Mountaineer hopes to inspire pupils

Rhys Jones, who conquered Mount Everest on his 20th birthday, hopes his talk will encourage the schoolchildren to achieve their dreams.

“If you want to really do something then you can,” he said.

“But if you don’t believe you can do it, then there’s no way you will.”

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Rhys, 22, will visit Knutsford High School on Wednesday (today) evening to give a talk, which residents can also attend.

The event has been organised to raise money for the pupils’ trek through the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

As a boy, Rhys was inspired to climb Everest when he attended a similar talk.

During a Scout meeting the then 11-year-old listened to a talk by a mountaineer who had reached the 29,035ft summit.

“I think I was being given a badge and that’s the only reason I went to the talk,” he said.

“But it turned into quite a life-changing evening.”

Reading about mountaineering heroes further inspired Rhys.

He idolised climbers such as George Mallory, who grew up in Mobberley, and later died on Everest. Some believe the mountaineer reached the summit and perished on his way down - and so does Rhys.

He said Mallory’s attempt was most remarkable because no-one had achieved it then.

“Knowing that people have done it before you is a pretty big tick in the box that helps you do it,” he said.

“So people like Mallory were pretty brave and pretty hardcore.”

Rhys began climbing when he was 14 and three years later decided to take on the seven summits challenge.

Mallory famously said he wanted to climb the world’s highest mountain ‘because it’s there’.

Rhys approached his challenge with a similar outlook. “It was just because it sounded cool basically,” he said.

Rhys spent more than two years touring the continents to climb Denali in North America, Aconcagua in South America, Kilimanjaro in Africa, Kosciusko in Australia, Elbrus in Russia and Vinson Massif in Antarctica.

Then in March 2006 he began the two-month climb of Everest, where more than 200 mountaineers have died.

He believes the challenge is more a mental than a physical test.

“About 65% of the task is determined by a person’s state of mind,” he said.

“You’ve got a lot of time to think and it’s very, very easy to talk yourself out of it.” The mountaineer said the £30,000 he spent on the climb and also people’s expectations helped spur him on. “I’d told a lot of people I was going to do it,” he said.

Rhys also thought about his mountaineering heroes including Mallory.

His team were the first to climb Everest in 2006, so there were no footprints in the snow.

He said that was the closest he would get to Mallory’s experience.

“It was pretty much what the mountain would have looked like all those years ago,” he said.

But danger was never far away due to the threat of avalanches, deep crevasses and extreme weather conditions.

On May 17 2006, he eventually reached the summit at about 3pm. Rhys, though, only had time to remove his oxygen mask, pick up his sponsor’s flag and have his picture taken.

He said he was mostly thinking about the journey down and how dangerous it could still be.

“It’s quite a long way to go for just two minutes,” he said. “I just felt a lot of relief and was thinking I still had a lot of opportunities to hurt myself on the way down.”

The journey back to base camp took just two days.

Rhys said the enormity of his achievement suddenly hit him when he put down his rucksack.

“I was feeling literally like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” he said.

During the past two years Rhys has made a living delivering inspirational talks to companies.

In his spare time, though, he also visits schools.

It was difficult for him to return to a relatively normal life after the two years and 11 months he had spent conquering summits.

But Rhys said even visiting places such as the Lake District still gave him a thrill. “I just love being outdoors,” he said.

The two-hour talk at Knutsford High’s lower school site in Westfield Drive will cost £5 and start at 7pm.