Thank you for watching. Thank you for supporting the show in whatever way you can. And thanks for the education to all the amazing guests we've had on the show and the amazing guests yet to be on the show. It has been a ball. It has been a joy. It has been a pleasure. And I'm excited to really put a lot more energy into it going forward. I've been wrapped up in this house build in the kind of last year and a half. And I always feel like these are kind of, oh, we've got to get another show out. And I haven't been able to put the energy I like to. I've got a whole huge folder of suggestions from those of you who have reached out over the months and years.
And I promise to bring those shows to you. We have a lot of legends out there to interview. A lot of hang gliders and hot air balloon people that I don't typically have on the show and should. It's been one of those I need to do for a long time. And I promise I will. But... But... What I can say about this show... I'm kind of happy that it just happened to fall on the 200th. This one is very special. One, it's the first time we've ever had so many people in a single recording. I had three of the Expeditions Five on this one. We've done live shows with more than that. But I had to get these guys in South Africa and London to come on the show. And that was all thanks to Barb's, Richard Barber.
Thank you, sir. But this was... This was a real treat to talk to a climbing legend, Andy DeClercq. And we didn't have Pierre Carter and Jeremy Holdcroft. We were two of the Expedition members on this one. You know, I'll know, probably recognize those names. But certainly Pierre Carter. He flew off Everest last year and partook in the Red Bull X-Alps back in the day. A couple of those. And some great stories from that. And I will get him on just independently. On the show. As soon as we can make those two things online. But in this show, I talked to Scott Baker and Andy DeClercq and Richard Barber. Andy DeClercq, you all might recognize those of you with a mountaineering background.
Legendary climber. He's climbed with Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker and many others. Was on Everest and the fateful John Krakauer story. And has many hundreds of first descents. And his home of South Africa and many around the world. He's been at it a long time. He's also a skydiver and a base jumper. And a true pioneer in flight. He's been paragliding since it started. And hang gliding before that. But it was just fantastic to have him on my screen. And get to share in his joy of the mountains. These five guys went off to Pakistan this summer. To try to break the altitude. They have been inspired by all the amazing stuff that's gone on in Pakistan.
Of course, Brad Sander was one of the first out there. Who I've been some flying with. And haven't seen him in an awful long time. But he was one of the original pioneers. And then in the last few years, we've seen some amazing things. By Antoine Girard and Damien Lacaze. And Fabi Buell and Aaron Durogati. Incredible. Huge triangles out there last summer. And then more recently, Horacio. And Daniel D 'Oralmes and Tom D 'Adorladeau. Who have both been out there several times. But they made their incredible film of flying out to K2. Along the Baltoro Glacier this last year. And that film is absolutely amazing. I'm sure many of you have seen it. If you haven't, make sure to do so.
The link to that film will be in the show notes. But these guys are more humble, I think. And they're flying into the mountains. And they're making great endeavors. And certainly Andy is the BMF when it comes to mountaineering and climbing experience. But they'd seen this stuff and thought, Why can't a group of just blokes from South Africa get out there and go big as well? So they did. They went out there. And soon after arrival, they did their acclimatization in the Hunza. And then made their way up to the launch point. To get out to K2. And fly along the Baltoro. You hear all about that. But on the first flight of that series, things went epically sideways.
And this is their story of what went right. What went wrong. Which was quite a bit. And the learning and the education that came out of it. They are all, as you will hear, still very good friends. And they have plans for the future. But this was a lot of fun. And sometimes pretty riotous. But a great education for all of us. Especially when heading off to remote, big places. Like Pakistan. It has the highest mountains in the world. So, enjoy this bicentennial episode of the Cloud Base Mayhem. With all these fine gentlemen. And enjoy their story. Cheers. Music.
All right. Well, gentlemen. We've never interviewed this many people at one point. And you're spread all across the world. South Africa. And Capetown. And Barb, you're in London I guess. Well,
I'm in Nottingham today. Ah,
you're in Nottingham today. All right. And I'm over here in Sun Valley. So, welcome to the Mayhem. It's cool to have you guys on the show. Barb, I appreciate it. you keeping me updated both before and after. Why don't we start by just a very quick introduction from the three of you on who you are and your climbing and flying background, and then I'll ask you about the mission. But why don't we start, Barb, why don't you start, and then we'll go around my clock here, and then we'll go to Andy, and then we'll go to Scott.
Okay, cool. So Richard Barber, I've been flying since 2004. Before that, I did my pilot's license in 2008.
Within a year, I lied about my hours, went to South Africa, to the Northern Cape, to a place called Doha,
flew over 100 k's quite quickly, went back the next year, flew 100 k in a little over two hours, using half breaks most of the time, and sort of scaring myself stupid. Gave up for a little while while I was married, then got divorced, so I didn't have any responsibilities, so I took up the sport again. And then since then, it's just been a continuous rise with paragliding taking over more of my life.
Nice.
And Andy? Oh, that's great. Cool. So in South Africa, I would be known as an obali, which is an old man, an old guy. I started flying
in the very early days, you know, prior to actual paragliders being made. We used to take the pilot shoots off our skydiving canopies and then run off hills.
Started in the early days, sort of up to about 1990, was part of the early wave of flying in South Africa. And then I stopped and went to the North Cape. And then I started flying in South Africa, and then I stopped and went off to pursue my alpinism and the sort of rock climbing. I actually lived in Seattle for 10 years. I've climbed all over the world, Denali, Patagonia, a few trips to the Himalayas before. And while this was going on, I was always, you know, busy with the taken sport of skydiving, and then later base jumping. So I've kind of been around the block climbing, and then about five or six years ago, I decided I was going to get back into paragliding.
I probably had about 300 hours up till 2017, and that's when I got back into it properly. And I'm really enjoying the aviation aspect. So in a way, with the rise of paragliding, I got off just when all the experimental stuff happened, and then joined the game when it was nice and safe and well as a tablet. We got
to do three podcasts just with you, but go ahead. There's a lot of history there I would just die to dig into, but yeah, okay, go ahead. Sorry.
Yeah. And then basically married with four kids in Cape Town and run a cabin and make a business. So that's me. Do your kids fly? My youngest son does. Yeah, he just started about a year ago.
Very cool.
And the others don't like paragliding.
Probably better.
Probably better.
And Scott?
So I've been flying far less of a lustrous career, I suppose, in aviation terms. I've been flying since 2019.
I've come from a bit of an outdoor background. I did a lot of freestyle and white water kayaking was my thing for many years, kind of in my youth. A little bit of rally biking. So used to being, to a degree, a bit of a kayaker. But I've been flying since 2019. I've been flying since 2019. I've been flying since 2019. I've been flying since 2019. I've been flying since 2019. Out in the exposure thing, but not as wild as Andy's previous career. And also live in Cape Town. I work in the film and media production industry and service, strangely, mostly fashion and luxury brand. But I organize things for a living and make good tea. That's my, yeah, that's my life.
I always find it really interesting, the kayaking, flying connection. And there seems to be a very much similar mindset in those groups of people. That was, you know, certainly my background was in paddling before flying. And it seems to really connect. A different one is you, Andy. You know, Will Gadd always told me that it made him nervous when climbers would go to fly. Because it was, you know, flying is very much a gravity sport. It's a flow sport, you know. So he finds that kayaking, skateboarding, mountain biking, these kind of sports where you're dealing with a lot of gravity. You're dealing with gravity, obviously climbing, but climbing is more
precision, slow. It's not so much a flow sport. You can get in the flow state of mind, of course, which we talk about a lot on the show. But it's interesting that you actually, sounds like you went the other way. You started with flying and then you went to paddling. And so, you know, you've been doing that for a long time. And I think that's a really good example of how you got into climbing. Is that right?
Not exactly. I've been, I've basically been climbing since I was a very young kid. And
the, how shall I say, the, you know, the combination of base jumping and climbing works very well together. And that was something I always wanted to do. So I started skydiving first. And, and, and then I started doing, you know, I started doing, you know, I started doing, you know, paragliding. And then in the early days paragliding, but it was mostly to get into base jumping so we could climb things and then jump off them. And that's kind of what we did.
So you were the original Dean Potter. You probably gave him the idea.
Pretty much.
And your, your, your partners were no strangers to the, the Alpine world, Alex Lowe and Conrad. And you're, you're being quite humble. You've, you've climbed a lot of big stuff.
Yeah. Well, very interestingly, I met Conrad at the, at the 7,000 foot Kiltner base camp in Alaska on his very first season. He was a youngster with a huge crop of blonde hair. And then more sadly enough, we were in Paiute in 1999. We were trying to gash them four. And Alex Lowe was in a,
he was on an expedition to Shipton Spire and he came out for a few days. I think he had, he was sick or something. And that was sadly the last time I saw him because later that year he was killed in that accident. And he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he
was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, he was, as enormous risk, usually not so much dependent on the people, but the, you know, the, the mountains themselves, same with flying often. It's not, you know, it's not the gear it's off. It's sometimes the decisions, but we get in the, the problem with paddling and flying and climbing is you can get into places where you can't stop. You can't just hit the eject button, I guess, unless you've got a base rig on your back and can, but which one, this is a hard question, but which one has taken more friends?
I would say on balance, more people get taken paragliding than climbing, but I've just been climbing a lot longer than, so there's been a lot of people from climbing most, more especially from alpinism, you know, in the mountains, not so much rock climbing, but again, it's just got to do with numbers. I mean, there's, I mean, there's a lot more people that basically paraglide, I think. And I think paragliding is a far more dangerous sport or activity than mountaineering and climbing. As you said, it's, it's, it's a lot more dynamic.
