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“When you’re a young man at 14 years old and you’ve already been written off by people — you never forget that.”
Elia Saikaly is speaking by satellite phone from Nepal, thousands of metres up the side of an unclimbed peak recently renamed to honour mountaineering legend Sir Edmund Hillary. With him is his friend and climbing partner, Pasang Kaji “PK” Sherpa. The third member of the team, Gabriel Filippi, a seasoned Alpinist and Saikaly’s climbing mentor, is back in Montreal, recuperating from a devastating fall three weeks before that nearly derailed the entire expedition.
It’s snowing heavily, but Saikaly and PK are pushing on, plunging into chest-deep snow in places and traversing treacherous glaciers on their way to establish Camp One, 5,500 metres up the flank of the 7,600 metre Hillary Peak. Avalanches regularly rumble down the mountain above them.
It’s an unlikely place to find a kid from Ottawa who ran away from home, was expelled from school three times and spent his teen years living in foster care.
“It’s no small feat,” says Saikaly, 38. “But I’ve always made a conscientious effort to downplay that aspect. I’m not here to challenge myself. I’m not here to see how far I can push my body…
“I learned that all a long time ago.”
By his own admission, Saikaly was a “rebel child,” a delinquent with a spiked mohawk who battled authority and railed against his father’s strict religious beliefs. He left home as a young teenager, living for two years in foster care. He was 15 when he was introduced by a friend to Ginaud Dupuis, an ex-soldier who ran a small gym in Aylmer, Que., and made a name for his feats of strength, overturning cars and pulling tractor-trailer trucks singlehandedly.
Dupuis took Saikaly under his wing, teaching him about weightlifting and the Chinese martial art of chi kung. Dupuis believed in cold-water immersion to aid in muscle recovery, a common technique now but one that was unusual at the time. He had his young pupils immerse themselves in icy water, a skill Saikaly says has saved him from frostbite on the mountains and gives him the mental strength to survive the harsh conditions in the Himalayas.
In Unclimbed, a documentary on the preparations for the Hillary Peak climb to air on Discovery Channel in November (and published online in weekly 10-minute instalments), Saikaly calms himself with chi kung before slipping through a hole in the ice of a frozen Gatineau lake. It looks like an over-the-top dramatization for the camera, but Saikaly’s fiancée, Amanda O’Reilly, assures that it’s genuine.
“I thought it was a bunch of BS, too, to be totally honest with you, but it’s real,” said O’Reilly, an Ottawa events planner who met Saikaly in 2011 when he came to her company for help organizing a soccer tournament.
“He can channel energy and control his breath. He’s very strong, and it comes from mental strength,” she says. “The Sherpas are calling him a Sherpa.”
The 2016 climb is Elia Saikaly’s ninth Himalayan expedition.
Saikaly studied video production at Algonquin College and worked for a while as a model and MuchMusic Veejay before landing a job as a TV news cameraman in Ottawa. He went to Nepal for the first time in 2005 when University of Ottawa professor Sean Egan hired him to film Egan’s attempt to be the oldest Canadian to summit Everest. The expedition ended in tragedy. Egan, 63, a super-fit sports psychologist and former championship boxer, died of a heart attack at the base of the mountain.
Saikaly was devastated by his friend’s death, but he also began building a reputation as one of the go-to guys for high-altitude filmmaking. In 2014, he was on Everest again, working for Google, when he was trapped on the mountain above an icefall that killed 16 Sherpas. And that wasn’t his only brush with death that spring. A few weeks later, a paragliding accident left him with a broken back and lacerated liver. Though the accident put him in a body cast, it didn’t keep him from returning to Everest again the next year.
“It was hard being here on this end,” O’Reilly said. “His back was broken and you’re taking care of someone who literally can’t even go to the bathroom. So you take a little broken bird and heal them, and then, literally, they want to fly away again and back into that. All I can do is support it from this end.”
Saikaly was back on Everest with Filippi and PK in 2015 when he dodged death a third time. His camera was rolling at base camp on the morning of April 25 when a 7.3-magnitude earthquake shook the country, sending a massive avalanche down the mountain that killed 22 climbers, including a close friend.
