Meet the Brit who travelled 3,556 miles to Alaska’s deadliest mountain
He encountered bears, avalanches and trecherous blizzards on the way.
As a severe storm eased on the side of Alaska’s most deadly mountain, British explorer Oli France suddenly noticed the sound of a helicopter.
Watching it fly overhead, the explorer’s stomach sank knowing what the aircraft carried.
‘I’d just finished messaging my three-year-old daughter on a satellite phone,’ Oli, 33, recalls to Metro. ‘Then we set out to climb a really steep section of the mountain. Once we reached the ridge, around 5,000 metres high, the helicopter appeared. I knew it was carrying the body of a solo climber off the mountain, a man who had died a few days earlier.
‘At that point, I had to take a moment to refocus my mind and make sure we were making the right decision.’
Despite being so close to the summit of Denali, the tallest peak in North America, Oli admits he still felt the end goal wasn’t ‘guaranteed.’ He was aware of the risks which could stop the mission at any point.
Denali is among the world’s top ten dangerous mountains. Temperatures can plummet to -40C and bears, moose and wolves stalk the route to the summit. Located in the Denali National Park and Preserve the mountain, originally meaning ‘the tall one’ in the Alaska native language of Koyukon, reaches from 86 metres below sea level to 6,194 metres high.
‘It’s a brutal, unforgiving place to be if you aren’t prepared,’ Oli admits. ‘Every day we had a mental battle to make the right decisions and find the perseverance to carry on.
‘We faced snowstorms, mountain blizzards, bear encounters, nearby avalanches on the mountain, all sorts. We had one team member nearly fall into a crevasse. He was skiing down the mountain and fell in. Luckily, he had a heavy sled attached and it flew over the crevasse, essentially pulling him back out.’
But before Oli started his ascent of the deadly mountain, he had to complete a gruelling cycle through some of the most remote areas of North America. The Brit had taken on an inspirational 3,556 mile journey from California’s Death Valley to Alaska’s Denali mountain. His solo bike ride saw him pass through deserts, mountain ranges and frozen roads before he reached his team in the state nicknamed the ‘Last Frontier’.
‘The bike ride was a long, lonely journey at times,’ Oli recalls. ‘These were remote areas of North America where I might have one interaction a day, maybe. I listened to music and podcasts to not go crazy. Sometimes I could go through an entire podcast series in one day of cycling.
‘When I needed to fire myself up, I’d get some house music blaring. Sultans of Swing by the Dire Straits was also quite an evocative song on the journey and on some of my previous travels. It was very fitting for cycling through North America and travelling on these long open roads.’
Once in Alaska, accompanied by a four-man team which included photographer Aaron Rolph, the next journey began.
‘Alaska is an adventurer’s paradise,’ Oli says. ‘99% of climbers fly directly into Denali base camp and start their climb from there. But we did things differently, our climb was entirely human-powered. That meant skiing 122km over hills, wading through rivers and climbing a huge glacier just to reach the base camp.
‘We had towering mountains on either side of us and, at one point, didn’t see anyone else for eight days. This was raw Alaska, it felt so special to be in that kind of wilderness.
Oli and his team successfully completed the climb at 6pm on Sunday May 26, and felt a mixture of ‘relief’ and ‘deep satisfaction’ at the accomplishment.
The dad-of-two adds: ‘Getting to the summit never felt guaranteed. I couldn’t let myself believe I was going to stand at the top of Denali and complete the challenge, we all felt so emotional because of the journey we’d faced to reach that stage.
‘Despite all of these moments of hardship, this challenge showed how we all have this kind of internal resilience, but it’s just not something we use in an everyday way. So this journey was a reminder to tap into a bit of that resilience.’
A keen sportsman who grew up in the village of Standish in Lancashire, Oli recalls that he was ‘always the boy who stared out the window wanting to be outside.’ He studied outdoor leadership at university which was the catalyst for later travelling to the most remote and dangerous corners of the world.
The Death Valley to Denali feat forms part of the explorer’s ‘Ultimate Seven Project’: where he hopes to become the first person to travel from the lowest to highest point across 20 countries and seven continents.
‘I’ve guided in countries like Iraq, Congo, Yemen, and Syria. I always want to push myself in a physical way as I take on these adventures,’ Oli explains.
‘On this challenge, my greatest motivations were my wife and my two children; I have a three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son. When times got really hard, I imagined speaking to them in the future. I’d play out this conversation where I would say to them “look, I tried this extra hard expedition and it got too difficult so I just gave up.”
‘The thought of having that conversation with them played on my mind and was my own way of rallying myself to carry on.’
Find out more about Oli France and his adventurers by clicking here.
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