It's a
difficult question to answer, but on balance, I'd say paragliding.
Interesting. Hadn't planned on going there. Just caught me as an interesting question. Barb's, you reached out before you guys went and you and I had, you'd said, Hey, we got to get Pierre on the show, which I still need to do. And I was hoping he could join us for this, but those of you listening as Pierre Carter who competed in the X-Alps a couple of times and a legendary South African pilot and animal. And so tell me the original expedition, I assume was a bit inspired by Tonda Dorlado and what those guys did in the Baltoro or no, was this, this something you had dreamed up and then they went in there and got into it, but tell us what was planned and, and the team, a little bit about the team and what, what the mission was.
Sure. So I'm never good when I'm bored. And COVID was rubbish, particularly to start with. I was, I was furloughed for a little while. And that was June, 2020. And so I started looking for, and I'd sort of started in May even just looking for convergence lines and high cloud bases around the world. So I played on windy, just looking, looking for convergence and then also looking at cloud base. And so the two, which I found were the the convergence that sets up over the Atlas.
And also, then I found sort of the the, the caracor from that. I was also already aware of the caracor because of John Sylvester, like you, I went with sky safaris,
Jim Eddie Colvox, who I think at some point you just got to get on.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
And and obviously John Sylvester as well. And then sort of, and I'd watched the end of the caracor and so I had a sort of bit of a, and having seen this thing for Pakistan, I then contacted Andy.
It was like, Hey Andy, I've, I've seen the caracorum and I also watched a program with David Attenborough program at the same time. This happened happenstance where it talks about Concordia and Concordia. You've got the view of broad peak, you've got K2, you've got the gash of rooms and you've got mashup rooms. And it's out and it called it, I think the value of the gods. And I was like, okay, got to do this. So got in touch with Andy. I was like, Hey Andy. And he chuckled and sent me his goals and paragliding and his ultimate goal and paragliding was to fly the belt or a, um, so, so that was 2020. Um, and then 21, I sort of started, started really sort of looking at it a bit more,
um, then, um, 2022, uh, yeah, 21, uh, I started planning for 2022, but couldn't get it organized and actually thank goodness. Cause I would've gotten nowhere cause I didn't have the right contacts. I didn't realize quite how difficult, um, trying to organize the logistics of something in Pakistan would be. So, so that was where it all came from, I guess. And then Tom, can you
give us a, can you give us a couple minutes on what is involved? I just had four buddies take off and go there to, to fly. And I don't know that they did anything. I think they're just going out there and seeing what happens. I don't think they have a necessarily a mission. They just want to be in the care of quorum and fly. And they know that there's oxygen. That's kind of it.
Oxygen is a hard one. Oxygen. That was my, that was my portfolio. Make sure we have oxygen.
Ah, okay.
All right. I, I offloaded
that particular one to Scott. Yeah.
I offloaded that pretty fast when Scott joined the trip. I was like, Scott, I've been in touch with Brad Sander and I was like, Scott, you can look after oxygen. So that was, that was that problem. But now I think first of all, you've got to get permits. Now you've had Aaron on, on the show in the past, who talked about ending up in jail and honza cause he hadn't got that bit sorted out in advance. Now all these things can be sorted out with, with time. Yeah. If you've got the time, it's not a problem. You can speak to the right people. You get when you get there, people, the Pakistani people are the most friendly, helpful people anywhere on earth. As far as I'm concerned, I've been to a lot of places, but they really were outstandingly brilliantly helpful and wonderful.
Um, but you've got the, in the, for the Boutour is specifically, it's, it's a military, it's a militarized zone. Um, the only helicopters that can fly there are military helicopters. Yeah. Um, so you've got to get, uh, a bunch of different permits. You've got to get a tracking permit. First of all, from the, uh, from the government, but actually it, do you get a tracking permit or do you get a tracking and mountaineering permit? And if you don't have that, you can't go in there. If you don't have an expedition partner, that's a local partner. You can't go in there. Um, if, and then on top of that, you then need to have a permit to go flying. Now, fortunately, Tom and Horatio and Tom, um, uh, we spoke to, to, through XC mag. Um, they put me in touch with Tom and Tom.
He was moving from Belgium to the Azores. Uh, and he's like, okay, I'm going to have an hour on this day at this time. I can talk to you guys. Yeah.
He's a busy man.
Yeah. But he gave, he gave that full hour and gave us a total undivided attention. What he didn't tell us was that he was moving house from, from Belgium to the Azores. He was, was editing the, uh, uh, flying between giants movie, which anyone who hasn't seen is an absolute must for anyone. That's amazing. The cinematography is excellent. He and Horatio just awesome. The, uh, when Morales got caught, caught up at base camp and seeing his face sort of having walked for two days back, it's, um, the whole thing's priceless. Um, so, so there was just, and, and, and Tom put us in touch with Jasmine tours, which to be honest, was probably the most important thing out of everything. Um, because they, they are, they've been established for over 20 years.
They know everyone. They know the commissioners, they, they know sort of everyone that's needed. They, they know the military people. They even have a deal with the military for the helicopters so that everyone, any other group that goes there, they have to put down a 10,000 pounds deposit or $10,000 deposit on people's own money beforehand. So if they're going to get a helicopter now, we, we didn't have to do any of that because Jasmine's so well established and Jasmine does all checks to make sure that we had the appropriate insurance and stuff and the military wasn't going to be sort of left left short. Um, if, if they did things so, so that, that was super important.
But yeah, I also WhatsApp turns one Gerard because I found this number somewhere. Um, and had a WhatsApp conversation with him. Um, I found out that the guy called Sajid Shah was the head of the Pakistani paragliding association, got in touch with him and he said to me, look, if you want to go to the Valtorio glacier, you need to have a, what's your mission going to be? And so it's like, ah, okay, we need a mission. Oh, well, I guess we're going to go for the record then. Um, and so that's how it went from just wanting to go and fly in the Valtorio and flying around the month, the triangle towers and fly to brought the, to actually, let's see if we can break a record.
Okay. So the, the mission was to just break the record, go higher than anybody else. The record
was to, to fly onto K2 ideally. Yeah. Um, and to break the altitude record. Um, and so all the preparation really from settling from my side was to make sure I was in the best possible condition to enable me to do that safely.
And how was the team chosen? Um, and, and we've got a couple of people missing here, so fill in quickly. Who's the team? How is that chosen? Uh, what was, what were the different roles?
Sure. So, um, Andy and I had been talking about this for a couple of years and one of the things I've been doing was looking at weather. Um, I've always been a bit of a weather geek cause I don't have that much lead. Um, so I'm forever and I've got access to staff travel. So, um, I, uh, I bounce for, for day trips. So the outs are not desperately unusual for me. Um, because if, if it's good, then, um, I'm very happily spend twice as much on a plane ticket than I would on a train in the UK. Um, and so, so Andy and I were absolutely down for it. And at the same time, um, Pierre Carter and sort of, I guess his, his other, his sidekick, um, chap called Jeremy Holcroft up in Joe Berg.
Who, and he flew off Everest last year. Um, he was the first person to do it legally. Um, they were also looking at Pakistan and what could they do? Um, and so, so we had a call between us and I didn't really, I'd never met Pierre at this stage and it was like, look, do we think we can, we can muddle along and that, you know, we're, we're going to keep each other safe. And it seemed like, yeah, this, this, this could work. And it was sort of going to be Andy and I as buddies. And then Pierre and Jeremy, Jeremy is buddies. Um, and then the autumn I was in South Africa and I got to know Scott a bit. And then at Christmas spent more time with Scott and, um, and Scott was like, I'd really like to come on this. And it's like, eh, you got the experience. Um, so it was slightly unsure.
Um, and then we had had more chats and then Scott proved incredibly useful when sadly a pilot in South Africa crashed. Um, he didn't end up making it, but Scott, uh, did a hell of a lot in terms of trying to do logistic, um, to try to give him the best possible chance. and, uh, and then we sort of, we had another discussion that we think Scott could, could be good. Um, and Andy sort of broached that with Pierre and, uh, Jeremy. Um, and they said, yeah, yeah, he's welcome. And, uh, I
got in under the, under the guise of organizing things for a living is what I do. So I can organize, I can organize, I can organize.
You need that. You need that person on a team. I can fix,
I can, I can, I can fix is my, that's my gig.
You're a fixer.
I'm a fixer. Yeah.
So, so I, so I threw oxygen at, um, it's got then the, everyone else decided they would go to Hunza for two weeks before going to the Boutore. Um, I just simply couldn't do that with work. So I got an altitude tent, um, instead. So, so, um, every morning, the daily standup would start with, so what altitude were you sleeping at last night? Did you get any sleep? Um, my very first night, I may not have read the instructions quite as well as I should have done. Um, and I woke up after two hours sort of going, holy, uh, I feel, I don't feel very well. Um, so, uh, I sort of opened the, opened the tent and just was there.
And, uh, I discovered that I got a, I'd gone straight to 6,000 meters. Um, perfect. So, so while,
so while, so while Bob's was sitting in an altitude tent in London, Andy, myself, Pierre and Jeremy, um, went to Hunza for 12 days. Was our major acclimatization time, um, was 12 days prior in Hunza. Um, Andy, uh, and we, we coined the house thermal Andy's thermal because, because from pretty much the first day, Andy used to would launch, go straight into the thermal and be close on 6,000 meters, sort of 20 minutes later, all in one climb. Whoa. Um, it is, yeah. So, I mean, 3000
meters.
