We guess some of you have been in this position before.
Sitting bored out of your mind in your bedroom, thinking, man, is this it?
Is this all that life has to offer?
I need excitement, adventure, I need to challenge myself.
You peer outside the window and see a grumpy-looking man mowing a lawn.
Five days a week that guy wakes up early and goes to a job he hates to work with people
he fears for money he spends on things he doesn’t always need.
“That could be me in years to come,” you think.
You’re still young.
You have to seize the day!
Get out in the world!
Do something with your life.
You call a friend.
He picks up and you say, “Hey, how about we go trekking in the Himalayas?”
In this day and age people leaving their homes in North America and Europe to travel across
the world is hardly a daring adventure.
20 or 30 years ago intrepid young travelers were finding beaches in Asia that had barely
been seen by anyone but locals.
They were “doing” India and then taking that perilous bus ride to Nepal, sitting with
chickens in the next seat and squealing pigs tied to the roof.
They had no smartphones with GPS.
They had no way of getting in touch with friends or family quickly unless they spent ridiculous
amounts of money on an international phone card.
In those days when you went backpacking around the world, you virtually went missing.
It was, for sure, dangerous at times, and it was pure adventure.
It was a very different experience from backpackers these days who guzzle booze out of buckets
on a beach while live streaming the entire event for the friends back home.
It’s hard to get lost these days.
It’s difficult to go MIA.
So, that’s how it was for the man we are going to talk about today, a man who defied
death, who doctors have called a miracle.
His story of survival perhaps tops all others.
We mean no disrespect, but he shouldn’t be walking the streets today.
He’s super-heroic, and so it’s fitting that his nickname in the media is sometimes,
“The Iceman.”
Back in 1991 when he left his house and embraced his mother and father he knew he wasn’t
going to hear from them for a while.
Going to Nepal from Australia was a really big deal for a man just aged 23, especially
as he was going by himself.
This young medical student, named James Scott, was armed with a guidebook and a backpack
and took off from Brisbane in Australia to Nepal.
His intention was not to hang around bars in Katmandu and get down with that famously
smooth Indian hashish, but to hike into the Himalayan mountains after doing a bit of training
in a hospital.
He was prepared in some ways, because he hadn’t spent his adolescence on his behind.
He was keen on keeping fit and had trained at karate for six years before setting off
on his trip.
He was in very good physical shape, but his mental heath was also very good.
This would save his life.
Saying that, you can be really fit and still starve to death or freeze to death at such
a high altitude.
There is a reason why when you walk around Katmandu or the city of Pokhara you can find
a guide easier than you can find your own guesthouse room key.
But no guides are involved in this story.
Is there really a point in hiring a guide?
Just don’t go off trail.
That’s how a lot of people think, and it was what James Scott intended to do back in
late December ’91.
Just hit the hills, and keep climbing.
At first he had a trekking partner, another medical student who had also been doing some
work at that hospital in Kathmandu.
When that was over, they decided to hit the mountains.
Late December is about the coldest time to go trekking in the mountains in Nepal.
The higher you go the colder it gets, and everything is covered with ice and snow.
As any expert will tell you today, trekking at this time of year can get a bit tricky
and if you intend to ascend by yourself, well, good luck with that.
You could be looking at temperatures of -20 and lower, with a windchill that feels like
a ghost made of ice is walking through you.
James did not stay at lower altitudes and he did experience severe cold, high up, and
during the night.
The teahouses scattered around the hills were open, but since it was off-season due to the
cold there were few other trekkers.
The worst thing that can happen is you get stuck in a vicious blizzard which makes it
difficult to see anything, and that’s exactly what happened to those guys.
In no time at all, the two young men knew they were in trouble.
James told his friend that they should turn back since it was too dangerous to keep climbing.
The two disagreed, and James went off by himself.
He wouldn’t be seen again for a long time.
He had the right gear and he had some spare clothes in his backpack, but the only source
of food he had with him was two chocolate bars.
He had decided to travel light and his backpack only weighed about 22 pounds (10 kilos).
He had a medical kit, 10 pairs of underwear and socks, lots of t-shirts, some long-johns,
some cotton pants and a sweatshirt, as well as the gear he was wearing.
He also had a camera and four books.
Those books were, The Silence of the Lambs, Great Expectations, the Lonely Planet Guide
to Nepal and a Guide to Trekking in Nepal.
He’d had a map, but he’d given that to the trekking partner he’d split away from.
When he failed to turn up in Kathmandu his friends soon knew he was in trouble.
They got in touch with his family back home and said they were sorry to say, but James
was most likely lost in the mountains.
As this was happening, James was looking for any sign of footprints, but he became more
disoriented the more he moved.
He then found a creek and followed that, which was a sensible thing to do.
But as he carried on he found himself in very dangerous terrain, full of steep slopes.
