Today is the 91st anniversary of the last diary entry of the first man who tried to climb Everest solo. Mind you, his plan had been to crash land a plane 14,000 feet up and then stroll the rest of the way, so perhaps he wasn’t destined to succeed
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Maurice Wilson was one of *those* chaps. He’d been a captain in the army, got a Military Cross in The Great War, and not adjusted well to peacetime, when there wasn’t as much call for derring do. According to Geoff Powter’s book ‘Strange and Dangerous Dreams’:
He went a little bit beyond the basic military-adventuring type, though. He was an ascetic, convinced that the world would be a much better place if everybody fasted and believed in The Beyond as much as he did. Which was perhaps why...
“Wilson purchased no climbing equipment, and the only skills training he did consisted of walking several hundred miles from London to Bradford, where his family still lived.” He set off in 1933 in a Gypsy Moth he’d only recently bought and renamed Ever Wrest
He was a novice pilot, having only just learnt to fly, and began the jaunt with a characteristic act of bravado: summoning the press to watch him tear up the Air Ministry’s letter telling him he didn’t have permission to go, saying
When he got to Cairo – and achieving that, intact, was remarkable in itself – the British Legation wouldn’t give him the permit he needed to go further, so instead of Everest, he flew to Baghdad, navigating his way over 1,000 miles of desert using only a compass
Once there, he started looking for maps to guide him round the Persian Gulf. When there weren’t any, he borrowed a child’s school atlas and used that to get to Bahrain. Then, thinking he’d be arrested if he went to Persia, he flew for 9.5 hours to Gwadar in India
Most entertaining thread I've read in some time. I couldn't help reading it as a Monty Python script with Michael Palin playing the main character.
I love the idea of fasting as a competition sport.
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I love the idea of fasting as a competition sport.