In the common room at Belvedere Heights Home for the Aged, Laura Mallory eases residents into their chairs and bends over to offer them tea and coffee.
Wearing pink nursing scrubs and tall and pretty — with the kind of good looks that radiate from the inside out — it’s difficult to imagine that just a few months ago, she was near death on top of Mount Everest.
“Really?”
“What a thrill. That’s terrific,” the seniors cluck as she serves them in the sitting room, its great glass windows overlooking sublime Georgian Bay.
Laura, who just turned 21, is in her fourth year of nursing at the University of Western Ontario. Her family has a rustic cottage in McKellar and they spend their summers here. Once she graduates, she wants to work in the emergency department or obstetrics. “I’ve always loved to help people, that’s what I want to do with my life.”
She’s already been living it well.
Just 20 when she climbed Mount Everest in Nepal this past summer with her mother, father and two older brothers, Laura made history in June when she became the youngest Canadian woman to do so and a member of the first family of four to summit on the same expedition.
Everest’s isn’t the first peak she has scaled. Laura has also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the highest peak in the continent of Africa, and Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Russia.
None have been as difficult as this last one. A foreboding antagonist, Everest stretches 29,028 feet or 8,848 metres in the air. It takes the average person over two months to reach its peak — if they are lucky. Since humans first dared to scale her, the mountain has killed hundreds of people and left them for dead.
Laura would prove herself its equal.
***
Climbing is a rite of passage in this family — albeit a bit of an accidental one. Though they share the same name — and maybe even lineage with 1920 Wales Mount Everest climber George Mallory, Dan and Barbara’s tardiness first turned them on to climbing.
Travelling in Venezuela in 1988, Dan Mallory, an insurance broker in Barrie and his wife Barbara, missed an aerial tramway tour of Picco Bolivar — the highest mountain in Venezuela and the highest in the Northern Andes.
Dan, who speaks Spanish, struck up a conversation with a local, who suggested instead the couple try to climb the mountain.
“He made it sound like everybody did it on a Sunday afternoon stroll,” laughs Dan. “Until the next morning he showed up with climbing ropes and a harness and pick axes and we’re looking at each other: What did we sign up for?”
Following that success, Dan was hooked. As his children grew, he imagined climbing the highest mountains on each continent with his family.
That goal was put in action earlier in the decade. Desperate for adventure — in another time, Dan likely would have been an explorer — he proposed a climb on Aconcagua in South America. Barbara couldn’t go so Adam, the eldest, then 19, volunteered.
Two years later, Dan’s thoughts turned to Mount McKinley in Alaska. Alan, 24 (then 19) stepped up to the plate. Two more years and it was Mount Elbrus in Russia with Laura.
The granddaddy of them all, Everest, was brought up over dinner one night.
“Just sort of casual conversation,” laughs Laura. Dan asked which of his intrepid family members would accompany him this time.
Everybody put their hand up.
***
While making the decision to go is easy, the process is anything but.
It can cost up to $100,000 a person to climb Everest. But for the Mallorys, it’s significantly less. They have their own gear and, generally, don’t hire guides. Foolish, some might say. Dan grins. “That way we can be in control of our own destiny and our own timing.”
Preparation for the 68-day climb is even harder.
The family flew to Nepal in the beginning of April. Before they could even think of climbing, they first had to acclimatize to the amount of oxygen in the air.
If you flew from Parry Sound and plopped yourself on top of the mountain where there’s one-third the amount of oxygen in the air you breathe, you would die within a minute, says Barbara. (“People have asked, ‘does it take one day?’’ laughs Laura dryly).
She tries to explain the physical exhaustion she felt. There are four camps set up by sherpas at varying safe spots along the climb. Keep in mind, ‘camp’ here means tents on a spots that are the most safe from avalanches.
Of the 29,028-foot climb, you can only scale about 1,000 feet a day. Often, you repeat these climbs over and over. Dan explains. When you leave base camp, at the bottom of the mountain, you climb to camp one. Later, you descend back to base camp.
This back and forth forces the production of red blood cells, which can burst or even cause your lungs to burst if you don’t acclimatize, says Dan. “You really climb the mountain four times.”
