Q&A: Conrad Anker

Conrad Anker is legend among climbers. During his 34-year career, he’s ascended some of the world’s hardest climbs, from Baffin Island to the Karakorum. He’s become entwined in the history books for another reason, too: discovering the body of the enigmatic climber George Mallory, who was lost in an early attempt to summit Everest in the 1920s. His discovery sparked a frenzy among the public, since it raised the question: did Mallory get to the top first? In an exclusive WideWorld interview, Conrad tells us about his connection with Mallory, and also his latest mission to save the disappearing glaciers of the Himalayas.

It’s ten years now since you found the body of George Mallory on Everest. Do you feel connected with his story?

I have a lot of empathy for Mallory and what he did as a pioneer and climber. It was May 1st 1999 when we were there on the north side of Everest and I came across his frozen, well preserved body. It opened up the question whether he could have summitted in 1924, 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary. Mallory was a very complex person: a teacher, he studied at Cambridge, he was part of the Bloomsbury group and he had seen combat in the Great War. Overarching it all was his love for the mountains and his sense of adventure, and that’s what I really hope to share with people.

What is it about mountains that compels you?

It’s cathartic for humans. When we’re outside we’re able to process the information that we’re completely bombarded with on a day-to-day basis. They’re an antidote to the over-stimulated world that we find ourselves in.

But isn’t the world of technology encroaching more and more into the mountains?

Yeah – for one thing, there’s the transportation. An Everest trip is 10 weeks or something like that, while in Mallory’s day they were talking six months, with steam ships and trains and the rest on foot. And now we have this change in communications. Every Everest trip has its own web page and blog and you can find how fast they went to camp, what they had for dinner, who’s got a blister and it’s just too much information. So I’m kind of moving away from that hyper-connectivity that these modern expeditions are pulling in to.

There is a commercial factor though, and these kinds of communications do attract funding, don’t they?

I’m not a luddite, but we’re so over-saturated with technology that to have a true adventure, to lose yourself in the outdoors you’ve got to say ‘I’m taking this stuff away – I’m going to go, just me and my mates and our team and we’re going to tough it out’. Sure, bring along an ELT, [emergency locator transponder]. And you can press a button and they’ll bring in a rescue immediately if you really want that.

What items do you always take with you? Are there certain items that you always have to be around?

Probably the most key one when I go on these climbing expeditions is a good time instrument. If you pressed me, I’ve been using the Timex Expedition WS4, a widescreen altimeter watch. [Anker is a brand ambassador for Timex and tests their new models on his trips - Ed] It’s got an altimeter, thermometer and compass all built in. It’s the one piece of technology that really can help. I mean, they had timepieces in 1924, and in Shackleton’s time - they’re a lot more advanced than they were in those times but it’s still the basis of it.

Your recent trip to Borneo involved some quite long climbs – how long were you living on the vertical?

We were about five days on the wall, and then eight/nine days all said and done doing the climb.

Is it disorientating, living on a vertical plane for so long?

I absolutely love it. It’s what I live for. Next week I’m going to go on El Cap, and it’s going to be four days living on a vertical cliff. Once you overcome this initial fear and you trust your systems you can then progress - a lot of what I do is built on experience, one to the next.

You’ve recently gone on record talking about glacial recession and how it affects climbing. Can you tell us what that’s all about?

There’s a TV show I did called On Thin Ice that I worked on last year. Receding glaciers are the most obvious manifestation of our climate warming up, and there’s two measures of it. One of them is the parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere: we’re at 387 right now. Pre-industrial revolution, we were at 250 parts per million, and the reason for this increase is that we’re consuming more carbon. It’s predominantly in the western world and especially in the United States. We are energy hogs. 4% of the world’s population consumes 25% of the world’s resources and are contributing 25% of the world’s pollution.

What do you see as the manifestations of this?

You’ve got to ask, is the season warmer, is it wetter, is it drier? In England, are the rains coming earlier or are they lasting longer? The thing about these measures are that weather changes day to day, season to season, so you can’t track it. But heat melts something that’s frozen, so we look at glaciers and we look at pack ice on the North Pole and we see both of those are indicators of our planet warming up. And to see them in the mountains is amazing. I’ve been climbing now for 34 years and going to the Himalayas since about 1986. Ice routes that were climbable in ‘86 are now 1000 metres higher. The level of ice has moved up 1000 metres, so the volume is decreasing and it’s a result of a warmer climate.

And this is a problem you can testify to seeing first-hand?

There’s this old joke that goes, how do mountains hear? With mountaineers. So we’re the eyes and ears of the mountain out there, we’re seeing this change first hand. Last year I travelled to the Gangotri, which is the first glacier for the Ganges river in India – some people actually call the Himalayas are the ‘water tower of Asia’. The ice is a natural reservoir of water. During the dry season the glaciers release ice in a very slow manner and then keep the rivers full and sustain the millions of humans downriver. When you think about it, one fifth of the world’s population receives liquid sustenance from the glaciers in the Himalayas. Everyone says ‘the next oil is going to be water’ and there’s certainly truth to that, because fresh water is becoming more expensive – the amount of carbon that’s required to bring it in, and the process to get it to where we can then use it is increasing on a yearly basis.

Conrad is hosting two events at Cotswold Outdoor stores in Preston (Wednesday 24 June) and London’s Covent Garden (Thursday 25 June) to speak about his amazing mountain experiences. To book a ticket, visit www.livefortheoutdoors.com