Anna Magnusson - The Skys the Limit: The Story of Vicky Jack and Her Quest to Climb the Seven Summits

ANNA MAGNUSSON is a writer, broadcaster and radio producer. In 2006 she published The Quarriers Story , a history of Quarriers Homes, once the biggest orphanage in Scotland, and now a leading care charity. She also edited The Time of our Lives (Rannoch Press, 2011), a collection of memories of wartime schoolgirls evacuated from Glasgow to Auchterarder. Anna is an award-winning radio producer and broadcaster who has made documentaries all over the world.

The Story of Vicky Jack and her Quest
T o climb the Seven Summits

ANNA MAGNUSSON

Luath Press Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

Originally published by Black & White, 2007.

This edition published by Luath Press, 2016.

ISBN: 978-1-910745-79-3

eISBN: 978-1-912387-02-1

The authors right to be identified as author of this work under the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Anna Magnusson 2007, 2016

For Mum and Dad

The best storytellers

MAGNUS MAGNUSSON , 19292007

MAMIE MAGNUSSON , 19252012

Contents

Acknowledgements

She looks as if a puff of wind will blow her away is how one old friend describes Vicky Jack.

Appearances can be deceptive, as I found out during the months of talking to Vicky and writing her story for this book. She wears her achievement in climbing the Seven Summits so lightly as to render it almost invisible, but as I got to know her I was enormously impressed and inspired by her talents, her personality and her great appetite for life. She was unstinting in her time and efforts as we talked about her life and career and climbing always thoughtful and always open and I thank her most sincerely. Those conversations and the writing of the book took place during a very intensive period of only three or four months in 2007. It was an exhausting process but Vicky never once flagged along the way. Thats probably why she got to the top of Everest. Those hectic months were also the foundation of a lasting friendship with Vicky. She is a remarkable person.

I would also like to thank the many people friends, family, climbing chums, work colleagues who helped me with information, stories, reflections and memories. I hope that the Vicky you find in this book is, at least in small part, the Vicky you know.

August 2016

Foreword

AFTER I HAD completed the Seven Summits, I was asked if I was going to write a book about my adventures. I knew that what I really enjoyed was the adventuring and not writing so I decided to look for someone to write the book for me. Never having delved into the book-writing world before, it took some time and, just when I was starting to make progress, I was awarded an honorary doctorate from Glasgow Caledonian University. Magnus Magnusson was the universitys chancellor at the time and, during the pre-award-ceremony lunch, I was sitting next to him. We were chatting and he suddenly put his hand on my arm and, with an excited boyish look, said that his daughter Anna wanted to write another book and he thought that my story would be ideal for her. He asked if it would be all right for him to suggest it to her and of course I said, Yes.

I then met Anna and she was not only keen to write about the adventures but also wanted to cover my life. I found this prospect quite daunting as I am not one to discuss my experiences, feelings and emotions, particularly with someone I didnt know. However, when we met, I immediately liked Anna she has a quiet confidence, a good sense of humour and is very insightful. I felt that I could trust her to write a true account of my story and we agreed to go ahead. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be but the hours spent talking about my past were made so much easier by Annas relaxed patience and perceptive questioning.

I tend to make light of things but, underneath, there is a serious person and Anna was swift to discover this. In fact, I think now she probably knows me better than I know myself! Thanks, Anna you have captured my life astonishingly well.

And of course thanks to everyone we contacted who so enthusiastically added their accounts to the book.

I believe we tend to limit our own horizons but I also believe that, if you really want to do something and you feel it from your heart, you can achieve almost anything the skys the limit!

I hope you enjoy the book.

Vicky Jack

Prologue

AS LIGHT BEGAN to smudge the horizon on 22 May 2003, Vicky Jack stood at 27,500 feet on Mount Everest, about 1,500 vertical feet from the summit.

It was a beautiful dawn. The weather was superb, there were no clouds, and I cried with the sheer impact of seeing the dawn growing, looking down on everything. We were above every hill around us. You could see the curvature of the Earth. I could hear the oxygen coming through the pipe beside my ear. I could hear my own ragged gasps for breath. I was absolutely exhausted, but there was this sudden feeling of elation: and that split second of feeling will never leave me.

That day on Everest was the planned culmination of her six-year quest to climb the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on the seven continents: Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus; Kilimanjaro in Tanzania; Aconcagua in the Andes; the Vinson Massif in Antarctica; Mount McKinley (also known as Denali) in Alaska; Carstensz Pyramid (also known as Puncak Jaya) in Indonesia; and Mount Everest in Nepal. There is some debate about which are the seven highest peaks, and there are two rival lists. Some people climb Mount Kosciuszko in Australia instead of Carstensz.

When Vicky climbed Mount Everest in 2003 she was 50, a fit, wiry, slight woman who had a successful career in human resources and had recently set up her own HR consultancy. Shed already had many adventures climbing the highest mountains all over the world, from Alaska to Antarctica: shed spent a night being very sick in the freezing cold on Mount Elbrus and had nearly died in a blizzard in Antarctica after summiting the Vinson Massif; shed fallen off a narrow ledge 16,000 feet up on Mount McKinley in Alaska; and, in 2001, shed been smuggled in a speeding truck through the worlds largest open-cast mine (where no women, let alone tourists, were allowed), en route to climbing the Carstensz Pyramid in Papua, Indonesia. And here on Everest was the ultimate challenge, the final test of her determination to push herself to the limits of her mental and physical strength.

Forty-three years earlier Vicky had been on a different hill, a tiny mound by comparison, on a childhood holiday in the Scottish Highlands. She and her brother, Brian, were climbing Ben Bhuidhe with their parents. They raced up the hill in great excitement and Vickys father called to them to sit down and not get too far ahead. So the children were laughing and giggling, bumping their way up the hill backwards on their bottoms, shouting to Mum and Dad below to hurry up. They were so slow! Later that day, skipping down off the hill, Vicky was thrilled and scared when she and Brian found a dead wildcat which had been hung from a barbed wire fence, by the farmer presumably, to warn off other predators.

Ben Bhuidhe was Vickys first Munro (a hill over 3,000 feet), her first proper hill. The personal and inspirational journey from that first climb, all the way to the summits of the highest mountains in the world, including Everest, is the story of this book. Vicky is not an elite mountaineer, and this book is not about mountaineering. It is about how hills and mountains have been an inspirational part of her life.