Yeah. 3000 meters. Yeah. Okay. Wow. 3000
meters. Andy, what was the floor? The floor was, um, the bottom of the, the, the,
uh,
uh,
uh,
uh, uh,
uh,
uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, The day's mission was to try and chase Andy in his first thermal of the day up to the top.
Some quick math there. That's 11,000, 12,000 feet over the valley floor. No, more, 13,000, 14,000 feet over the valley floor. That's spectacular.
That's good. It's quite something. Yeah, it's quite something. So on these kind of altitude, you know, getting adjusted flights, were you pushing into the big terrain? Were you kind of, okay, let's go for some little XC? Or were you guys literally just, you know, taking what you could and getting some altitude and getting some time under your belts?
Well, I'll answer that. I mean, the flying in Hunters is really good. We did, in all those acclimatizing and training flights, I mean, pretty much every day we did triangles. So anything from a 60K triangle to a 100K triangle. We found. We found that when we got there, there was a lot of snow from the winter, which hadn't cleared off earlier. And actually, Antoine said it was. In the beginning of June.
Beginning of June,
okay. The beginning of June. And so we found on the snowy side of things, on the Rakipashi side, there was a lot of downdraft, katabatic winds. So we pretty much stayed on the other side, which would be the. The southeast side. And we found that, you know, we could still get pretty good, pretty decent climbs there. So it was basically, you know, 12 days of just really nice cross country flying, big triangles.
And, you know, just testing out all the warm gear and the oxygen and all that sort of stuff.
Hmm. What would be involved in going from that? You know, 60, 100K triangles. To the mission. What needed to happen? For those like me who haven't looked very closely at maps of this area in a while. What needed to happen on the day? On the day that you're going to try to do it?
You mean on the record-breaking day?
Yeah. What would be involved in making that? Obviously good weather, but what does that route look like? How long is it? How much time would it take?
Well. I mean, flying from in the Baltora, flying from where you take off in Paiu to up to K2 isn't very far. It's about 50Ks.
Oh, okay.
So it's 50Ks there, 50Ks back. But in that entire flight, there's nowhere to land. It's as, you know, as Tom said, the Baltora glacier, you've got to think of it as lava. I mean, you could land there, but you'll crash and you will get injured badly. So it's highly committing. Basically, you're flying over this river of ice with boulders and rocks and lakes and all sorts of things. So the transition from Hunza to the Baltora, the flying is very similar. I mean, it's, you know, you find a nice, it's a rocky, tiny face and there'll be a climb there and, you know, you just bounce from thermal to thermal and peak to peak and so on and so on. But the difference between Hunza and the Baltora is the level of commitment.
Okay. I mean, in Hunza, there's fields to land on anyway. You're just one glide away from a landing. In the Baltora, there's nowhere to land.
Yeah, okay. Barb, you look like you want to talk. You keep putting your hand up. Yeah,
no, it was just, I think, so obviously Hunza is about 130 kilometers away from the Baltora glacier. Okay. So those guys spent two weeks in. In Hunza, then they spent a day in a sort of in the back of Land Rover's sort of being driven from Hunza to Skardu, which is sort of the staging post, if you like, the city that's closest to the Baltora. Okay. And then you have a day's drive up to a place called Ascoli. And on that journey, depending when you go, depends on how.
How sketchy that drive is. On the way up, it was still early enough that there wasn't that much water coming down. But by the time I came out in a vehicle, there was a few landslides that had been down. There was so much water coming down the portable rivers that they were no longer portable. So you had sort of one Land Rover and then another Land Rover. You'd walk over a dodgy little couple of pieces. Of wood to get across the across this raging torrent over the top of the raging torrent. And then you get into a different Land Rover and then go down the next bit across another one and then down the next bit. And so what a company like Jasmine Doors does is they organize to have these cars which are doing shuttles between unportable rivers.
And then once you've got to Ascoli, you then have a two day walk into to get to Peiu. You can do it in the day, but even if you can do it in the day, your kit and everything else isn't going to do it in a day because that's what the port is. And there's only so far when they can walk when they're carrying all this kit in 2800 meters. It's 25 degrees in the valley. Absolutely scorching. It's amazing how strong the sun is. And these these guys are carrying
50 kilograms. They're carrying 50 kilograms per person. So they'll they'll carry two two glider bags, for example, quite comfortably when they walk in. I think the logistics smoothed over by someone like Jasmine Doors is is is quite substantial. It's quite rough logistics. But I think, Gavin, your actual question was it was was towards what were the weather conditions like? As in when would you call? No, not yet.
Let's let's get to that. No, I'm trying to understand the logistics. So the you can't then you can't start at Hunza and do this mission. You've got to you've got to do these overland things to get into a better zone. You can't fly from Hunza and fly to Schooley, for example, or Paiu. What was the other one? The Paiu. And you can't you can't do it by air.
Yes and no. I mean, you well, it's all driven. It's all driven. So you fly from. So Andy and my logistics were we flying to we flew into Islamabad. We flew from Islamabad to Gilgit, which is a commercial flight. Beautiful through the mountains. And then from Gilgit, you take what was it? A two hour car drive to Hunza. Then we were based in Hunza. The logistics in Hunza are amazingly easy. It's a little town. You can get oxygen at the local welding shop. And it all takes a little bit longer than you would expect or than you might hope. But it's all manageable. And it all it all happens. We stayed in a really nice hotel called the Hard Rock Hotel, which is a 20 minute walk from launch, which was absolutely amazing as well.
20 minute walk up to launch. They've got a nice set of five flags outside. You can see all the wind direction. Absolutely perfect. And then flying in Hunza, as Andy was saying, is relatively easy. You've got plenty of places to land and there's plenty of big flying there. We then drove with Pierre. And Jeremy up the Karakoram Highway, which is spectacular in itself. And that we did in a minivan. Perfectly comfortable. Lots of rock falls along the way. And then we got through to Skardu. And Skardu is that town that's like the base of operations for all of the mountaineering and all of the big treks of people going to going into the Baltoro K2 and all of the peaks you were talking about earlier.
And then it's a day. It's a day. On the scariest road I've ever been on. It's carved into the side of scree slopes. Like you just like the ground that the road is on is the same as the ground that's that's not down the mountain. It's like it's. Yeah. But they're there again. They're amazing. And Barbes and I were with the driver that must have been in his 60s, maybe mid to late 60s, maybe the early 70s. And the guy drove. The hell. hell out of his toyota land cruiser like old school land cruiser felt didn't feel overly safe in the beginning but then realized actually how good he was um and then you get to as bob said escoli and that's a camp in a village the most yeah that's a camp in a village and then you walk and then you walk from there and that's where so you are you the the last part of it you can't fly to bob's flew into scardu so he didn't do the whole roundabout trip he had one day's cheap drive in um and then we all started so we all did the jeep drive in together and the walk into the baltoria and
from from from there what are you looking at to get to launch what's what's required for the day now now i'm asking the weather question
so um the weather we worked out that i've been a fan of soaring meteo for years because it's super simple really easy to see what's what and actually i found a really quite good interpretation of how soaring meteo so what that was saying and what that meant for the conditions in the baltoria um basically if there was any sort of big lines of cloud then it was going to be overdeveloped in hell um and uh if there were little if it was saying little clouds and the cloud base was saying five and a half you could probably basically add somewhere between 500 meters to a thousand meters to whatever it was saying but within the baltoria um so that that that was that was quite helpful that was quite helpful um so on any given day when we're going to fly we walk up from base camp at payu which is at 3300 and it's the last camp before the glacier itself starts walk up to four thousand meters um we we use porters to carry out the bags up um because well why wouldn't you um at nine euros um it's uh and i i slightly messed up with kit so i ended up having to have a very heavy kit um so so i had an impress for uh
and so i was carrying 28 well my kit was total was 28 kilos but porter would carry the kit and then i carried the warm kit and the oxygen that stuff up in a little day back um so you get up for about around 11 um by which time the it would be starting to come up the hill in the valley the caspatic would be still still glowing but not hard um but that's sort of almost helped with an easterly because it'd be coming down the down the glacier which is running sort of uh east west so it'd be coming down down the uh down the glacier um and then it's then actually the flying itself is pretty simple um you know it's uh at four thousand meters it's it's a pretty simple it's a pretty simple thing to do um so you're going to have to take off a thousand meters and it's hot um it you uh there isn't a lot of air um so so so take off is fast um and it's it's scree and it's steep um you know it's if you mess up the takeoff there it's gonna hurt a lot um you're probably going to be okay but being a scree slope you'll sort of bounce and slide and you're going to bounce and slide a long way it's going to you're going to smart for a while
yeah um
but uh but yeah once you take off then there was a thermal to the left the thermal to the right and and you kind of just pretty much certainly while we were there we just sort of pinged up pretty fast after that and then you'd sort of kind of it
is a lot of that is a lot of the forecasting you said soaring media worked pretty well but it's a lot of the forecasting just you know licking your finger and sticking it out in the weather or or they're pretty reliable models is it is so
sorry machine model worked really really well the big problem is once you go into the baltoro there is no mobile reception at all yeah it even the satellite reception at payu base camp is almost non-existent you have to kind of it takes 15 20 minutes for an in-reach message to get out a lot of the time because it's got to wait for a for a satellite to be in just the right place um because it's got a bloody great steep mountain behind you so so so that meant that although i had absolutely learned how to interpret the weather i was then having to ask sort of people on on uh via the in-reach going hey can you give me the weather forecast for tomorrow um this is what i'm interested in and i get some i get these different messages back and then it was a case of trying to imagine what soaring media was actually saying from that to then work out what the weather was going to be um and that was a sort of so so a learning point was you need to really have a fully briefed person who absolutely understands what it is you want from a weather forecast and the other problem was the people providing the weather forecast did not want to say it looks great if there's any risk at all because they don't want to feel responsible if you then crash and smash yourself up on the baltoro yeah once you take off as andy says you go up the baltoro there are no landing options you have to make it back so
