GRYLLS and HIMALAYAS

On 16 May 1998, Grylls achieved his childhood dream (an ambition since his father gave him a picture of Everest when he was eight) and a record, as the youngest Briton, at 23, to summit Mount Everest, just eighteen months after breaking his back. However, James Allen, an Australian/British climber who ascended Everest in 1995 with an Australian team, but who has dual citizenship, beat him to the summit at age 22.[19] The feat has since been surpassed by Jake Meyer and, at age 19, by Rob Gauntlett.

Grylls' expedition involved nearly four months on Everest's southeast face: From his first reconnaissance climb on which he fell in a crevasse and was knocked unconscious, regaining consciousness to find himself swinging on the end of a rope, to the weeks of acclimatisation climbs involving climbing up and down the South Face, negotiating the Khumbu icefall (a frozen river), the Western Cwm glacier, and a 5000 foot wall of ice called the Lhotse face, to the grueling ascent with the ex-SAS soldier Neil Laughton, involving climbing for hours in the night, that took him past extreme weather, fatigue, dehydration, last-minute illness, sleep deprivation and almost running out of oxygen inside the death zone where air is three times thinner than at sea level.

To prepare for climbing at such high altitudes in the Himalayas, in 1997, Grylls became the youngest Briton to climb Ama Dablam, a peak described by Sir Edmund Hillary as "unclimbable".