Elia Saikaly was at Everest Base Camp in April 2015 when an earthquake triggered an avalanche that killed 22 climbers.
“That was hard. It took him a good nine months to come to grips with that,” O’Reilly said.
In many ways, the tragedies of 2014 and 2015 were an inspiration for this year’s expedition.
“It’s been heartbreaking to watch this community suffer,” Saikaly said. “Anyone who has travelled to Nepal falls in love with the people. You might have come here for the mountains, but you keep coming back because of the Nepalese people. It changes your life.”
The trio planned this year’s expedition to climb two peaks east of Mount Everest that have been renamed to honour Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who in 1953 became the first climbers to summit Everest.
Saikaly arrived in Nepal on Aug. 5, but the expedition was barely underway when disaster struck. Filippi was leading a pitch up a 20-metre cliff when something went wrong.
“I was standing right there,” Saikaly said. “Gabriel was leading the pitch with PK belaying him from below. He disappeared over the top of the cliff and was out of sight for a couple of minutes. Then I heard him scream, ‘Rock!’ and he flew past us upside down.
“Nothing can prepare you for that. I’ve been in these situations before so I had to pull myself out of it, then I just ran toward him. I was sure he was dead or paralyzed. When we got there he had no idea where he was or why he was in Nepal.”
Filippi was able to stand a few minutes later, but it was the end of his climb.
“It was an incredibly emotional 10 days. To see your friend nearly die, two mountains don’t really matter in the big picture,” Saikaly said.
Filippi’s fall left the expedition in shambles. The team got him down to a lower elevation and the Sherpas and porters fashioned a makeshift helicopter pad with their bare hands. With their leader gone, the climbs were cancelled, the porters sent home.
Saikaly was ready to return home, too, when PK argued the two of them should carry on.
Elia Saikaly and Pasang Kaji Sherpa on the side of Hillary Peak, Nepal.
“Pasang looked at me. These aren’t emotional people, but he was in tears. He said, ‘Gabe’s OK. He’s going to be fine. Why are we giving up on the expedition? Giving up on the dream?’ ”
The pair hastily reassembled gear and supplies, and headed back up the mountain, eager to not lose the altitude acclimatization they needed to ascend safely. Among the gear they’ve humped up the peak is the myriad cameras, lenses and tripods Saikaly needs to film the journey.
“We’ve climbed this mountain three times and we haven’t even started for the summit yet,” Saikaly said.
Though it’s 1,200 metres shorter than Everest, ascending an unclimbed peak is far more challenging than the heavily travelled slopes of the world’s highest mountain, which sees hundreds of climbers each year ascending on ropes fixed in place by advance teams of Sherpas.
“It’s hard to compare to Everest,” said Saikaly, who has twice stood on top of the world. “In my opinion, Everest is a lot easier. It’s a known route. There’s a path to follow and you don’t veer off that path.
“But there’s no path for us here, no route. We’ll be going along and suddenly we’ll be in snow right up to our chest. There are no safety lines in place. And there’s just the two of us. We’re really hoping that nothing happens because we are alone here,” he said.
“We could not have made it harder on ourselves if we tried. It’s probably the most difficult challenge I’ve ever undertaken.”
Saikaly and PK have a few more weeks to try to stand atop Hillary Peak. The weather, however, has been a frustrating mix of rain and snow as the monsoon season lingers. The satellite phone keeps them in touch with the outside world, but it’s a 10-hour trek for the Internet access they need to upload photos and reports that are used by teachers and students in Canada and the U.S. following the expedition online.
Saikaly is adamant the climb is about more than just “bagging a summit.” The climb was conceived as a way of honouring the Sherpa people. He concedes that in the rejigged climb, Pasang Kaji is the real leader. Nepalese officials in Kathmandu were stunned, he says, when PK’s name was on the climbing permit.
“They couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘You’re a Sherpa. You don’t pay to climb. But he (PK) said, ‘No, I’m part of the team.’
