Thirty-three years ago, under an ice-cave smaller than an office desk atop New Zealand’s Mount Cook, 23-year-old Mark Inglis and a friend found themselves trapped in -20ºC. Their wait for rescue lasted 312 hours... 13 days in the freeze.
Mark lived to tell the tale but he lost both his legs to frostbite. “But hey, I can now ask for a discount when I get a massage,” he says with a burst of laughter, pointing at his artificial limbs. Mark lost 30 per cent of his legs and 60 per cent of their use after that incident.
And years later the New Zealander is in Hyderabad, to talk to students from a business school. “Sometimes people make changes, sometimes changes happen to people. So, when the change happened to me, I couldn’t go back to living like I did.”
“I couldn’t live my old life so, it was a completely new journey for me,” says Mark.
Mark has always been a mountaineer. He started climbing mountains when he was 12 and kept going until the incident.
“After I lost my legs, I took a break. I didn’t get back to mountaineering until 15 years later. You can’t scale mountains if you have even the slightest doubt in your mind.”
One would imagine that Mark would stay away from the very mountains that caused such a change, but he never blamed the mountains. “The mountains did nothing. The mountain didn’t fail me. The mountain is like a mirror, she reflects what you show her and it was my bad performance that led to the circumstance and I couldn’t ever be angry with her,” he says.
After taking part in many other expeditions, Mark decided to scale Mount Everest in 2006, making him the first multiple amputee to do so. “Five days before the expedition the leg that I was supposed to wear broke, but because I had worked with the engineer to make them, I knew how to fix them. I fixed the legs, wore them and went on to scale Mount Everest,” he says.
But that expedition wasn’t easy. “I ended up losing five of my fingers to Everest. But the experience changed me. When I climbed the mountain, the only thought I had was, ‘How will I go down the mountain now’.” he says.
Despite all that life threw at him, Mark never gave up. “I accepted my reality, but decided to make the best of it. Sometimes, you need to get a big blow to your life to realise the change you need to make. That big blow is absolutely necessary to get you back in the right track and here I am... after all of that.”
“I don’t want people to look at me and think, this is what a disabled person can do... I want them to look at me and learn — this is what a positive attitude can do,” he says.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any tough days. “I’m so busy that there is never any time to think about what happened to me... but sometimes, perhaps, once in five days, I might think about my life and feel that it is tough... But it never lasts,” Mark says.
Mountaineering however also made Mark take one of his most difficult decisions ever. During his Everest climb it is claimed Mark and his team walked past “a dying man”.
“But there was nothing we could do. The young man was in the final stages of life — there was nothing we could do to save him. Stopping would have meant putting the lives of other expedition members in danger and I couldn’t risk it. It was the one of the toughest decisions of my life.”
Today, Mark travels across the world, is a motivational speaker and is an avid cyclist who also happened to win the silver medal at the Sydney Paralympic Games in 2000 — he has also written five books.
“I’ve been quite lucky — most of my climbing friends have passed away but I’m still here. ”
And will Mark ever do another Mt. Everest expedition? “Not if I want to stay married!”
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