesting that with all the excuses in the world to call upon in a mountain environment--overworked, undernourished, sick, not resting at night, not enough people to do the job, more is happening than you thought was going to happen, plans change--with all the excuses in the world why you can't do it, I've noticed that people always find a way of doing it and doing it right the first time because their attitude is right. They're not going to waste their life on the mountain. I think that's something we can learn from climbers about attitude because in the years that I've been climbing, what I've found to be far more important than physical fitness or being the best in your chosen profession, is having the right attitude towards what it is you're trying to do and, if anything, that's what I'm hoping I'll leave you with after showing you a few slides here.

What I'm going to show you here is what most likely you were expecting to see here this afternoon. That is Mount Everest taken from the southern side with a telephoto lens. That piece of rock and ice that you see there at 29,107 feet is the highest point on the surface of the earth. Regardless of any controversy you might have heard a number of years ago, it's all be reproven--it's still 600 feet higher than K2. So, Everest still remains the biggest of them all.

Now, just a few slides showing what did lead up to myself going on this climb. When I came back from my Outward Bound course in 1970 and first started getting involved in climbing, climbing Mount Everest was probably the furthest thing from my mind because, like an average Canadian, I tended to think something like that was only going to be in the realm of the other people--the Americans, the Europeans. I didn't think we as Canadians would ever go over there. So, when I came back from Colorado and started climbing in Canada, I didn't climb where you might assume--in the Rockies. I learned to climb on the boulders in the prairies of southern Alberta. If you're wondering what you can learn on boulders, you can learn all the basics of the sport on boulders, especially when you're not using a rope. Here, climbing 20 or 30 feet off the ground and making a mistake, it only takes one fall before you start to realize that maybe there is something to this business about thinking and planning your moves out ahead of time so you didn't work yourself into a cul-de-sac where there was no option except to suffer a bit of pain. On these boulders, I learned the simple early lessons of motivating myself. I noticed that the level of motivation in me always increased with the height I was above ground, so that when I was 30 feet above ground without a rope, I always tried a lot harder than I was when I was only five feet off the ground.

Now, these basic lessons, if learned well, we could apply to harder and harder climbs; taking those basic rock climbing lessons, adding on to the skills by using sophisticated climbing gear--climbing ropes, harnesses, heavier clothing--and tackling harder peaks like this one you see here in southern British Columbia in the Bugaboo range. And we also have to climb with packs now, because we spend the nights on these faces. They take more than a day to do. This one took three days to do and two nights. And if you wonder where you sleep, well the next picture was taken 300 feet from the summit where we spent the second night on a ledge. There you see my partner, who is sleeping on a ledge in the upper left-hand corner. Directly to his left, it drops off for 4,000 vertical feet back down to where the first photograph was taken three days before. When you wake up in a situation like this, you don't need a dictionary to understand the meaning of the word commitment. You find that if you have the imagination and the creativity to make yourself believe you could pull something like this off, then you begin to realize that with those qualities must go the commitment to see them through to their logical conclusion. Now, you learn other things, too. You learn how not to toss and turn much when you're sleeping on a ledge that drops off for 4,000 feet on the mountainside.

Now, there you see a picture taken in California, where 2,000 feet up a wall, we're pushing across a ceiling that bars our way up. What you don't see is the amount of time it took to train for this thing. There's a crack that splits the ceiling and we found that it we taped up our hands, we could jam our hands in the crack, pull our upper bodies into the ceiling and then, by pulling our feet up and sticking our feet in the crack, we could move our feet one at a time and our hands one at a time, and work our way to the outer lip, periodically letting go with one of our hands to reach behind our body and stick it in a bag that's hanging from our waist which has crushed gymnastic chalk in it, to sort of powder our hands up and then jam them back in the crack. For some reason, our hands tend to sweat a lot when we're hanging 2,000 feet off the ground upside down. Then, we worked to the outer lip and then flipped our legs around the outer edge to hook a flake that's two feet up around the lip. Then once one foot gets behind it, we let go with our hands and twist our body up to grab that flake and then try to muscle our way onto that flake and continue climbing a vertical wall around the other side. Now, of course, the reason I put this in is not to get you people interested in the sport, but it's to show you how we don't accept something as impossible, the first time we view it, We say "Okay. Where's the flaw? Where's the line of weakness and how can I best exploit that line of weakness?" That's how we approach things that many people think of as impossible in the mountains.

Now, this picture shows you Sharon Wood. She was 17 years of age. l first met Sharon when she was a student at Outward Bound when she was 15. This is Sharon climbing on a route west of Calgary in the spring-time. She's 300 feet off the ground there. She's frozen her left hand. She's trying to thaw her fingertips out. A couple of hours before I took the picture, it was bright and sunny out. Yet within that short period of time, conditions changed, turned dramatically against us and we were caught in a snowstorm. It's interesting that one of the first things you learn in mountaineering, if you're going to stay with the sport, is how to adapt to changing conditions. You learn how to choose clothing, choose climbing gear and learn climbing techniques that will allow you to be flexible enough to adjust when conditions turn against you and if you don't learn this lesson well--learning how to adapt--you don't go very far in the sport of mountaineering.