you've got to make 50k you got to make 100k 50k out 50k back uh and then you have to make it back and then you have to make it back and then you have to make it back uh and then you have to make it back uh and then you have to make it back and you you've got to make it there's nowhere you're not slow planning in the scree you're not you're not landing on the glacier that's just game over you got to make it pretty
much and and certainly that should be the attitude of anyone flying there yeah um is that that that that you know um tom described as his lava and that for me was a really good description because it just said you know you don't land on lava um and and that was certainly the mindset that i went there with not that i really got to fly very far up the glacier just because of circumstances but for me that was something i never wanted to to get into a risk of yeah i mean i certainly know that andy felt the same about that and
andy you've got obviously the most glacier experience i'm sure of anyone here but there there were a couple of glacier crossings i had to undertake in in alaska when i did the thing up there with dave turner and luckily you know after the first one i flew over the rest because walking across this thing was just mind-bendingly difficult uh and and incredibly dangerous but it was just uh they they present things that you can't see from the air and it's just a maze i don't know how the baltoro is but i imagine if it's similar uh that was not something i ever wanted to repeat yeah
i know for sure i mean glacier
travel is uh time consuming shall we say and yes it's just the worst maze problem ever exactly it's much easier to fly over them the baltoro um doesn't have snow on it until you know much higher up on the gashabrim side and and just underneath k2 it's basically just um ice and uh gravel and pebble and rocks and rivers yeah yeah yeah sort of rivulet so it looks brown it doesn't look white but it's it but it's not it's it's convoluted jumbled um and not something that you could ban safely um last year ramas did land in the middle of broad peak base camp he sunk out there um and also something to consider i mean the baltoro starts at 3300 and goes up to 5200 and i mean just for the air density you're flying much much faster so
you know you can't just sink it into a little hot spot anymore you need a proper runway because you're going to come in fast and hard yeah
right yeah that that does catch a lot of people out you know places like peru and that kind of thing your your speeds are i remember john sylvester always talking about the that you know he he really liked flying a much lower end glider in the really big terrain just because of the speeds you know you don't want the enzo speed anymore you want something that you can manage when you're trying to fly it's just a matter of time until you're going to stick it in yeah
for sure that's why um all of us on our trip we all had sea gliders um you know we thought about it um um basically basically barbs and jeremy had had the new proton i had an alpina and um um and then scott had a Niviuk pierre had a um here i had another zenon but it was an older one that's a d but it was four years old so i've been sort of thought it flew about yeah
pretty similar pretty similar machines so so when you get you know quote unquote the day it looks looks pretty good i'm imagining i've been told that flying in pakistan is in a lot of ways pretty straightforward it's kind of like beer there's there's there's not a lot of wind i mean obviously you you've got to deal with the katabatics you've got to deal with things it's big terrain but on good days it's pretty straight pretty straightforward but i would imagine there's a little pucker factor here doing that so i'm imagining that's pretty straightforward but i'm guessing there's a little pucker factor here doing that so i'm imagining there's a little this thing flying over all this terrain that's unlandable or is it that straightforward is it the kind of thing you you launch you get in the thermal and okay this is going to work this is straightforward we can do this so
i'm gonna as the as the most junior of the pilots i will say um there's definitely a pucker factor um from my point of view i suppose for from everyone you got to wrap your head around it um it's why honza was quite important because it is um it's a very important thing for me to be able to do this thing for me to be able to do this such big terrain i've flown prior to this a couple of times in the alps but not flown any really big mountains and then suddenly when you're looking at as we discussed earlier when you're sitting at six like andy got to six and a half thousand in hunza and you're looking down at the floor it's uh two thousand it's four it's over four kilometers in that uh in that distance and so definitely a case of buck up and hack it um as well as uh obviously all the the planning and the right conditions to um to boot but one of the big one of the big warnings that uh about flying in the area that and antoine actually um said to us was it's one thing when you have over development when you have a cloud a slightly lower cloud base so um five to seven thousand and you start having over development but he really warned that he's he's flown a lot in the in the area he like strongly warned he was like when you have cloud base between seven and eight thousand and you have over development in at that height he he said it happens much quicker so much much quicker than than than anything lower the over development happens much quicker so his big one of his big warnings was yeah if you if you start to see it over developing or developing um between seven and eight thousand then you need to go home yeah yeah
erin talked about that too you know he had those huge triangles there last year but talked about if there was any sign of over development it's game over you do you know your your exits uh start shrinking really fast because you've you're high it takes takes some time to get on the ground and i would imagine you know with this with this flight out to k2 at the baltorro if you're high enough are there places to run can you get over into another valley could you are there escape routes are your your trapped this your this is the mission you got to get in you got to get out this is you got to make it work
so so with the val turro it being this one valley that goes basically east west And then you go, as you head east, you get to a place called looking at Tom's tracks. And to an extent, Tom and Horatio have done all the hard work and Antoine as well in terms of highlighting. You can even see on some of the apps, you can see where the thermals are and they are beautifully predictable. But then you have to hop over to K2. But before that, literally, you can just run back down the Baltoro to the end of it, which is at the end of it is Peiu Camp. So as long as you're in the main valley, you can get there. In theory, the only problem is that Mascherbrum is still over 7000 meters.
You've got even Peiu, which no one really bothers climbing. That's 6400 meters. And behind that is Churicho, which is 6500 meters. You've got the Trango Towers next door, which are the Trango Towers. It's just the scale of the mountains that are everywhere. So if it's ODing in one place, the chances are it's ODing everywhere. So you just don't play with that. If
you OD,
you're just getting home. But of course, you're going fast. I mean, our trim speed was on the hottest day. I think it was actually on the first day. We were sort of running. We were sort of turning around. OK, wind's got to be that way because I'm doing 49 k's an hour at trim.
And then you turn around, you're doing 49 k's back the other way. It's like, OK, this is going to be a fast landing. And then you try pressing the speed bar and you can do over 70 in both directions.
Just because you've got the height to play with when you're going out. You can. And it's quite novel.
I mean, so in a perfect world, you're out 50k, you're out at the end and you're tall. Assuming you picked a good day and you're trying to break the record. You're tall. You turn around and you're a glide from being back. You don't have to work very hard. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. OK, so. What happened? Are we are we at that point yet? Can we talk about that? Yeah, I think probably beyond
it, to be honest.
So let's let's let's try. Andy, I think. Andy, I think. Yeah, I think Andy should start on this. And then because really it's his it's it's his story combined with a bit of what I normally describe as fuckwittery. I'm not sure whether that can make it onto the. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Totally. Totally. We're we're actually by the way, let's go for it.
All right. So after being in Hunza, we we had.
We made our way to the Baltora and we had a really nice check out flight. The first day.
Then the next day we went up and.
We had we had allowed ourselves two weeks in the Baltora. So on the second day we started the 700 meter walk up. It was quite steep. And I had very tight neck and I pulled out just a respiratory infection that we would get. And actually, Pierre had one of those as well, because it's not a very clean place. There's, you know, there's donkeys and porters and all these mountaineering expeditions come through, so it's incredibly dusty and dirty. So so then anyway, we walked up chest pain started getting worse and worse. And so I thought, let me just put some oxygen on. Then the chest pains lowered.
And I mean, the wind's perfect. I've got this chest pain. I didn't think that I thought it was going to go away. We all took off and about an hour later, the triangle towers has gotten really bad on a scale of one to ten, I'd say about eight and in terms of pain, in terms of pain. And I was like, shit, I'm having a heart attack in midair above the triangle towers, which is not a nice place to have a heart attack. So I mean, the heart pumping. I'm going to. Yeah.
I'm going to back it up there a little bit and just say, give like I suppose, add a bit of the humorous side to that. And he's and he is saying that I mean, he's saying that he was a pain level eight on the radio comms and on the radio comms, he's like calm as a cucumber. He's I'm like so from as Andy climbed, as Andy climbed up and obviously started to have the chest pains. And he flew out at about five five. I think Andy, you flew out about five thousand five hundred meters. He flew out from the from the gaggle. We were in a nice gaggle flying and he flew out. And I think I radioed him. It was like, hey, Andy, where are you going?
Because we were all kind of flying together. And he was like, no, I'm not feeling so good. I'm just going to put on my oxygen. So he flew out of the of the kind of more busy air. Put on his oxygen. He came back and joined us and we flew for a bit longer. And I think that was when we were in Triangle Towers and Andy flew out again. And as you heard him say, he was at pain eight. And I said to him again, hey, Andy, where are you going? Like, OK, I'd seen him knocking his chest while walking up, which was when he was it didn't really register at the time, but he was at the time, you know, and he said that he had not been feeling great.
That's why he went to put the oxygen on. So I said, Andy, everything OK? And he was like, yeah, guys, I'm I'm I'm not feeling so good. I'm going to head back to camp. I'm going to go land. But don't worry about me. You guys just stay and do your thing. Enjoy your flight. And off he started.
But this wasn't this wasn't the flight you were going to try this on. This is just a checkout flight. You guys are just goofing around in the air, having fun or or you or you kind of playing with it. Maybe we got the day.
Well, what we were doing, we were basically just exploring all the thermals on the way up the Gulf. The day was pretty stable, beautiful blue sky and everything. But but I mean, you know, the top of the climbs would have been about six thousand five hundred. No more than that. That's the forecast we had. So
it wasn't a day to get very high. But eight thousand meters, I think it's likely different weather conditions. You need a heat low or you need a little more instability or you need or you need a little more wind, you need different factors.
