NOTHING VENTURED NOTHING GAINED
IT was rude to say it to Tim Macartney-Snape, but I did. Just months before, he and Greg Mortimer had pulled off what was called “the mountaineering coup of the century”. They had climbed a new and difficult route on Everest without using bottled oxygen.
Back then, in 1984, only two others had climbed Everest without bottled oxygen; one of them superstar mountaineer Reinhold Messner. On the summit they’d been at their limit, but Tim, at 8848m, acted as if he was at sea level. He got out his tape recorder and made a passionate and eloquent ten minute plea for nuclear disarmament. Back at Base Camp I asked him whether he could have made it if Everest had been a few hundred metres higher, and he thought he could have.
I knew that Tim was the perfect person for what I had in mind.
Three months later, when Tim, Dick Smith and I were trekking in Nepal, I chose the right moment to be a little rude. “Tim, you haven’t climbed Everest. You’ve only climbed
