When Ex Welsh rugby international Richard Parks was forced by injury to retire from professional rugby union, he set his sights on something immense, something no one had ever achieved before. He set out to summit the highest point of each continent to reach Earth’s three Poles and to do it in a world record 7 months. Oh! and along the way, he wanted to raise one million pounds for the Marie Curie Cancer charity.
737 Challenge - The Ambition
To achieve this dream, Richard sold his house and ploughed every last penny of the savings he built up from years playing professional rugby, into his training. He had to overcome physical dangers such as falling into a crevice on Denali and contracting frostbite on the descent from Everest which not only threatened the record attempt, but which came close to costing him his toe. Even as the final hurdle was in sight, unrest in the region of Elbrus in Russia jeopardised the challenge, causing Richard to shave off his beloved beard for a lower profile as the team entered the area.
What makes this achievement so special was that until July of 2009, Richard Parks had never set foot on a mountain and yet here he was daring to challenge some of the most extreme and deadly terrain on the planet. For nearly 18 months Richard pushed himself to the limit learning the skills which would keep him and his climbing partners alive. A mixed approach saw him climbing, ‘lesser mountains’ such as Mt Blanc in France, a mere 15,771 ft with acclimatisation training such cold water immersion training at the University of Portsmouth and altitude acclimatisation at the University of Glamorgan. He also summitted one of his target peaks, Denali as a trial run.
737 Challenge - South Pole on New Year's Eve
The 737 quest began with the trek to the South Pole which Parks achieved on December 27th 2010, having to remain at the bottom of the world until the New Year to ensure that his challenge was completed within the same calendar year. From there he trekked to Mt Vinson, one of the most remote mountains on Earth. Fewer than 800 climbers have stood on the summit of the 16,067ft mountain, the highest point on the Antarctic continent.
The dangers to the success of the challenge were many and varied, extreme cold, impossible weather conditions, crevasses, landslides, but there were other, more prosaic problems which threatened the time sensitive challenge. When Parks set out for the third leg of the challenge, he ran straight into a fuel strike which stranded many tourists in the deep south of Patagonia (ironic for a Welshman) and hampered his attempts to get to Aconcagua, South America’s highest peak. Eventually, after a fortnight’s delay, his crew managed to get him through and the next leg was successfully completed, Richard even managing to take time out to send a good luck message to his old team mates in the Welsh rugby team who were playing England.
After completing the 4th leg of the challenge, Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa where he was joined by Janet Suart, a Marie Curie nurse, a reminder of the charity which the challenge was trying to raise money for, Richard was forced to sweat on the next leg, first figuratively and then literally.
It was feared that the Japanese tsunami would hit West Papua, site of the Carstenz Pyramid, the highest point in Australasia, which could have stopped the Challenge in its tracks. Fortunately, the reports from the region were positive and Richard could sweat properly as he was plunged into the jungles of Papua New Guinea and 40 degree heat as he waded through waist deep swamps.
Things chilled considerably on the next leg, the trek to the North Pole. Parks was joined by Olympic royalty, double gold medal winning rower Steve Williams, but news broke that they would be sharing the ice with actual royalty as the Palace announced that Prince Harry would be joining the start of a trek to the North Pole by wounded servicemen at the same time. The pair achieved the pole after 6 days of traversing the ice pack in temperatures which plummeted to -40 degrees Centigrade, but there was no rest as they headed straight for Katmandu and the legendary Mount Everest.
737 Challenge Frostbite on Everest
At this stage of the challenge, the two week delay at Aconcagua threatened to scupper the challenge. Parks and the team were trying the climb the world’s highest mountain very late in the season when the weather was at its most unpredictable. The weather could close in at every time making the best case scenario an inability to make the attempt and the worst case scenario a fatality.
In the ‘Dead Zone’, above 8,000m there is not enough oxygen to support human life and the upper reaches of Everest are littered with the corpses of climbers who even if they made the summit, failed to make the descent. At this height, it’s too dangerous to even bring the bodies down.
Richard and Steve Williams who also accompanied him on this leg of the journey headed from Camp 3 to Camp 4, the final camp before the summit push, but the capricious weather on the mountain forced them to spend an extra 24 hours in the Death Zone. The forecast was better for the following day, but if the weather didn’t improve, they would have to abandon the attempt on the summit and with it the challenge.
Fortunately, the following day, the weather did abate and they were able to achieve their goal, Richard getting to the top a couple of hours before Steve who suffered from having done the climb from Camp 3 to Camp 4 without the aid of oxygen.
Getting to the summit of Everest is only half the job, as the descent has claimed a significant number of lives over the years. Even though it looked as though Richard got down safely, the mountain had a sting in the tail. When he got back to Base Camp, it was discovered that one of Richard’s toes had been frost bitten. It looked as though the challenge might be over and it was 50/50 on whether Richard would lose his big toe.
The following few weeks saw Richard taking advice from the top physicians in this very specialised medical field and spending a lot of time in hyperbaric chambers to speed up recovery. Despite the fact that it would take months to heal and that exposing it to further low temperatures would jeopardise the toe, Parks decided to continue on to Denali in Alaska, one of the most dangerous mountains in the world.
Parks had successfully climbed Denali as part of his training in a season when fewer than 20% managed to reach the top of the highest peak in North America but this time around, it nearly claimed him as he plummeted into a crevasse and had to be rescued from a 50 foot cavern. Luckily for Richard, a rope team was in the area and came to help, but it still took an hour and a half to rescue Parks who said, ‘I was down there about an hour and a half constantly being dripped on by melting ice above me, so I was soaking wet when I came out and close to becoming hypothermic really, I was conscious of my toe and my fingers and frostbite in general’.
When he was finally extracted, Parks still had a 6 hour climb to the base camp at 7,500ft with winds of up to 70mph trying to pluck him and his team off the mountain, but ultimately, the 9 day climb was successful leaving just one mountain to achieve the world record.
The whole challenge has not simply been a case of a man versus the elements and with the finishing line in sight, another outside obstacle reared its head. The final mountain Elbrus in Russia, had curtailed access due to terrorist activity. This forced Parks to change the route he had planned to attempt the summit by and also to shave off his bushy beard in an attempt to keep a low profile as they travelled to the region.
737 Challenge - Success
In the end, this turned out to be a sideshow and on the 12th of July, 6 months and 11 days after he set foot on the South Pole, Richard Parks became the first man to stand on the highest point of each of the continents and also to stand on the Earth’s three poles, (Everest is considered the third as the highest point on the planet).
This magnificent achievement must surely be recognised and apart from the various Sport’s Personality of the Year awards, a Facebook campaign has already been set up to try and influence Park’s inclusion in the New Year’s Honours list. Sir Richard Parks?
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