Now, this is a picture of the highest waterfall in western Canada. Now if you wonder if we climb waterfalls, the answer is yes, we do. But we don't do it in summertime. We wait until the middle of winter until they're a frozen ribbon of ice. We practice on these things because the ability to move up and down steep water ice is very important if you are going to tackle difficult mountains like Mount Everest in the future, because ice is one of the defenses these huge peaks have which prevent a lot of people from reaching their summit. In the early 1970's, we started practising on these waterfalls and we started finding that all the gear available was inadequate because nobody was trying to climb these type of climbs. So, we had to create the tools we needed to get up this peak, developing the ice axes, developing the protective devices that allowed us to attach ourselves to the waterfall. We'd hammer steel tubes in the ice to anchor ourselves to the waterfall. On our feet, we'd strap these devices that allow us to move on vertical ice, and we'd use ropes, of course. Usually, we'd climb with two ropes because sometimes you can accidentally hit your rope and cut your rope right in half and then you'd find yourself stranded on a waterfall without being connected to your partner. The way we'd protect ourselves is to tie in to the two lengths of 250 metre ropes and then wrap the rope around our waist to feed out to our partner who is climbing. As we move up, the idea is that if you fall, your partner will wrap the rope around their waist tighter and then you can't fall any further below them than you are above them. You place ice screws in the ice periodically as you go up to limit the distance you'll fall down.

Here, there's an ice screw 40 or 50 feet below me on the right hand side. Now, if I should fall, I'll fall 40 feet down until I'm level with the ice screw, 40 feet below it and then if the ice screw doesn't rip out and my partner does his or her job and locks the rope to their waist, there'll be about 10 feet of slack being taken up. In 10 feet of rope you should stop. That means though that's about a 100 foot fall. What I'm getting at here is when you're carrying 12 ice screws under your armpit and you've got 24 razor-sharp pieces of steel strapped to your boots and you've got two ice daggers in your hand, which are your ice axes, if you fall 100 feet, something's going to hurt. That's what I mean about the name of this game--you do it right the first time--you don't fall. All the motivation in the world is right there in front of you. You don't have to have somebody whispering in your ear as to why you shouldn't fall. It's obvious that if you do, you're going to get severely hurt. So, you learn how to do it right the first time. You learn how to get yourself organized.

You learn how to look at the line you're going to take. You learn how to assess yourself and the problem you're taking on accurately and honestly, because if you're dishonest with yourself, if you let pride push you into something you're not capable of doing, that's how people do get killed and that's how people do get hurt.

The last couple of slides are just a few shots to show you what you can achieve. Here's a waterfall that's 400 vertical feet, a pillar of ice that just goes straight up and the last 60 feet are actually overhanging. This is just about 50 miles out of Calgary, close to the Olympic site. This particular waterfall here is called Sorcerer. When we first attempted this, people told us--members of our established climbing community in Canada--that it was impossible because it was too long, the ice was too steep, it was too thin, it was a wet waterfall and many of our ropes would freeze in, there was no place to camp on it. All these critics were proved happily correct for the first two winters, because we tried three times and we didn't succeed. But we did get it on the fourth try and took 6 days and 6 nights to get up this thing. We slept in hammocks that we'd hang from ice screws we'd attached to the waterfall. Now, the unique thing, l think, isn't that we did it, but that eight years later two people did it from the bottom to the top in seven hours with improved equipment with improved climbing techniques. The point I'm trying to make here is I think it's important that all of us carry with us an image of something, be it a waterfall or something else that we know was accepted by the majority as impossible once, but which with time and effort and teamwork has shown to be not only possible, but, as in this case right here, relatively mundane. Actually, it's a special photograph because every time Sam Blyth uses this, he keeps saying, "Laurie, when are we going to go and climb this thing?"

These things that I'm showing you here, the bouldering, the rock climbing, the ice climbing, the Alpine climbing, were the things that led me up to Everest. It was 11 years of that sort of experience that put me in a position that I felt I was capable of asking if I could join the team. It's interesting to note that when I was accepted on the Everest expedition, it wasn't because I told them that I knew I could get to the summit, because I didn't and that was the fear I had when I went to speak to the expedition leader. I was afraid he'd ask me that and if I was going to be honest, I'd have to tell him that I didn't know if I had what it would take to get to the top. What's interesting is that isn't what he was concerned about. He wanted to know what I had to give his team, what I could give to his organization that would give someone--whether it was me or someone else--a better chance of making it to the summit and that, in essence, is what teamwork is all about. In the end, that's what our climb at Everest in both '82 and '86 was about. It was about teamwork.

I'd just like to finish up with one more comment. I know perhaps I'm disappointing some of you. I think many of you were hoping to see more slides perhaps of Everest. I guess what I'm trying to do is just entice some of you to hear the story one of these days. I enjoy talking to schools, especially kids. A lot of business people enjoy the story of what happened on Everest because they see the similarities. I think for me the best enjoyment is when I see kids understand for the first time that they can actually do anything or be anything they want to be if they're willing to go beyond these false beliefs many of us fall for, which is thinking we can only do what we've done in the past. When we learn that to be a fallacy, that we can go beyond what we've done in the past, I think that's how we can as adults change the world.

The point I want to finish on is that I think very few of us in our life are ever lucky enough to get a glimpse of what we are actually capable of doing and I think in a sense we're all climbers in a way. Perhaps my mountains are more of the mountains of deprivation, hardship, cold--maybe your mountains are mountains of planning, preparation, mountains of endeavour as it were, and if that's the case, I want to wish you good luck and good fortune on the mountains that you're going to be climbing in the years ahead. Today is a good day for me because today I get to take this suit off and I don't have to put it on for another 4-5 weeks. We're going to Argentina, to the highest mountain on this side of the world. After we come back, I've got three weeks here and then we go back to the Himalayas, to a different part of Nepal. So, I hope you wish us luck. Perhaps we'll send a card back to the Empire Club and tell them what we're up to over there. Thank you for listening to me. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and good luck in all the things that you're going to be up to.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Sam Blyth, President, Blyth and Company and a Director of The Empire Club of Canada.