Fanshawe student youngest female to ever summit Mt. Everest

Can you imagine reaching the highest mountain on Earth and living to tell the tale? What about being the youngest Canadian female to reach the summit of Mount Everest? It's an incredible feat, and the woman behind the journey is Fanshawe's own Laura Mallory.

Mount Everest attracts climbers of all levels, from well experienced mountaineers to novice climbers, from all over the world. For Mallory and her family, the idea to embark on such a journey came after a casual family dinner conversation when her father asked her, her two brothers, and mother if they would be willing to tackle Everest.

“Everybody said this is Everest, this is the big one, this is the top of the world, so we all want to go. We just all went,” explained Barbara Mallory, Laura's mother.

Although the highest, this wasn't Mallory's first experience climbing some of the world's most well known mountains. In 2006, the Fanshawe/Western nursing student summited Mount Elbrus the highest mountain in Europe and Mount Kilimanjaro the highest mountain in Africa.

How do you pack and prepare yourself for such a dangerous climb?

“A lot of specialized gear,” she explained. “My dad actually flew to Columbus, Ohio to buy our Everest boots, poles, crampons, down jackets, helmets, goggles, repelling devices, harness... things like that.”

Along with the specialized gear, the Mallory's packed the necessary medications, and for every two climbers, there is one Sherpa; an elite mountaineer with good physical endurance and resilience to high altitude conditions. The altitude conditions alone are tough to get used to.

“What you want to do is climb high and sleep low,” explained Mallory. “You climb to the next camp and that same day, you climb back down to the camp below and spend the night there. The next day you climb back to camp you were at the day before and sleep there. You're more or less climbing the mountain twice...Because you have to do so many climitization climbs.”

Mallory explained to a lecture room at Fanshawe College last week full of people that the time period in which she climbed was interesting because of the Olympics: China wanted to bring the Olympic torch to the summit of Everest. This made for a lot of restrictions on what the climbers could and could not do.

“For quite a while we thought we weren't going to be able to summit Everest. They had told us we were only allowed to go to a certain point at a certain time [because of the torch],” explained Mallory.

“There's only a two week window in which you can summit Everest, so they were pushing back the window a lot... A lot of tense people at base camp, they just spent all this money and now they could be told they can't summit,” Mallory said.

That was only the beginning of some of the challenges that Mallory faced on her climb. Physically she experienced everything from wicked sunburns, to internal bleeding, frost bites and blisters.

“I was really sick. I ended up having some really bad gastrointestinal problems and throwing up some blood. I was bleeding internally... developed some skin burns. There was lots of sickness going around,” she said.

Mentally, the nights alone in a tent, in a place that has taken the lives of many before you, can take their toll. You start missing the comforts of home like a warm bed, a decent meal, a proper place to use the washroom, your friends and significant other. Mallory said not seeing her mom was hard, too. Before the family started their journey, Barbara Mallory injured her achilles tendon and wasn't able to make the climb with the rest of her family.

“We only saw her for a day; we hadn't seen her in two months...that was pretty hard. Plus, after I had just made the summit, I ended up coming down and sleeping in a tent all by myself. I wanted to talk to someone about it, or be with someone, but I was all alone in the tent.”

On May 27th 2008, a day after her two brothers and father made the summit without her because of a battle with sickness, Mallory made the summit of Everest; a feat she says was hard to believe.

“It's so hard to appreciate the summit when you're actually on the summit. There's such a lack of oxygen up there, you're basically exhausted. You're just so mentally and physically tired that when you get there, the first thing I said to myself was ‘I just want to take these pictures and get off the mountain.'”

To this day, it's hard for Mallory to grasp that she's the youngest Canadian female to ever reach the summit.

“It doesn't really feel real. It's kind of hard to explain, it's not something you bring up in a normal conversation for sure,” laughed Mallory, “It's kind of neat.”

Mallory admits that climbing Everest is a one-time thing, but she left a piece of herself and Fanshawe College behind. If you ever have the guts to climb Mount Everest and you do so successfully, you might just see Fanshawe's flag waving above the world, in the clouds. Atop a mountain that many dream to climb, but only few can accomplish.