Between base camp and camp one lies the most dangerous part of the climb: the Khumbu ice fall. This glacier atop big chunks of ice and crevasses, moves four or five feet a day and is different every time you tackle it. Climbers have to journey across ladders that are brought in every year by the sherpas. “I wouldn’t exactly call it fun,” says Laura. “It’s cool, but at the same time I wouldn’t say I enjoyed myself the whole time. There was a lot of pain involved.”
Especially, if you are sick.
Laura picked up a gastrointestinal bug at base camp and carried it with her all the way up and down each perilous leg of Everest. She was throwing up black blood and had black diarrhea, for days and days, recalls her father. “But our biggest strength, which she has, is we don’t quit.”
***
Don’t ask if the climb brought his family close together, laughs Dan. Climbing Everest takes a lifetime of preparation, he says. And having a crazy, crazy father, Laura interrupts.
“It starts right from the beginning with spending time with your kids,” he said. “Because if you weren’t close as a family right from the beginning then you’re not going to get past first base. They’re not going to want to spend two and a half months with you,” he says.
As he speaks, he munches on potato salad and sausage on a bun, his hair still wet from a swim in Grey Owl Lake where the cottage is.
It’s a far cry from what he and the kids ate and drank as they tried to summit. Barbara bowed out with an injury at 19,000 feet.
You need to drink as much as six litres of water a day and eat what is called daldhat — lentils and rice, which give you lots of energy and calories. If you’re lucky you get some cooked beef. “It’s disgusting,” says Laura.
But you need it.
Climbing Everest is so physically exhausting, Laura says it’s easy, when you’re alone on the mountain, to want to just give up. On the climb, they passed corpses that hadn’t been removed, preserved in the snow and wind. Generally, when people die — and they do, often, some died during an attempt while the Mallorys were there — they aren’t removed.
“You don’t have the energy up there to move yourself let alone someone else,” says Adam, 26, an electrical engineer.
“Until you’re actually there, you can’t understand why people actually can’t come down. But if you run out of oxygen (climbers bring canisters with them) … you have to just let yourself die because there’s nothing you can do.”
She almost experienced that herself.
As the family prepared to summit one night, Laura was unsure if she could physically handle it. Summit attempts start at 7 or 8 p.m. and last through the night. Otherwise, afternoon storms could sweep you off the peak.
“They told them, if it’s noon hour, it doesn’t matter if you are five feet from the summit, you turn around. The weather changes in the afternoon,” says Barbara.
It’s a mirage sometimes, says Laura. “It could be there but it might take me 20 minutes to half an hour to get to (there) …. because it’s so exhausting .. . People are like – I’m almost there, this is what I paid all this money to do – so they just keep going and that’s why stupid mistakes happen.”
Laura was determined that wouldn’t happen to her family. Summit night, about 15 minutes into the eight-hour summit climb, weak and exhausted, she turned around and blindly made her way back to her tent.
“I cried. I thought I can’t believe I got this far and I’m 12 hours away from my goal,” she remembers. “Then I thought, I can try tomorrow; at least I can try tomorrow.”
Father and sons continued on. They reached Everest at 7 a.m. and met her at camp that day, drained to the point of utter exhaustion.
That night, she set out for the summit with the sherpa.
“Laura is an extremely strong endurance athlete. She’s capable of pushing herself way beyond any limit of most people. She’s in complete control when she has to be,” says her father Dan. “What she went through would have stopped 99.9 per cent of people but she pushed herself beyond what would be acceptable limits to keep going.”
He remembers waiting to hear from her on the walkie talkies they used to communicate.
“When I was coming up to the summit I saw (the sherpa) pull out the radio and started talking on it so I didn’t really ask too many questions I was just so exhausted and said let’s take these pictures and get me off of here,” says Laura, of her summit.
What she didn’t know then, is the sherpa’s radio had died.
After seven hours with no word from their youngest, Laura’s family thought she had been lost to Everest.
“For about seven hours, I was coming down the mountain and trying to think about what words I was going to tell my wife that our daughter had died on Mount Everest, “ he said. “There’s no airplanes that can come up and rescue her. She would have died right there.”
The family grins at each other on the crowded deck of their rustic cottage. Next up is Mount Vincent in Antarctica. Since everyone in the family has climbed with Dan, it will be up to grandkids next.
“I hope they have a flight to the moon by then,” he says.
Reaching the granddaddy summit
From left: Adam, Alan, Laura, Barbara and Dan Mallory.
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