So, Andy, you're you're experiencing this pretty severe chest pain. Is this is this something you had experienced on previous climbing expeditions? Was this something totally new? You know, were any any red flags going off other than heart attack? Was it was it? And, you know, it was you thinking, hey, pace, were you thinking something along those lines or were you pretty clear what was going on?
Well, I didn't I've never had any medical problems like that before ever. And, you know, my family's got no history of heart attacks or anything. But there was just this incredibly tight chest. I didn't think of it as a heart attack at the time. I thought, well, I've just got massive angina, which is very tight chest. And as I said, you know, I've never I've in in all my prior mountaineering, I climatized easily and never had any problem. So it came as a bolt out of the blue. And funnily enough, it was one of those things. Afterwards, you can see, okay, prime risk factor, basically middle aged man,
not acclimatized up high. There's not enough oxygen getting to the heart. I mean, it's clear as daylight. And we can talk about, you know, the mitigating factors that we could have taken beyond that. But the point was here I found myself at 5500 meters and it was a mortal feeling. It's like this is not right, guys. I can die from this. So all I wanted to do was get down on the ground. So that's what happened is a long 30 minute glide from five, five, six thousand meters to three thousand three hundred.
And it's one of those instinctual things I need to get down on the ground. I need to sort out the chest pain. So I landed OK.
Bob's also landed next to me OK. And then because we were buddy flying.
The five of us would basically fly together and not, you know, for me, from a safety point of view, when I said I'm going to turn around, Bob, Bob and Scott both joined me so that, you know, after an hour and a half, that sort of cut short their flight. But as I said, it was it was a mortal feeling. I needed to get down. So we all landed. Scott, unfortunately, had
I guess the word would be slightly harder landing than. Yeah, yeah. Landing.
I mean,
we were chatting. So in that half an hour where Andy kind of left Trango and I think I think we left it just just under six thousand in the in the end and the long glide home.
We, Bob's and I, obviously, there's like there's all this time. So it's all this. There was half and half an hour glide. And yeah, close on half an hour glide.
Obviously, check in, check in, check in, check in, check in, check in, check in, check in. Check in on Andy a couple of times. Again, the radio comms is on some of our camera footage. And he always like Andy just checking in on you. And he'd be like, yeah, Chespin's still there. I'm just going to go. I want to land quickly. It was like quite a very common collective. We all, I suppose, knew that it was quite serious because no one would have landed before. And I.
I was watching to see where Andy and it was my my my saying to myself is the classic airline saying with it's put your own mask on first. Like when the when the when the oxygen mask come down, put your own mask on first and then help the situation worse. Yeah. And I was watching Andy because I was like, I wasn't I wasn't totally sure how he was going to land or where he was going to land or if he was still up for landing. But I fixated on watching Andy and made the cardinal error of not putting my mask on first. And I landed a little bit quicker than what I had then than what I should have. But.
I rolled my I rolled my leg over over a boulder. My my actual injury is not that bad. It's just a broken fibula. And I tore the ligaments off. But the what made it worse is the fact that I landed. I landed the other side. Andy landed one hundred two hundred meters from camp. I landed one hundred meters from Andy. But I landed the other side of the river. So it earned me a four hour walk home on a broken ankle, which I took. I took some we had some of med kit was really well organized and we all had little flying med kits as well. I had some chamazole in there.
Which is like Oxycontin, which from when I did rally biking stuff. Also, you make sure you carry a bunch of really hardcore painkillers just to get you through the first part. So I ate two of those and they make you a little bit funny. So I did a video. I did like a video interview with myself where I did a splint on my leg. Andy sorted out the med all the med kits for us. We had an expedition doctor put a list together and he did all the ordering. So we had like a nice leg splint. I bandaged myself and I took I took my four hour walk home all the time chatting to the guys again. Andy in such tough nut spirit that we had a little negotiation with the porters as to what they were going to charge us to come and pick me up.
And Andy in the middle of his scenario was still holding it together enough to organize to send their back to the guys. So I was kind of in the middle of my way. And by then, Bob's had landed. He took a bit of a tumble on landing as well. And then Bob's I mean, you you had you you you kind of took over the
you rolled with things from there. And that's I suppose where the crux of this is.
So so so yeah, so I was the last to land by about. We actually all landed within 45 seconds of each other. So Scott landed landed first. It was all on video. Then Andy landed about 15, 20 seconds later, but in the perfect spot. And actually, it was the best landing for the three of us. The day before, we had agreed that one of the things I'm always keen on is that everyone focuses on spot landings. So we'd agreed that he who lands the furthest from the from the windsock would have to pump the water.
And that's a way of just sort of getting everyone to be focused on on something that matters. So Pierre trying to nicely
say that Scott really messed this up.
Well, and Bob's. And Bob's not shy
of random competition. I would put it
differently to that,
but I'll come to that in a second. And Scott may want to come back at me. So so Pierre and Jeremy put the windsock up. And I said, look, the closest to the windsock is the key thing. What they didn't tell me was that put it on the edge of a boulder field.
So it was a spot landing.
I'm trying to get a spot landing. You weren't meant to land in the boulder field. It was to land. I
was landing with it. I landed with it. You misinterpreted
it. You misinterpreted it. I landed within 20 feet. It's
a
good thing you
guys are all a long ways apart in South Africa. Yeah, I can see the punches are coming out.
Yeah. So I did my little roly poly down the which is on video with my 360 camera underneath me because I had it dangling down. So that gets a nice picture of me doing a roly poly. Anyway, I then sort of was that, OK, yeah, I'm all good. And I'd ask Scott if he was OK. And initially he said he was fine. Then I twisted my ankle quite badly. And then sort of later on then. So I went over and looked at Andy and he was like, yeah, no, I'm not feeling great. Just going to chill for a bit. Can you help pack up my kit? So I help him pack up his kit. I pack up my kit. I give him my oxygen, give my water. Then I run up to camp to go and get the big med kit, which was meant to have some the special heart attack spray stuff, the thing you put under your tongue.
But couldn't find that. But got back down to Andy, got him some shade. And Scott comes on the radio and say, guys, I'm kind of cooking out here in the in the heat. And I'm starting to
burn. Can you see? I'm starting to burn in the pain, starting to set in. And
I was like, and I give a shit. Not at all.
Bob, you were very sweet. You landed in the. Mr. Bob, you were very sweet at the time. I really wasn't. You should have heard me to Andy.
I was furious.
And even Andy was like, what was he thinking? Landing on the wrong side of the river? Don't ask me. So so anyway, a couple of immediate lessons were when I went up to camp. I didn't actually know exactly where the medikit was. And OK, there are only only five tents and to go through and it was in Scott's tent, but actually it was at the back underneath two other bags and it's a big medikit. So I found it. But it wasn't a case of just going and grabbing the medkit. And that was a really stupid mistake to start with. Let's let's
stop there for one second. You gave me a list yesterday. What you guys did right and what you did wrong. Can you pull that out? You got it in front of you.
Yeah, I do. Yeah. Can
you just take us through that? Because it's it's fantastic. And, you know, if if certain things need need elaboration, go for it. I you know, they all seem pretty self-explanatory. But I think in terms of the takeaways here, because I want to ask more about Andy's injury and Andy, how you felt and all those kind of things, but this is a good segue. I think it's a great chance for for you all to review this as well. But also the listeners, because it's, you know, again, we always learn everything too late, we learn it afterwards, but this, you know, hopefully this can help all of us listening to learn from your mistakes. And in a sense, it wasn't a tragedy, but it was but it was, you know, things went wrong and of course, we we learned from that.
So take us through that first. What did you do right?
Yeah, so I think one of the things we did right was we spoke to everyone. Yeah, I reached out reaching out to Antoine, Tom Dodorlo, Jake Holland,
other people who have flown there as well. Logistics wise, speaking to the head of the Pakistani Paragliding Association advance, Jasmine Tours, Brad Sander, who was super helpful as well. I also spent a bit of time talking to Fabian Blanco just about the mental side. And, you know, what what did he see as the biggest potential gotchas for us? And he particularly talked about the exposure aspect and that you needed to be. You may not be able to get the same exposure, but make sure you have some exposure. Put yourself in situations which are uncomfortable because you don't want the first uncomfortable situation you have to be over the Baltoro
at six thousand something meters and things going a bit wrong and you having no no capacity to deal with that because you've never had to deal with it before. Good. Then the next one we did right was from a medical perspective. I I reached out to me. I was Matt Wilson. He nearly joined us, but work meant that he couldn't. But he put together a comprehensive list of what we should have. And Andy's wife's actually a former expedition doctor as well, and she sort of helped, too. So so, you know, we covered that the logistics, the flying, the mental side of things. We also made sure that we all had appropriate, adequate insurance, global. We all had global rescue. We all had good travel insurance.
We all had paid. We all had the government bid as well. We and we were we all knew that we all had that. That was something that was super important. We all did a lot of prep, although, you know, it was quite different in terms of what we did. And then equipment wise, we had we had an Excel spreadsheet running on Google Docs. So everyone could compare. We could see what everyone had. I think we made pretty good choices on wings and reserves. One thing I would recommend, though, is check your reserves going to fit into your harness before you buy the really expensive, really large reserve, because you're not going to be able to sell it back again. So that was a bit of an error. Then
I think I was very lucky. I managed to get some sponsorship from Virgin for my wing. The few connections to in terms of Richard Branson went to the same school as me. He did. He did all sorts of aviation stuff, which is pretty crazy. And I managed to get it to someone. We used to be out there and they just loved the idea. And they were like, yeah, we'd love to support this. And for them, I wasn't asking for the trip to be sponsored. It was something that I was doing anyway. So so they were happy to. And, you know, I'm hoping to get that next year acclimatization wise. And this also goes to the exposure thing. The other guys went to to Hunza. I did a whole bunch of S.I.V. on my own, which doing S.I.V.
with someone on the radio is very different from just going out and pulling stools on your own. Also, then mountain flying and with Scott and with Andy flying in the Northern Cape, sort of pushing and putting yourself somewhere where if things go wrong, it's going to be consequential very quickly.
