Everest
Eighteen days from home in Exeter to the top of the world
At 6:50am on 13 May 2022, Graham Keene stood at 8,849m with his guide and three Sherpas. He was 68 years old.
No Briton has ever summited older.
The record
Three years older than Ranulph Fiennes
The previous British record belonged to Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who reached the summit aged 65 in 2009. Graham beat it by three years.
Of the nearly 7,000 people who have stood on the summit of Everest, they both sit inside the twenty oldest.
Graham had been born a year after Hillary and Tenzing got there first. For most of his life it was somebody else’s story.
The preparation
He did his acclimatising in Devon
Everest expeditions usually run a minimum of eight weeks, most of it spent acclimatising up and down through the Khumbu Icefall so the body learns to cope with the thin air. At 68, Graham’s problem was that the icefall is the most dangerous part of the mountain and he’d have to cross it six times.
So he did it differently. A hypoxic tent over his bed, oxygen slowly stripped out of the air night after night, dialled up week by week until his body thought it was living at altitude.
On arrival in Nepal the team climbed Mera Peak, 6,476m as a final tune-up.
The climb
Out of Camp 4 at 8:30pm into the dark
Graham went with Furtenbach Adventures on a “flash” expedition: sixteen days from leaving Kathmandu to summiting, ten of them on the mountain itself. One night at each of the four camps, leaving in the small hours each time to beat the risk of avalanches, the sun and the queues.
At 8:30pm on 12 May, the team left Camp 4 in the death zone on the South Col at 8,000m and started up in the dark. Along the summit ridge from the South Summit. Up the Hillary Step. To the top of the world at 6:50am, with a sunrise to remember.
He unfurled an Exeter Chiefs flag. Then he took out photographs of his five grandchildren and called Frances on his Samsung mobile!
The people who got him there
None of it happens alone
Graham climbed with his German international mountain guide Luis Stizinger, who had been alongside him for years of preparation, and with Kunga Sherpa, Ang Kaji and Lakpa Thinduk, who carried, fixed, encouraged and celebrated.
It’s why a share of every speaking fee goes to Sherpa families in Nepal.
A cleaner way up
Half the resources. Half the waste.
The flash format isn’t just kinder to a 68-year-old body. Two weeks instead of nine means roughly half the resources, half the waste and a far smaller carbon footprint – with the local crew paid the same as for the long expedition. Basecamp ran on solar with waste-water treatment.
Book Graham to fully tell his story
The talk has the photographs, the summit footage and the stories that don’t make it onto a web page.