Graham Desborough: Spiritual journey to summit of experience

I have read with fascination media reports on the recent Everest saga involving disabled climber Mark Inglis and his interaction with the English climber David Sharp who later died on the mountain.

I have been a mountaineer since my introduction at Ketetahi on Mt Tongariro with the Kelston Boys' High School tramping club, under Bob Barrack, then head of the school's science department. Barrack and other teachers provided a well-resourced tramping club with guidance to introduce novices to the mountains safely.

The feeling of challenge that the mountains gave me, so different from the challenges that ordinary life presented, has never left me and is something to which I will always return.

My first time at Ketetahi hut on the northern slopes of Tongariro opened a whole new world of challenge, adventure and camaraderie that seemed so absent from life in the "burbs".

One could feel nature, reach out and grasp it.

I felt at home. Here was something that held an enormous challenge, but fitted like a glove.

The journey to try to understand it was parallel to the journey to try to understand life's issues that we all grapple with.

It has brought relevance to my life in a metaphorical sense that till then was a relative void.

This does not discount the effort that my parents, my children and their mother, my teachers, my patients and many other fantastic role models have put into my life so I can comprehend how I fit into this universe in which we all struggle to find a meaning, a basic truth, to our existence.

I love them all for it, but some of the more intrinsic lessons on life were learned from the challenge that mountaineering provides.

I recall the night that Boud, my long-term climbing partner and I summitted Aorangi. We had bivvied off the lower Silberhorn Ridge in an ice cave with an unforgettable view of the sunrise. Briefly we had forgotten - as we struggled to put on frozen boots, and munched our last scroggin - that right outside was a cliff that fell 2000 feet to the glacier below.

All my other life history, marriage, the birth of my children, the gift of friendship, the privilege of being able to practise medicine, was no comparison to the feeling of utter completeness when at 7.30pm on a fine, clear February night, aged 41, with the half moon already above the horizon, we summitted.

The eight-hour downhill walk that followed was in relative safety on a well-trodden route. My feet painfully reminded me of the physical reality of our situation, and sparks jumped off our crampons as we abseiled down the summit rocks in shadows caused by the moonlight on a beautifully calm night. All this heightened a sense of achievement which had eluded me until then.

No matter that I had had a "good" upbringing, had always been a relatively good academic achiever with relatively little effort, Dux of the school etc, had three wonderful children, had a good income, had, and still do, great relationships with my friends - these all paled into insignificance with the emotion that I felt on attaining my mountaineering goal.

I can well understand the late Rob Hall's emotion after summitting Everest his last time.

There is no other place that one can get closer to God, in a literal sense (if God is in heaven), and in a spiritual sense, particularly if one is a mountaineer.

I cannot explain it.

The classic quote about why we do this - "because it's there" - is an offhand remark we mountaineers give to people who can never understand that feeling of being in the mountains.

The question, "Why do you do it?" is an indication of the questioner's inability to comprehend.

I have a similar lack of comprehension for people who risk their lives, for example, caving, or diving to extreme depths. I am sure, too, that to ask them "Why do you do it?" would produce the same wistful reply. I ask only that people accept that this is an emotion we as mountaineers cannot understand.

We cannot figure it out but we are driven by it. We lose relationships because of it.

We are inhibited from entering into relationships of all sorts. But we feel as though our lives are enriched beyond belief .

It is our temple, our church, an expression of our spirituality.

I cannot explain, but I hope you can understand why we have to go there.

* Graham Desborough is a medical doctor who lives in Parnell and is working on a book, Advanced Decision Making.