Life's risks rewarding for this adventurer

At 59, Graeme Dingle's mountaineering days are over. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Children are becoming less physically adept, says outdoor education and mountaineering expert Graeme Dingle.

"You take them to a cliff and most kids don't know what to do with their arms and legs," says Mr Dingle, 59, whose autobiography, Dingle: Discovering the Sense in Adventure (Craig Potton Publishing, $39.99) is published this week.

He has noted children's decreased general mobility over years of leading outdoor activities, and blames an increasingly litigious society and less encouragement for kids to play outdoors.

"We've moved away from letting people take risks," says Mr Dingle, founder of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre in Turangi, and, with wife Jo-anne Wilkinson, 49, of Project K for at-risk young people.

While safety was needed in workplaces and schools, "we don't want to take the risk out of everything".

"We need to be physically adept and healthy. But kids are discouraged from going out and inventing a game and running around like lunatics."

That's a shame, he says - "you have to experience a branch breaking, and the fright, and sometimes a tumble, because that's what teaches you to be safe".

Mr Dingle is an adventuring "obsessive" - his word - who has circumnavigated the Arctic, traversed the Southern Alps in a 100-day epic and climbed six major European faces in a single season.

The mountaineering days are over but he remains lean and wiry. Barefoot, dressed in jeans and a polar fleece, he stirs honey into his coffee in the bush home he and Ms Wilkinson built near Leigh.

They both work for Project K; 900 teenagers are involved. It works, says Mr Dingle, because tough outdoor challenges "strip you bare. Once you've been stripped bare, it's possible to build a person back up".

It's the story of his own life, really. Although Mr Dingle's adventures are well-documented, his book has a more philosophical bent, describing how a skinny, shy boy "scared of snakes and the dark and the bush" transformed himself.

There were also two marriages destroyed by his lengthy absences, mountain deaths and a dangerous, storm-lashed Everest expedition which failed to reach the summit.

But Mr Dingle says he has no regrets. No, he corrects: "I had a tiny tinge of regret about one little thing - when Rob Hamill asked if I'd cross the Atlantic with him, I said I was too busy working on Project K. I probably could have done it ... "

The 1997 pairing of Hamill and the late Phil Stubbs, who won the 2900 nautical mile race, turned sour. "It would have been interesting to see whether Rob and I could have held it together."