The youngest British climber to conquer Everest died in a tragic fall in the
French Alps yesterday. Rob Gauntlett, who was just 19 when he climbed
Everest two years ago, died with a fellow Briton who has not yet been named.
In his short life the explorer had also travelled from the North to South Pole
entirely under his own power, cheating death twice on the way. At the age of
just 15 he had cycled from Lands End to John O’Groats and also worked as a
motivational speaker.
The bodies of Gauntlett and his friend were found by a mountain rescue crew
near Chamonix on the 14,000-ft high Mont Blanc du Tacul at 8am yesterday.
His mother, Nicola Gauntlett, said last night that the family was
“devastated”. Speaking from the family home in Petworth, West Sussex, she
said her son and his friend had been ice-climbing.
“At the moment we don’t know exactly what happened but there was obviously a
big fall and they both died,” she said. “We’ve only just been told the news.”
She said her son and his friend had arrived in the region on January 2 and
were due back in the UK this Wednesday. She and her husband, David, will be
travelling to France today to recover her son’s body.
“We are all just devastated. He’s far too young to die. We had spoken about
something like this happening only recently. We can only take consolation
that he died doing something that he loved.”
There was mystery last night surrounding the deaths. Mont Blanc du Tacul is in
the Mont Blanc massif of the French Alps, midway between the Aiguille du
Midi and Mont Blanc.
French police said the British pair were in a couloir when they fell 500
metres. The emergency call was made by other climbers and rescue teams found
both climbers dead.
A French police spokesman said: “The weather was bright and clear. They were
well equipped and it is a mystery how they were killed.
“Four people have been killed already this season. All were killed in ice
falls. Weather conditions had been good.” He added that there had been no
reports of avalanches in the area. “There have been no other accidents on
the mountains.”
Gauntlett shot to fame when he and James Hooper, also 19, scaled Everest in
May 2006.
He and Hooper later became the first explorers to travel from the geomagnetic
North Pole to the geomagnetic South Pole entirely under natural power. The
Foreign Office said last night that Hooper was not the other mountaineer
killed.
Gauntlett nearly died twice on the 13-month, 22,000-mile polar trip. On one
occasion he fell through some ice in the Arctic and on another their yacht
capsized under 80ft waves.
Speaking to The Sunday Times in June last year, the 21-year-old said: “It’s
quite funny looking back. While I was near death in the sleeping bag, James
was recording in front of the video camera saying, ‘Oh, this is bad.’ “We’ve
been out of our depth for the last three years.”
The journey took almost 13 months and involved skis, dog sleds, a yacht and
bicycles. The pair travelled through more than a dozen countries on three
continents, including Greenland, the United States, Mexi-co, Nicaragua,
Panama, Peru, Chile and Argentina – as well as the wastelands of the Arctic
and Antarctic.
The expedition began on April 8, 2007, when the pair departed from the
geomagnetic North Pole on skis, each pulling a sled laden with supplies in
temperatures that reached -35C. Their first goal was to find the supply
cache they had buried on the eight-day journey to reach the start point,
which they had completed with the help of Inuit hunters and their dog sleds.
They needed 6,000 calories a day to stay healthy and their supplies
consisted of a mix of high-energy pig fat and bird seed. “It was
disgusting,” says Hooper.
Six weeks into the journey, disaster struck when Gauntlett retraced his steps
on the ice to retrieve a glove and it gave way under him. He hit his head
and ended up unconscious face down in the water.
“He was in there for at least three minutes before I managed to get to him
across the ice and snow,” recounts Hooper, whose knowledge of first aid was
confined to a short course in north Wales. “I was desperately trying to
remember what they’d taught me: I quickly removed his wet clothes, put him
in a sleeping bag inside a tent next to a gas stove, and called for help.”
The film shows an exhausted and worried-looking Hooper speaking to the camera
against a backdrop of unrelenting snow and ice . “We can’t get a response
out of him,” he says. Gauntlett remained unconscious for almost four hours,
until he was airlifted to hospital, where he spent the next six days
recuperating.
The incident would prove to be only the beginning of their travails. As they
continued on their trek the wind whipped up, reducing visibility and
plunging the temperature to -58C. Eventually, after 70 days on the ice, they
reached Uperna-vik, in Greenland, from where they would catch an ice-breaker
yacht to sail the 3,000 miles across the north Atlantic to New York.
Gauntlett said he and Hooper decided to climb Everest when they were doing
their GCSEs.
The pair punctuated their studies with climbing in the Alps and the Himalayas
and completed a 3,000-mile cycle from Bilbao to Istanbul before undertaking
the “big one”.
“We had friends whose ambition was to go to Cambridge University, and others
who wanted to go to art college. We just wanted to climb Mount Everest,”
Hooper says.
In November 2008 Gauntlett and Hooper, former pupils of Christ’s Hospital
school in Hor-sham, West Sussex, were named National Geographic 2008
adventurers of the year for their epic pole-to-pole journey, which raised
money for the Prince’s Trust.
Whereas once the popular image of an explorer was of a grizzled middle-aged
man, a new generation of adventurers is showing that age is no barrier to
achieving the near-impos-sible. In April Camilla Hemple-man-Adams, 15,
became the youngest British female to ski to the North Pole, a feat she
accomplished with her father, the explorer David Hemple-man-Adams. Last year
Michael Perham, a 14-year-old schoolboy from Hertfordshire, became the
youngest yachtsman to cross the Atlantic single-handed when he ended a
3,500-mile, six-week voyage.
The youngest person to climb Everest is Ming Kipa Sherpa from Nepal, who was
just 15 when she scaled the peak in May 2003, with her 30-year-old sister.
