NEWS | Wednesday, 11 March 2009

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Three Maltese to brave world’s tallest mountain in a bid to fight air pollution

Raphael Vassallo
There is a palpable feeling of optimism at the Melita Restaurant in Balzan, where three Maltese mountaineers – together with their guide, veteran British author Victor Saunders – are finishing lunch before heading out for an afternoon climb.
Marco Cremona, Robert Gatt and Gregory Attard are all in high spirits, discussing various local cliff faces and rocky scarps upon which to test their rock-climbing skills; but this is all idle banter really, as their real challenge will commence more or less this time next year.
Earlier, the four mountaineers announced their daredevil plan at a press conference at the Corinthia Palace Hotel across the road: Challenge8000, the first all-Maltese attempt to scale the tallest mountain in the world.
Ostensibly, the idea is to raise awareness about air quality in aid of the Society of Maltese Asthmatics and the Stop the Dust! campaign. But Robert candidly admits that there is more to the whole idea than social consciousness alone.
“Everest is the summit of what you can achieve,” he says simply. “It’s the one thing on every mountain climber’s mind; the one place they all want to be...”
Getting there, however, is not as simple as he makes it sound. The 8,848-metre ascent is difficult and dangerous; especially the final 1,000 metres, inauspiciously known as the “Death Zone”. Here, no further altitude acclimatisation is possible, as the human body uses up oxygen faster than it can be replenished. For this reason alone, Everest summit has so far claimed 210 lives in total; and some of the irretrievable corpses can still be seen from the main climbing routes.
Still, this does not seem to daunt the Challenge8000 team, which in May next year will be readying itself for the ascent of Cho Oyu in the Himalayas: at 8.2 km, the sixth tallest mountain in the world. All three Maltese mountaineers are familiar with Himalayan trekking peaks, having already completed the 6.4 km Mera climb; but none has yet reached the summit of Everest, and Cho Oyu – though every bit as demanding an ascent– in a sense serves only as a taster for the endurance test to follow.
“For us this is a challenging climb, and we will be treating it as an expedition in its own right,” Robert continues. “But at the same time we will be trying to make sure we can all handle altitudes above 8,000 metres...”
Robert is the only one of the three to have never climbed higher than 6.5 km; and he explains that contrary to widespread belief, altitude acclimatisation is not simply a question of physical fitness alone.
“Fitness and exercise are of course very important, but acclimatisation to high altitudes depends also on other factors, including genetics and the weather,” he says. “It’s a very personal thing, too. Altitude sickness affects some more than others. There are those who simply can’t go any higher than 3,000 metres...”
In these harsh and inhospitable climes, teamwork is every bit as important as physical and mental prowess for survival.
“A mountaineering team always has to look out for one another, and it’s important to be honest with each other, too. If you have a headache at those heights you can rest assured it’s altitude sickness... you had better tell the others, even if it means descending and camping for a few days until you are fit to go on...”
For these and other reasons, the climb will not be carried out in a single push from zero to 8,000 metres.
In practice, the team will travel slowly, ascending slightly higher with each climb; then retracing their steps downwards to rest at lower altitudes for a few days, before pushing further up the mountainside. This in part also accounts for the duration of an average climb; the team envisages 40 days to ascend Cho Oyu, and 55 days for Everest, making the entire expedition a three-month affair.
If successful, it will be nothing less than History to await them on the mountaintop.
“We would put Malta on the world mountaineering map,” Marco Cremona explains with pride... and not just for being the first Maltese to conquer Everest, either.
Marco admits it is a rather meaningless statistic, but nonetheless it looks good on paper: “If all three Maltese climbers make the summit, Malta will among the top 10 most successful mountaineering nations in the world,” he claims.
“In actual fact we would be in fifth place; but only because of the size of our population, which will make the number of mountaineers to have Everest proportionally much higher than most countries...”

Further information on partnering with the Challenge8000 expedition can be found on www.challenge8000.net

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