The Ultimate Challenge

There’s something a bit incongruous about Major Meagan McGrath.

On April 22, Meagan McGrath took this self-portrait while holding a GPS locating her position at 89.59.995N and 141E--almost directly at the North Pole. It was the closest she could get after scrambling to take the photo on fast-moving ice flows.

It’s not the tough-as-guts exterior. After all, she grew up besting the boys around her hometown of Sudbury, and even now, you can see the tomboy still lurks: the quick, freckled Tom Sawyer grin, the confident stride and the “Yes, we can!” Bob the Builder attitude.

Nor is it that, from next month, the 32-year-old is taking a year’s leave from her “interesting but safe” desk job in Ottawa with the Canadian Forces to take on not just the South Pole as the first solo, unsupported Canadian to do so, but some of the world’s tallest, toughest mountains as well.

What is incongruous—delightfully so—is that behind the uniform, beyond the fact that she’s already climbed mountains over 8000m, that she’s the first Canadian woman to ascend both versions of the Seven Summits (the seven highest peaks on seven continents, plus one), that she’s skied to the North Pole and has run the grueling 243km, seven-day Marathon des Sables across the Sahara . . . is that giggle.

It infectiously punctuates her sentences, your sentences and the air around her. She laughs easily and often, as the saying goes, often accompanied by a curiously girlish tendency to uptalk everything into dangling questions.

So when she mentions the very real possibility of perishing next summer whilst attempting to scale K2 -- the world’s second highest but indisputably most dangerous peak-- you do a double take.

“Yeah, I’ll have to say, yes, I could die,” she says, before quickly pointing out that “I’d like to climb other mountains during that period, too”, namely Nepal’s Mount Lhotse, Broad Peak, Cho Oyu, and Tibet’s Shishapangma. If successful, she’ll be on her way to becoming the first Canadian to climb the world’s 14 highest mountains, all over 8000m.

Meagan on the summit of Mount Everest in May 2007; the first Canadian woman to ascent both versions of the Seven Summits.

She pauses for a millisecond, giggles again and says: “And then, on first of November, I’ll report back to duty.”

Just like that. Of course, it won’t be ‘just like that’. McGrath will have taken on several lifetimes’ worth of adventure and adrenaline just “to challenge herself,” says friend and ultra marathoner, Ray Zahab, who met McGrath in 2008. “It’s not like she has a list of five things to do before you die. It’s an overwhelming sense of what she wants to do. So she just does it.” Even if she had a Bucket list, it would look something like this: In mid-November, sponsored by Sudbury’s Science North, she’ll strap on skis at Antarctica’s Hercules Inlet and traverse 1100km alone for 45 days, except for some radio contact, to the South Pole’s Patriot Hills base camp. Although fully kitted out, with help from Zahab, “if I break my skis, I’m walking,” she laughs. “I’ll have to MacGyver everything. Mountain climbing is harder, but an arctic environment is brutal on gear.”

Back home in January, she’ll attempt to attract major sponsorship for her “Magic Mountain” adventures before she takes off in March 2010, leading an Everest base camp expedition, which still has spots open. A month later, she’ll tackle nearby Mount Lhotse and then Broad Peak. If all goes well—she already climbed Everest in 2007—she’ll take on the big one: K2.

Located in a no man’s land between China and Pakistan, it’s unhappily nicknamed “Savage Mountain”: for every four people who’ve reached the summit 8,611 treacherous metres up, one has died trying. In fact, just 299 have ever succeeded, compared to 2600 who’ve scaled Everest. For decades, there was a legend that it cursed the fair sex, because until 2004, every woman who summitted also perished there, or soon after.

“Gosh, K2 is dangerous for so many reasons,” McGrath says soberly of the expedition, on which she’ll be joined by her friend, Nick Rice, and well-known Australian mountaineer, Rex Pemberton. “There’s a lot of rock fall, ice fall, slipping, avalanche, sudden storms that blow you off the mountain. The stakes are so high that safety is paramount. It will be about being smart, safe, knowing when to push and when to call it quits.” Almost anticlimactically, and “if I survive,” she interjects, she then hopes to climb the other major eight-thousander peaks throughout September and October.

On Mount Vinson

That she’s even trying doesn’t surprise Zahab, founder of the Possible-2-Impossible Foundation. “She’s a very positive person. The challenges she’s set out in the next year are extraordinary; it’s fantastic that someone is willing to push the limits of what’s possible. But I think it’s in every one of us to do so. It takes a belief in oneself, an incredible amount of dedication and hard work.”

McGrath has all three, in spades. Born in Toronto but raised in Sudbury, as a child, she’d set out with her dog and “run up a ridge, and there’s be five more, so you’d just keep going”. In 1995, she joined the military, and graduated Royal Military College in 2000. “It’s a tough school, a tough place,” she says. “I really felt like if I could get through that, I could get through anything.”

Although her current aeronautics posting is engrossing “but not very adventurous,” she admits, it does give her the scope to “dream harder for more exciting adventures.”

It’s difficult to imagine what that might entail after this year, and she giggles at the thought. “Oh, I don’t know! I just think this will be one awesome experience,” she says, her voice rising in enthusiasm. “I guess one day I’ll get to the Pearly Gates and when I do, I want to be thinking, ‘Gosh! What a great adventure that was’!”

For more information or to sponsor Meagan, go to www.meaganmcgratheradventurer.com

Posted in Adventure on 11/05/2009 - 0 Comments