Bear Grylls

Bear Grylls

Every year the death toll on Mount Everest rises, and for every six mountaineers who make it to the top, one will die. Yet at 7.22am on May 26th 1998, Bear Grylls entered The Guinness Book of Records by becoming the Youngest, and one of only thirty, British climbers to have successfully climbed Everest and returned alive. He was only 23 years old.

The actual ascent took Bear Grylls over ninety days of extreme weather, limited sleep and almost running out of oxygen deep inside the 'death zone' (above 26,000 feet). On the way down from his first reconnaissance climb, Bear was almost killed in a crevasse at 19,000 feet. The ice cracked and the ground disappeared beneath him, he was knocked unconscious and came to swinging on the end of a rope. His team-mate and that rope saved his life. Previously, in 1997, Bear Grylls had become the Youngest Briton to climb Mount Ama Dablam in the Himalayas (22,500 feet), a peak once described by Sir Edmund Hillary as 'unclimbable'. 'This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that only two years earlier Bear broke his back in a freefall parachuting accident in southern Africa whilst serving with the British SAS.

Bear Grylls has a natural talent for communication and his speaking has brought him worldwide acclaim. He now spends his time as one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in Europe talking to corporations on his experiences on the mountain and how these can help us in our business environments.

"I remember lying there during those long months of recovery and suddenly this dream that I had clung to so tightly for so long, of climbing Everest, just felt a million miles away. It was something I could no longer relate to. It was out of what I could believe and I remember vividly looking at those same pictures my father had given me of Everest years earlier, and taking them down. I dismissed it as something childish and something that could no longer become a reality." But he continued to persevere against all the odds and eventually after three months on the mountain, during which time four climbers were tragically killed, Bear was getting ever closer. "I remember clearing that final lip on my stomach and looking up and being unable to believe that just 200m away was the place that had captured me since I was a little boy. The roof of the world. But however many of these pathetic shuffles I took this place never got any closer. I remember the adrenalin beginning to pump, and you feel it as this very physical presence that fills your muscles and your veins but which also very quickly leaves you with this deep sense of weakness that follows" At 7.22am on the 26th May 1998 Bear Grylls climbed into the Guinness Book of Records as the Youngest British climber ever to reach the summit of Everest and return alive. "Looking back it is strangely clear how certain qualities stood out above everything else up there. There were certain things that kept people alive up there and gave us hope and they may be different from what you might at first imagine"

Bear Grylls focuses on those simple qualities that make the difference between life and death on a mountain: the intimacies and realities of teamwork, the honesty needed in intense environments and the courage that comes not from bravado but from something else inside.

His book has also recently been launched in the USA and continues to touch people through its honesty, courage and humility. This year Bear Grylls is presenting a prime time Channel 4 series on the French Foreign Legion