Then I would say the buddy flying, we we did. We did it. And even when Andy said, hey, you don't bother, you're only we're within gliding distance of of landing. We we we actually still stood by the the buddy flying rules. And I think that ultimately was very important. We then with the in reaches in reach comms are not that easy if you don't get it set up properly in advance and that getting that right and having the right message in the admin section. So including your health insurance, your travel insurance details, your credit card details that with paraglider pilots, if we crashed it serious, we're going to need immediate help.
And, you know, we survived. We're all alive. We're all still friends. And that's that's not always a given. So those, I think, are the things that I would say we did right. I don't know if anyone has anything they want to add to that.
I
think we did. Sorry, I'm going to be a little bit more esoteric and say the the first thing we did right was to to dream big enough to go and do this because that's also it's it's it's I mean, Bob's is going to go through a very well put together list of things that we could have done better or that we did wrong. But.
Going putting the effort into to doing something like this, going to everybody seems to think that Pakistan is this really far off place that is dangerous and hard to get to. Like these things are a possibility with the right things in place, with the right suppliers. I mean, we've mentioned Jasmine Tours a number of times, but also because they were so good with the organization on the front end. But when things went wrong, they were very good with things on the back end as well. And these things are like these trips are are more possible than what people think. So one thing so so back to big thing we did right is all actually put the time aside and have have and yeah, like actually have a crack at it.
Yeah. Yeah.
We've only got this one one one time on this rock. We might as well go for it. Might as well crack, have a crack at things. But yeah, absolutely. OK. So what what did you what what things you could have improved?
Yes, so to the extent of already touched on it, we had numerous protocols in place like buddy flying and stuff. But in reality, we should have had more. And there are elements where we should have had more robust agreements in advance.
And it's something I discussed with Matt Wilkes yesterday as well, just to get his take, because, you know, he's been an expedition doctor on a lot of expeditions and he flies and he's he was just I thought he'd be a useful person to bounce things off in advance and overall. His view is we did well, you know, when when when things went wrong, we did a pretty decent job between us in terms of getting getting everyone got out alive and, you know, but things we didn't do, which we should have done. We didn't all have medicals. You know, in some ways, I'm probably. Apart aside from Jeremy, probably I'm younger than Andy and Pierre and probably you middle aged, Bob's your middle age.
Middle age. I do a lot. But but we didn't have an agreed fitness standard that we needed to be at and we didn't have medicals done or all of us. And we really should have done. By
medicals, you mean going to have a cardiac test and that kind of thing like this kind of stuff you do for the exercise.
OK, so so when I when I did an expedition race adventure race a few years ago, we all had to go and do a VO2 max test, so, you know, where they did the whole ECG and they had proper cardiologists to actually do the analysis of that to make sure that there wasn't anything funky that was going on with your heart. That's because that's obviously if you're doing anything like that, that that's kind of an important thing.
So so that was something which was was really a big mess. But it's still possible that had we done that, Andy's one might not have been picked up.
Yeah, sure.
If if if he had really pushed it hard. Hard on the treadmill, it probably would have been particularly if a cardiologist had had had done the review and they'd been able to to look at this ischemia. According to that's what Matt said, then it would probably have been picked up. But if that hadn't been done, if it had just been a go for a medical. Yeah, you're fit and healthy. It would he would have come out here to come out clean.
Yeah. And from what I from what I know, I mean, Matt would know a lot more than this. I'm sure you guys talked about it, but from what I know about. Altitude is it's it's a really fickle beast as well. You know, I mean, like you said, you know, Andy's had all this experience at altitude, spent so much time, never had any trouble. You know, I've had friends that have gotten really hypoxic at 13 grand, you know, where they where you wouldn't even usually turned on your oxygen, just a little bit too much coffee the night before, not very good sleep, maybe a beer too many. You know, there's a lot of things that can affect our physiology on the day. You know, the next day could have been totally fine at eight. From what I understand, it's just. Yeah, no, no. Things are really. No,
but it's thicker. Yeah. Because you've got extra hemoglobin, you've got extra red blood cells. So your blood becomes naturally more stodgy. And so hydration, you need to stay extra hydrated to keep your blood thin enough. And one of the things that Andy did really well was he stuffed a aspirin down his neck when when. When when he found the aspirin in the thing, didn't have the spray, but we had we had aspirin and he nailed eight aspirin. And that was that was pretty damn important to saving his life. So so. But yeah, then, you know, we.
We probably we did all have we had the right equipment, the terrain, but everyone should have equipment, terrain and exposure. And I think that's a really important experience. And I think you can't necessarily get the terrain, but the exposure can always be done in a different way. And then acclimatization. I would climatized in the tent, I've done my reading on it and I was comfortable that I was happy that that was a that was a valid, proper acclimatization that I'd have done, but I never actually checked in with Andy and with Scott and Pierre and Jeremy.
And I was happy with me doing that as the acclimatization. And actually, that's something that, you know, the checking in with each other and making sure that everyone is happy with each of the protocols in advance is super important because it can take a small thing that can can really derail an expedition.
And that was then that brings us on to the first eight kit. We didn't actually know what was and was not in it. We we had an original list and then it was it was pared down to make make the the to make it more manageable in terms of just there's only so much stuff you can take. But.
We probably was a mistake not to just have one person absolutely in charge of the the medical side of things. Talking to Matt last night, had he been the expedition doctor for us, he would have insisted that we all had medicals in advance. That's something you just would have done. But he wasn't. He was providing ad hoc advice, which was super helpful, but actually probably not the best, you know, not what he would have done if he was engaged in that in a more professional capacity, if that makes
sense. If you do this again, sounds like you are you're planning on doing this next year. Would you have an expedition doctor on on scene?
I'm going with Matt.
No, I know you are. But but I'm saying I'm saying the
expedition doctor. Yeah,
no, I know. But I'm saying I'm saying, you know, just in the future, let's say you didn't have access to Matt, would that be somebody you would pay for? Would that just be is that is that a mandatory or is that, you know?
No, no, not for me. I think if you've done if you've done the right things in advance and you've agreed all the protocols in advance and you have an evacuation plan. Organized and you in effect, you've done a lot of the stuff that they say an expedition doctor would do and and a lot of this is just an awful lot of this is just admin and protocols and making sure that you've done the work in advance.
And that's we did quite a lot of it. We just didn't do all of it. And and the point is, it's just making sure that you've done enough. And I don't think, you know, in a lot of instances,
would an expedition doctor make it make a difference? Well, if you've got the right pills there, that's going to help.
If you should, you have a defect in that sort of situation. Well, in reality. Deep is going to help for a little bit, but it might it might help. But is the defect going to be with you?
Yeah, gotcha. So is the I mean, when we take our woofer training and paramedic training and, you know, even even first aid, you know, simple CPR at the YMCA, you know, it's always scenario based, right? They always they don't talk about it. And then you're done and you go to the next thing. You talk about it and then you do it and you have a victim and you go through it. You know, it seems to me the one the thing I hear over and over and over again in incidents like the ones that you guys had are things like the in-reach set up. You can't buy the in-reach and get the plan and assume it's all going to work. You know, you've got to go through it. You've got to make sure that you've got the check marks in your social thing.
So everybody that knows where you are can also message you. And you've got to have the contact set up and you've got to have it paired with your phone and they're brilliant, amazing devices that are, you know, we had we had these cat phones for the X-Alps two weeks ago that, you know, have satellite technology. So in theory, you don't need the in-reach, but in the reality, they didn't work like that. You know, they they you know, the in-reach is still the de facto device that we all need to have, but you've also got to know how to use them. And, you know, these are these are little things that can get swept under the rug when you've got a big expedition, because there's so many things that have to go that, you know, your groups when you're flying, just a way to contact somebody.
If Andy, you know, if it hadn't gone out and gone as well as it did and, you know, who to contact, you know, who who are you got to have a list, like you said. And so it sounds like you guys did a lot of that. Right. But it's just there's always these little things that are, you know, when I'm getting at is it's nice to play through, OK, what if let's actually go through the what if and get to the end and and, you know, what's in the medical kit? Let's open it up. And, you know, what what if somebody has a heart attack? You know how to deal with that?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the things the first time Andy actually said heart attack was in his message to to Garmin when when he pressed the SOS button, at which point, because after he landed, I said, look, do we need to press the SOS? Said, no, I don't think so. And I was like, OK, I'm going to outsource this. I'm going to ask my brother, who's a doctor, and I'm going to ask Matt Wilkes now by out to try the fact that I had those as potential contacts meant that I sort of I kind of took that responsibility away from myself to an extent, which was which was something that. Makes me very glad that Andy's OK, because I know enough in terms of having done enough different first aid kit courses stuff that I should have known.