At a certain point he found himself in the worst possible position.
To continue going up was dangerous and he couldn’t find the path from where he had
come.
He was stuck.
His family were hopeful he’d survive for a few days until he was found.
He had sufficient medical training to know how to keep warm and how to fend off frostbite.
His sister said she would go to Katmandu but before she did that she got in touch with
the president of the Himalayan Research Association in Kathmandu.
That man told her she should contact an expert mountaineer that lived in Nepal.
He was Australian, too, and his name was Carl Harrison.
It was January 7th when she arrived in the city, and by that time her brother had been
missing 16 days.
That was already a long time.
The outlook wasn’t good.
16 days in the mountains in freezing temperatures without food was enough to kill anyone.
More days passed and now the sister was hoping for a miracle.
Generally, when people go missing for so long at that time of year it means they have died.
She even went to see a Buddhist Lama and asked him for help.
The lama told her where her brother might be.
She asked, “Is he still alive?”
The Lama replied, “You will meet your brother again.”
She probably wondered, ok, but alive or dead?
A James frozen like a popsicle was not a James she wanted to see.
The sister went to visit mountaineers and showed them the place on the map that the
Lama had told her James was at.
They weren’t too sure he’d be there, and that was because there were no trails around
that area.
Why would he have wandered off so far from the trails?
More days passed and James was almost given up for dead.
The winter snow and freezing winds were so bad it was almost impossible to search for
him.
His sister was told when the Spring came they’d go in search of his body so at least the family
could bury him.
That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
Meanwhile, James was freezing his acorns off in an ice-cave, a place where he could at
least hide from those winds.
He knew exactly how much ice to eat to keep himself from dehydrating and he regularly
checked the color of his urine.
As a medical student he was aware that too much ice might induce vomiting.
His chocolate bars were now gone, and his only other source of food while he was lost
was one small caterpillar.
He was also aware of how to keep his head warm, the part of the body where most heat
is lost.
He kept his mind in shape by envisioning a rescue and never letting his hopes fade.
He knew that by keeping positive he could endure the experience.
The problem was, as he starved, his body basically started eating its own fat reserves.
After a few weeks, James became so weak he could hardly move from his shelter, and if
a helicopter should fly by it would miss him.
On day 40 he knew he was going to die.
He attempted to walk away from his shelter but after around 100 meters he collapsed to
the ground.
He started retching, but nothing came out.
This was the end.
He felt at this point there was no hope and rather than die slowly he considered taking
his own life?
But how would he do it?
He thought about using something from his medical kit to slit his wrists, but that seemed
grim.
He also knew that if he didn’t eat anymore ice he likely would die in just three days.
This is how he later described these final days in the shelter:
“When I awoke it was pitch black; the moon had turned again.
I knew I had given up and I shouldn’t have.
I got up and tried to collect more ice but it was too cold to eat.
My mouth stuck to it.
I thought it was too late.”
Little did he know that his sister hadn’t given up, and in the skies that mountaineer
named Carl Harrison we mentioned was in a helicopter with a team looking for James.
We should say at this point they were looking for a body, not a living being.
Harrison spotted something in the vast whiteness, and he was shocked when it moved.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
That’s because James had heard the mechanical bird in the sky and had crawled out of his
shelter.
He dragged his colorful sleeping bag with him because that might more easily be spotted.
His hopes then faded again when the helicopter flew off.
James crawled back to his shelter, whereupon he urinated.
The color was now black.
But he had been seen.
The helicopter just couldn’t land.
That evening while lying in his shelter ready to die, James heard the first voice besides
his own he’d heard in 43 days.
He thought he might be hallucinating, but the shouts got louder.
James was now too weak to crawl out again and so he shouted as best he could, “I am
under this rock.”
The next thing he knew, two Nepalese men were looking at him.
They removed his hood and asked, “Are you James Scott from Australia?”
He replied, “Yes,” and then he burst into tears.
He hadn’t shed one tear since he’d been lost.
The men hugged him.
These were local guys who believed the mountains had a mystical power.
They told James that he must be a God himself.
No one, they said, has ever survived longer than 10 days out here in winter.
He was taken to hospital and put on a drip.
No solids of course.
He had suffered a vitamin deficiency and severe malnutrition, but unbelievably he didn’t
have frostbite.
He is now Dr. James Scott, but because of his ordeal there is still damage to his nervous
system and his eyesight isn’t so good.
Still today he sometimes has double vision.
But he’s optimistic and he’s modest.
After his time on the mountain, he said, “The lesson I have learnt — simplistic as it
might sound — is that no difficulty is impossible to overcome.
I am just an ordinary person who fell into an extraordinary situation."
And now we have an extraordinary situation for you - choosing one of these two videos!
We know it’s tough but pick this one here or this one over here.
We know you can overcome this extreme challenge!