“To be a Sherpa and to emerge from the shadow like that, and be a hero and a leader and role model? That’s the reason I’m here.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
Elia Saikaly is speaking by satellite phone from Nepal, thousands of metres up the side of an unclimbed peak recently renamed to honour mountaineering legend Sir Edmund Hillary. With him is his friend and climbing partner, Pasang Kaji “PK” Sherpa. The third member of the team, Gabriel Filippi, a seasoned Alpinist and Saikaly’s climbing mentor, is back in Montreal, recuperating from a devastating fall three weeks before that nearly derailed the entire expedition.
It’s snowing heavily, but Saikaly and PK are pushing on, plunging into chest-deep snow in places and traversing treacherous glaciers on their way to establish Camp One, 5,500 metres up the flank of the 7,600 metre Hillary Peak. Avalanches regularly rumble down the mountain above them.
It’s an unlikely place to find a kid from Ottawa who ran away from home, was expelled from school three times and spent his teen years living in foster care.
“It’s no small feat,” says Saikaly, 38. “But I’ve always made a conscientious effort to downplay that aspect. I’m not here to challenge myself. I’m not here to see how far I can push my body…
“I learned that all a long time ago.”
• • •
By his own admission, Saikaly was a “rebel child,” a delinquent with a spiked mohawk who battled authority and railed against his father’s strict religious beliefs. He left home as a young teenager, living for two years in foster care. He was 15 when he was introduced by a friend to Ginaud Dupuis, an ex-soldier who ran a small gym in Aylmer, Que., and made a name for his feats of strength, overturning cars and pulling tractor-trailer trucks singlehandedly.
Dupuis took Saikaly under his wing, teaching him about weightlifting and the Chinese martial art of chi kung. Dupuis believed in cold-water immersion to aid in muscle recovery, a common technique now but one that was unusual at the time. He had his young pupils immerse themselves in icy water, a skill Saikaly says has saved him from frostbite on the mountains and gives him the mental strength to survive the harsh conditions in the Himalayas.
In Unclimbed, a documentary on the preparations for the Hillary Peak climb to air on Discovery Channel in November (and published online in weekly 10-minute instalments), Saikaly calms himself with chi kung before slipping through a hole in the ice of a frozen Gatineau lake. It looks like an over-the-top dramatization for the camera, but Saikaly’s fiancée, Amanda O’Reilly, assures that it’s genuine.
“I thought it was a bunch of BS, too, to be totally honest with you, but it’s real,” said O’Reilly, an Ottawa events planner who met Saikaly in 2011 when he came to her company for help organizing a soccer tournament.
“He can channel energy and control his breath. He’s very strong, and it comes from mental strength,” she says. “The Sherpas are calling him a Sherpa.”
The 2016 climb is Elia Saikaly’s ninth Himalayan expedition.
Saikaly studied video production at Algonquin College and worked for a while as a model and MuchMusic Veejay before landing a job as a TV news cameraman in Ottawa. He went to Nepal for the first time in 2005 when University of Ottawa professor Sean Egan hired him to film Egan’s attempt to be the oldest Canadian to summit Everest. The expedition ended in tragedy. Egan, 63, a super-fit sports psychologist and former championship boxer, died of a heart attack at the base of the mountain.
Saikaly was devastated by his friend’s death, but he also began building a reputation as one of the go-to guys for high-altitude filmmaking. In 2014, he was on Everest again, working for Google, when he was trapped on the mountain above an icefall that killed 16 Sherpas. And that wasn’t his only brush with death that spring. A few weeks later, a paragliding accident left him with a broken back and lacerated liver. Though the accident put him in a body cast, it didn’t keep him from returning to Everest again the next year.
“It was hard being here on this end,” O’Reilly said. “His back was broken and you’re taking care of someone who literally can’t even go to the bathroom. So you take a little broken bird and heal them, and then, literally, they want to fly away again and back into that. All I can do is support it from this end.”
Saikaly was back on Everest with Filippi and PK in 2015 when he dodged death a third time. His camera was rolling at base camp on the morning of April 25 when a 7.3-magnitude earthquake shook the country, sending a massive avalanche down the mountain that killed 22 climbers, including a close friend.
