03/10/2026
Twenty-eight years ago I stood on top of Everest. I was 23. Eighteen months before that I'd been in military rehab with three broken vertebrae, strapped into a brace and wondering if I'd ever walk properly again.
People usually ask me about the summit. What I remember most is the hour before it.
Above about 25,000 feet everyone slows right down, even the Sherpas, who are born and raised at altitude. You take two paces and then you have to rest. Then two more. Climbers call it the Everest shuffle. On summit morning that was me, gasping into my mask like an animal, and however many steps I took the top never seemed to get any closer. Then I started crying. Months of fear and waiting came out all at once, right there inside the mask, and I just kept shuffling.
At 7.22am on 26 May 1998 I reached the summit. Alan was there with me and threw his arms round me. Neil was still staggering up behind us, and as he got to us the wind began to drop. When Neil and I finally took our masks off, we just held on to each other.
Less than half an hour later Neil checked my oxygen. I was right down. He told me to get going, and fast. I had under a fifth of a tank to get me back to the Balcony.
I got up that mountain because other people kept watching my back, right to the last minute.
Earlier on the expedition I'd gone through a snow bridge into a crevasse at 19,000 feet. A rope stopped me falling, and a man on the other end of it held on. Only days before our summit, Mick and Alan got within four hundred feet of the top and ran out of oxygen. I was lower down, listening on the radio with no way of reaching them. Mick was hypothermic and fading. A Sherpa called Babu Chiri happened to be carrying a spare canister, and Neil dug out an emergency cache half-buried in the snow and got them both back on their feet.
Before the final push I'd tucked a scrap of paper into my pack with a verse from Isaiah on it. It says even young men stumble and fall, and that those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength. I read it in the tent when I was scared stiff, and I needed it.
Years later I wrote "Without Mick and Neil, I would have been nothing." I still mean every word.
Most of us won't ever stand on Everest. But we all know the shuffle. Two steps and a rest. The hospital corridor, the job that's gone, the kitchen table at midnight when the numbers don't add up. Those are the days we find out who's on the other end of our rope, and whether we've been holding anyone else's.
I brought a little snow down from the summit that day. Shara and I later christened our three boys with it. A few drops of that mountain went into our family, and so did the lesson that came with it. Nobody gets to the top alone, and nobody should have to get down alone either.
So tell me, who's been holding you steady lately? And have you told them?