I should have just been like, no, we're pressing the bloody button. The fact that I was like, I'm not sure about this. I want to check with a doctor is really me saying, no, I want to press the button. But
I respect you and you're a bit of a legend. I'm going to. But he didn't ever tell me my pain level in the air was I thought I was going to die, though those things came out, but they didn't come out the next day. And so the other part is being really we all have egos. It was being really honest about what's happened. Scott, you know, initially is I think I've sprayed my ankle and is like, yeah, I'm in a lot of pain. But actually, realistically, he was never walking out of that. There was no way he was going to be able to walk out of that. And he was never going to be walking out of that. We should have been pressed. We should have pressed those buttons straight away. And I think we didn't have any protocols of who makes that decision. What are the circumstances? What needs to be true? And had we done that, it may have meant that he got to hospital a day earlier.
It might not have done, but it could have done. And that could, in a different scenario, made the difference between life and death. And, you know, it was a pretty uncomfortable life.
That's that's Tom D 'Orladeau. That's Tom D 'Orladeau saying that I rely on all the time. If there is doubt, there is no doubt. And especially I think and I'm just adding, you know, you guys did an amazing job. But, you know, especially everybody's got global rescue. Why the hell not? You know, press the damn button.
Absolutely. And, you know, that that night is not a night I'll ever forget waking up every hour. Hey, Andy, you still with us? Yes, we
we took shifts. We
took shifts
every hour. One of us would
shout across to Andy or go knock on his tent. Andy, you OK over there? I'm fine.
So, Andy, let's let's switch to you here for a second. Rich, we'll come back to the list because there's a lot more learning there. But I'm just wondering what what's your frame of mind as this is going on? How are you feeling? How scared were you? Are you feeling like you're going to pull through? Are you really kind of questionable? I mean, obviously you've got the face that you're showing to your friends and you're being brave, but how are you actually feeling?
OK, so I've just landed, you know, the heart's thumping away, chest pains and everything like that, I'm very good at centering and staying calm. And that's what I needed to do. So I basically put my hat on and I told Bob I'm just going to calm down. And I lay there. I'm in the blazing sun and just try to relax myself because I thought that's what it would take and it did the you know, the the chest pains and the
and the breathlessness and everything came in waves and it stopped and it started and stopped and started.
Because everything's internal, I was still trying to control it. I still didn't believe it was the heart attack at the time. I mean, it was dawning on me, but I but I never felt like I was going to drop dead with a catastrophic heart failure. So I was just trying to calm down, you know, slow the breathing, slow the heart rate down. What actually helped was not the oxygen, it was taking all the aspirin. You know, that's the that's that is the platelets. And then, you know, subsequent to all of this, I found out that the type of heart attack I had was called the end stomach, which is
it's still life threatening, but it's not catastrophic. So it's a blockage of the one of the arterial veins. So not enough blood and oxygen is getting into your heart, but it doesn't cause muscular damage of the heart. So while I'm lying there, I'm thinking I can do this. It's going to be OK. You know, looking at the faces of my family. And, you know, just trying to get myself calmed down. So. I knew at the time that, you know, this was a serious medical emergency and I needed to get out of the sun up to the tent with a cup of hot tea inside me and then to discuss when to push the SOS button. So as it turned out, we could have pushed it an hour earlier.
But as it turned out, it wasn't. It wasn't a major issue delaying. That hour, I think if I was unconscious or
with greater and more severe symptoms, Bob's would definitely have come to the aid and, you know, called for rescue immediately, but I think it worked out OK anyway. So then.
Once you press that SOS button, you can't unpress it, it's like, you know, it happens around the world and it's the second time I've been rescued. The first time was when I broke my knee based jumping in a remote place landing and it's and it's quite humbling, actually, knowing that it's not out of your control. You can't get I mean, there's no way I could have walked out for two days and 35 degree heat with an unstable heart. So it was really humbling to be able to basically let go and let Global Rescue, let my friends come and help me. And that's exactly what happened. So the next day. I was chopped out in a military helicopter, actually quite cool talking to the pilot
to a military hospital in Skardu where they stabilized me, putting in blood thinning drugs and made it so that I was out of danger, you know, with ECG and echo scans and things. And they enabled it such that I'd be able to travel back to South Africa, which happened a few days later, and I went to see a cardiologist here in Cape South Africa, and the next day they put a stent in one of the veins in my heart. And it's a pretty common thing for middle aged men. And the prognosis is looking good. In about two weeks time, I'm going to do a stress test on the treadmill and they're going to put the electrodes on and see and I'll be able to see what I can do after that.
But pretty much the outcome was great. And I'm
I'm still around. We're all still friends. There was a lot that we could have done better, which Bob's is going through. But I see it as a very successful expedition. Actually, funnily enough, after my heart attack and the whole heliopathy, there were two more days of flying and then it started raining. So I actually didn't blow the rest of the holiday too badly. Yeah, nice.
Awesome. Awesome. And Andy, you know, prognosis sounds pretty good. What does your future expeditioning look like? Is it is it less? Is it the same? Can you go back? Would you want to go back? You know, I imagine the mountains are still calling just as strongly as they always have in a lifetime full of alpine.
Yeah, I would definitely like to go back. I would plan things differently and make a lot
the camping in Paiu a lot more comfortable. It's really dusty and really dirty. And if you've got a nice, comfortable base, then it's quite nice to do that. I would do things differently, definitely with the physical. And I would acclimatize better. And that would entail spending a lot longer
and acclimatizing a lot more slowly, like in a mountaineering sense. That's what Antoine and Jake and Veso were doing in Hunza. They were in Hunza for a month when we were there. And now they're in the Baltora right now also for another month. I think that
for a person my age, I think you need to be a lot more focused and a lot more clued up on your acclimatization. We thought we could just swing it with oxygen, but it didn't really work. Yeah. You know, the heart attack was caused by not really being acclimatized.
There weren't that many contributing factors. Smoking was one of them. I used to smoke a lot. And but ultimately, it was the altitude. So acclimatization becomes very important.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. OK, Barb, back to your list. Let's take us through that.
Yeah, I'll try and run through it a bit quicker. So one of the other things we didn't do was really agree what is not acceptable. And that was a bit of a mistake. So, for example, on the first day, I actually because I hadn't been there, I wanted to test out my setup and I wanted to make sure I didn't suffer from altitude. So I had my oxygen on full blast from the start. So we had these two massive cylinders, but it looked like it was running low. It actually turned out it wasn't really running that low. It was just that the angle that it was in my jacket meant that it looked like it was running low, but we went back and Jeremy and Pierre carried on.
And they said they got pretty close to landing on the on the Boutouro.
They got they got super low, which. It sort of wasn't something I was desperately so happy about when they told us that, because that for me was with what we'd said, with what we knew about it, the fact that, you know, landing there should be almost in itself just be perceived as a major incident. But we never actually had that conversation. We never had that conversation. What would our views be if someone clear
directives? And yeah, it's
that. Yeah, it's up to it. It was kind of everything was kind of still up to each other, even though obviously it would potentially have a massive impact on the whole expedition and to the same extent there was
how far away we're buddy flying, how far is too far? You know, when when I buddy flown in South Africa with Andy, I'm sure it's the same in some valley. You stay so far away. It's super close because it is amazing how quickly you can lose someone and you stay on the radio. And and again, we didn't have those agreed. Wasn't really a problem, but we probably should have had that. We kind of stay in the same thermal. If we're going, we say we're going the other person. It's agreed that they're coming with or if they're not happy, then they say they're not happy. We didn't have that done. So that was how much did you guys
the five of you? How much had you flown together before this trip?
Never. I thought I'd flown with Andy a lot. I flew with Scott quite a lot, but I hadn't really flown with the other two. I've flown a lot together. So so sort of there was that they they kind of knew how they flew together.
But then we'd all four of us had all flown in in the 12 days together. So that's again, that's one of those that's one of those things as well is. Yeah, it would be good to spend spend a little bit more time. Some time together before you push for the for the big one.
You guys are all you guys are all still friends. I don't want to throw a question that would put a knife in that. But, you know, what I thought about the first thing I thought about, Richard, when you when you told me about the expedition and the number of the first the first red flag for me was that's too many people. Would you did you find too many too little, you know, just for me, me managing more than one other person gets really tricky. You know, the the the odds of an accident, something going wrong. You know, like you said, the medical kit. What if the one person that knows the medical kit, what if he's the one that has it's just there's there's just there's there's difficulty in numbers. Would you did that present itself as a problem during this?
It doesn't seem like it, but I'm just wondering.
I think the fact that to its extent, we were sort of almost. Two buddy pairs, plus then Scott was sort of Andy and I in in a way is was my perception. So it's kind of
two pairs. It was the three of you and the two of them. Yeah, it was
kind of two pairs with Scott. They're there as well was my take. I don't know if you would agree with that, guys. That's that's well, but but I think just
to Gavin's point, actually, to the contrary, I think the five of us as five people were everybody had valid input. Everybody had. Had a piece to play in the organization and the prep, you know, equipment lists and all of that. That that was very much from my perspective, easier as a group of five. I think the flying thing I mean, we we agreed that we'd split always split into two or two, three, and we agreed, you know, and we'd always split into two pairs. And then the third could choose.
We'd always end up end
up end up end up end up end up end up end up end up end up
end up end up end up end up end up end up end up end up end up end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end end six months before going. And for me, before going alcohol for a day is quite a thing. I don't really like before going alcohol. I love it.
So when Andy and Scott were smoking, I was not happy. So that was an issue. That for me was just something that I wasn't very happy with. But we hadn't agreed in advance. And because we hadn't agreed in advance, I couldn't say, no, don't smoke. But that was something I felt we should have done. Then the next one, obviously don't become a casualty and then be realistic about your injuries and symptoms. That's super important. And actually one of the weird ones is speak to Garmin and Global Rescue in advance. Garmin started calling
loved ones before they actually started getting onto Global Rescue. I have no idea why they were doing that. And they did this when I rescued a mate from Nepal last year.