Elia Saikaly was at Everest Base Camp in April 2015 when an earthquake triggered an avalanche that killed 22 climbers.
“That was hard. It took him a good nine months to come to grips with that,” O’Reilly said.
In many ways, the tragedies of 2014 and 2015 were an inspiration for this year’s expedition.
“It’s been heartbreaking to watch this community suffer,” Saikaly said. “Anyone who has travelled to Nepal falls in love with the people. You might have come here for the mountains, but you keep coming back because of the Nepalese people. It changes your life.”
The trio planned this year’s expedition to climb two peaks east of Mount Everest that have been renamed to honour Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who in 1953 became the first climbers to summit Everest.
Saikaly arrived in Nepal on Aug. 5, but the expedition was barely underway when disaster struck. Filippi was leading a pitch up a 20-metre cliff when something went wrong.
“I was standing right there,” Saikaly said. “Gabriel was leading the pitch with PK belaying him from below. He disappeared over the top of the cliff and was out of sight for a couple of minutes. Then I heard him scream, ‘Rock!’ and he flew past us upside down.
“Nothing can prepare you for that. I’ve been in these situations before so I had to pull myself out of it, then I just ran toward him. I was sure he was dead or paralyzed. When we got there he had no idea where he was or why he was in Nepal.”
Filippi was able to stand a few minutes later, but it was the end of his climb.
“It was an incredibly emotional 10 days. To see your friend nearly die, two mountains don’t really matter in the big picture,” Saikaly said.
Filippi’s fall left the expedition in shambles. The team got him down to a lower elevation and the Sherpas and porters fashioned a makeshift helicopter pad with their bare hands. With their leader gone, the climbs were cancelled, the porters sent home.
Saikaly was ready to return home, too, when PK argued the two of them should carry on.
Elia Saikaly and Pasang Kaji Sherpa on the side of Hillary Peak, Nepal.
“Pasang looked at me. These aren’t emotional people, but he was in tears. He said, ‘Gabe’s OK. He’s going to be fine. Why are we giving up on the expedition? Giving up on the dream?’ ”
The pair hastily reassembled gear and supplies, and headed back up the mountain, eager to not lose the altitude acclimatization they needed to ascend safely. Among the gear they’ve humped up the peak is the myriad cameras, lenses and tripods Saikaly needs to film the journey.
“We’ve climbed this mountain three times and we haven’t even started for the summit yet,” Saikaly said.
Though it’s 1,200 metres shorter than Everest, ascending an unclimbed peak is far more challenging than the heavily travelled slopes of the world’s highest mountain, which sees hundreds of climbers each year ascending on ropes fixed in place by advance teams of Sherpas.
“It’s hard to compare to Everest,” said Saikaly, who has twice stood on top of the world. “In my opinion, Everest is a lot easier. It’s a known route. There’s a path to follow and you don’t veer off that path.
“But there’s no path for us here, no route. We’ll be going along and suddenly we’ll be in snow right up to our chest. There are no safety lines in place. And there’s just the two of us. We’re really hoping that nothing happens because we are alone here,” he said.
“We could not have made it harder on ourselves if we tried. It’s probably the most difficult challenge I’ve ever undertaken.”
Saikaly and PK have a few more weeks to try to stand atop Hillary Peak. The weather, however, has been a frustrating mix of rain and snow as the monsoon season lingers. The satellite phone keeps them in touch with the outside world, but it’s a 10-hour trek for the Internet access they need to upload photos and reports that are used by teachers and students in Canada and the U.S. following the expedition online.
Saikaly is adamant the climb is about more than just “bagging a summit.” The climb was conceived as a way of honouring the Sherpa people. He concedes that in the rejigged climb, Pasang Kaji is the real leader. Nepalese officials in Kathmandu were stunned, he says, when PK’s name was on the climbing permit.
“They couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘You’re a Sherpa. You don’t pay to climb. But he (PK) said, ‘No, I’m part of the team.’
“To be a Sherpa and to emerge from the shadow like that, and be a hero and a leader and role model? That’s the reason I’m here.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
