I turned sixteen on the 9th of May, 2001. Two weeks later, I was standing on the summit of Everest. People sometimes assume there was a long, deliberate gap between the two events. There wasn’t. There was a slow, unglamorous rebuilding: new team, new route, new understanding of what my body needed.
The North Ridge is not an easier mountain than the South Col, only a different one. It avoids the Khumbu Icefall but demands a longer, more technical descent. What made the difference this time was resourcing — a team with the equipment and experience mine had lacked the year before.
We climbed under a clear morning sky. I remember the summit less as an explosion of emotion and more as an arrival — the quiet end of something I had started as a much younger, much less prepared boy the year before.