They spoke, they spent to the casualties family before they went to the insurance company. And I'm like, why would you do that? Just get on with getting the evacuation. The last thing, people don't need to know the past. By the way, your husband's having a heart attack. He's stuck in the middle of nowhere. What they want to hear is your husband's being evacuated. It would be far more useful. Wait, this is, Garmin
did this? Yeah. Holy crap. I got to talk to them. I was just talking to Garmin this morning. I will let them know. I would love you to talk
to them.
That's not how you triage.
That's crazy. It's nuts. And, you know, and then there was a whole process that went through and then it gets to Global Rescue and what have you. And it just, certainly that was what we understood happened. And it certainly seems to be what happened on the two incidents I've been involved in. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. So
Garmin phoned Andy,
Andy, his button got pushed. Garmin phoned Andy's wife. She wasn't in signal. She, they then phoned second down the line, Andy's son
who gave them my wife's number. They phoned my wife and all they could say was somebody's had a heart attack. So they didn't actually, so all they did was create a little bit of panic amongst everyone. Okay. Now
I'm thinking about this. Okay. So we put in who to contact in an emergency. And so that's obviously what they're doing. So their protocol is to, you know, if you press the SOS, you know, you have the two emergency numbers, your primary, your secondary, that must just be their protocol to do that automatically. That's interesting. Not the
one which did your notes saying, cool, here's my insurance details. Here's the insurance number.
Oh boy. That'd be a big thing to straighten. Now, because there's, you know, that's, that's how they have it set up. But this is an interesting, God, that is their protocol though. That's an interesting thing to.
And this, I actually said to Bob's yesterday, I said, it may be that that's their protocol because they need the next of the next of kin, the listed person to, to they need to talk to somebody that can make decisions. And that is, that would normally be your second listed person. This
is a fascinating subject. Would be
my, would be my interpretation of why they always phone the next of kin. Yes. They do the same in a medical, in standard, in other medical things. You know, if you go cold on the operating theater, the first thing they do is they phone the next of kin and they, they open discussions with them. But as Bob's is saying, it would be preferable that they phone their, you know, that they phone the insurance people first. And, you know, and get on the rescue side before they get on the alerting everyone. So
I, I think there's, there's two really good things here for all of us and for the listeners. The first thing, and that's how Richard, that's how you and I connected first. But the, the first thing we should think about as a community is who, who are the two people we want on there? You know, for example, right now I've got my wife as the primary. After hearing this story, that's the last person I want to know be told if something severe happens. I want my buddy, Nate scales, who's a paramedic, who's a pilot. He knows everything about me. He knows my risk tolerance and he knows how to get into action. And he was part of the whole Kiwi incident here. You know, I, you want people like that to know that something has happened and can put it into, you know, when I threw my reserve here before the last X-Alps, you know, I, that was the person I contacted.
So maybe we as a community need to think about, okay, who do we put on as the primary and secondary? Secondly, I will call Garmin and give them this feedback. But I don't think that's going to change. I think that that's probably their, you know, higher up protocol. That's probably a legal thing or something, but it's it, but it is interesting. I mean, the first thing they should do obviously is, and I think they do do is it goes, the call Garmin doesn't do the rescue. It's the IERCC. It goes to them, you know, they take over. So it's probably for them. It's just, it's just protocol. They're just following the ABC.
Yes. So one of the other things from that was actually, you know, having, the, we would have been better off just calling Jasmine, messaging Jasmine tours, who would have contacted the military immediately and let us send a helicopter. Yeah. Now that, that actually would have been far more effective than anything else. So this is
a good one. I want to stall on this, you know, that you rescues, we, we had an incident here in sun Valley a few years back where a buddy went in hard, broke his leg. And, you know, there were, there were 15 of us in the sky that day and all, but a couple knew that it was going on and we landed and we organized our own rescue. I mean, that was what the article on the website is built on was, was this incident that goes into the insurance and the whole thing, because if we had just hit the SOS relied on, on standard authorities to, to save this guy, it was the same thing with Kiwi. Our community is way more research. The paragliding community, the flying community in general is, is way more resourced than outsourcing it.
You know, we've got the skills. We've all been there. We've, we have the contacts. We can do it much, much, much faster within our own community. So that is something that, you know, depending on where you are, most of the time it's hit the SOS. If there's doubt, there is no doubt, but depending on where you are, you may very well be able to organize and handle the rescue, especially if there's a search involved way faster through your own community. So that's a good point.
Yeah. So, so interconnected with that is after a couple of stories, I've got my, um, in, in the notes, I have my credit card number. So if in doubt, get a helicopter, I'll deal with it later. Here's my credit card. So the problem with that is that they don't seem to really read those notes. Uh, that seems to be the last, the last thing that, that, that happens. Um, and I also now have connected to that a Google, I have a bitly link, which goes to a Google spreadsheet of, of useful contacts, um, which just my way of trying to, trying to make sure that that can happen.
It's just, just, but it only works if it gets the right person. And you know, in South Africa, I know people who press the in reach and it's not worked. I know people who are, um, they've, they've contacted the wrong, the wrong people and because in different regions, different people and do Garmin or the IRC or whoever it is, does it get to the right person? So, so now when I go there, I have a, I have the local numbers. It's like, right here are the helicopter numbers, but actually should I be putting those in my emergency contact? I don't know. And that's if, if you can help the community with that, that would be something that would be epically useful. And it would, I think, Gavin, you're
like, we've done the right
thing. Your
point is that actually that first person of contact, especially for a trip like this might be a trusted, a trusted friend, um, with, uh, who's already had a basic brief of, if you get this call, um, please, will you, will you execute these, these instructions accordingly? Um, yeah, I mean, I, I, I,
I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,
I, I,
I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,
I, I,
I, I,
I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, anything, but she would call my buddy, Nate. But I, so I think what I need to do is first thing she'd think of is I got to call Nate, you know, he would know how to deal with this. So I think
just having my wife did the same thing. She phoned my mate Aiden, who was sailing down the front face of table mountain at the time. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. That's the risk. Well,
he looked at the phone and he was like, Sonia doesn't normally call me. There must be a problem. And he answered the phone. Yeah. And dealt with it. I guess it's just important.
It's important for us to know that as a community. Okay. Hey, Garmin's going to call first and then second, they're going to call your primary and secondary. Who do you want that to be? That may not be your wife. It may be, but it may be somebody who's, you know, used to dealing with these kinds of incidents on a regular basis. Might it be
the insurance company? That would be my question to them. Should we put our insurance company in there or should we put global rescue actually in that?
Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe global rescue, but then, you know, you, you want, you want to have the, you know, your policy number and all those kinds of, that's a really good question because in my experience, it really depends on who you get on the other line. Now the, the protocol, the very, very important thing, which I'm sure you guys learn from an insurance perspective, from a reimbursing perspective is when an incident happens, I've got a one pager now that we're going to be able to get to. And I'm going to be able to get to that. We're going to distribute to everybody here shortly because of these kinds of things. And it needs to be more on triaging, but the, the one pager is basically, buddy goes down, something has happened. The insurance needs to know as soon as possible, you know, they need to be notified as soon as possible, whether this should be the primary or secondary.
I'm not, I have to think about that more. I don't know. That's a good, that's a really good question. I'd never thought about that. It's a really good question, but for sure, you know, someone, I think, I think that's more of a, from your group, you know, the, the spreadsheet that you created that has all the information of everybody, you know, basically it starts to get very risky. If you start taking helicopter flights and having things happen in the, in the hospital after that, and that actually that all has happened before you've contacted the insurance company, you know, the earlier they are aware of what's going on, the better it is for you to be reimbursed. That's what it comes down to.
Yeah. Yeah. But I just wonder whether, you know, if you've got the policy, because you have all that detail in the admin section, but if you have, it just, if that means it's the first people they contact.
It's a good, it's a good question. I just don't know. I don't know if you want them involved in that kind of a thing because it's insurance. I'm always a little wary of that, but it's a great question that I need to get a better answer to.
Cool. And I think really that's, you know, we've got, it's also just, just having that key information in there, which is just the fall from the,
the, the fall from a fall from height where a paraglider pilots, let them know that it's going to be some, you know, paraglider pilots fall from height. Just so we've got that.
Yeah. You know, I'm a, that's what I have in my notes. You know, I'm a paraglider pilot, you know, the, the chance of a spinal injury are, are high, you know, just, just so they, just so they know that I think that that's important. Well, guys, great stuff. I'm glad everybody's still friends. And although it looks like fists are going to be thrown across the pond there, maybe a little bit in the future, but I'm glad y 'all made it back and, you know, a great end to a pretty scary situation. Andy, I'm glad you're to hear you're still going to be chasing it in the mountains. The world deserves that. And you're all stellar. I'm, I'm, I look forward to, talking to Pierre and Jeremy, but especially Pierre about his ex-alps campaigns and some other stuff. So thanks for reaching out in terms of suggestions for that, but Scott heal up quick.
It looks like you're, you're way more hurt than Andy. So y 'all can see the little scooter that Scott's riding around on and in his wrist. And so better landings to you, my friend and in the future, but thanks for sharing your story and for all these terrific lessons. And thanks for sharing your time guys. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Gavin. Thank you, Andy. And I'm going to, I'm going out to fly with them in November, December. So, so we are still friends. I'm sure, I'm sure I might get a dead arm from Scott, but that's fine. Bob's always deserves a bit of a beating.
Thanks very much, Gavin. Thanks a lot. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot.
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