KATHMANDU: Last Sunday, 24-year-old Arjun Vajpai from Noida scaled Kanchenjunga (8,586m), the world’s thirdhighest peak. The feat made him the youngest mountaineer in the world to summit six peaks above 8,000 metres, including Everest , at 16.But his father, retired Colonel Sanjiv Vajpai , is proud of a far more pragmatic victory. “After 11expeditions, all his fingers and toes are safe,” he says. “We consider it a big achievement because if you meet international climbers, you’ll find many have a missing toe or three fingers cut off.”Not that Arjun hasn’t had hair-raising adventures. During the summit push on Kangchenjunga , his oxygen bottle malfunctioned, his lips turned blue and parched, and his toes froze. “It was just up, up and up,” he recalls. “There was no place to rest, kneel down or even drink water for 12 hours.” To make matters worse, they’d run out of equipment for the final ridge, which had a sheer 1,000m drop, so 20-30 people were hanging from a single rope about twice the diameter of a USB cable. “If one of them fell, I knew the rope would not hold,” says Arjun.Arjun summited the mountain at exactly 8.05am and spent 15 minutes savouring the experience. “On the summit, I have no desires, no dreams, no unrest.” But he was also acutely aware he was running out of oxygen. On his way down, Arjun’s hands started shaking and he could hear a whistling sound in his ears. “My body felt like it was under attack,” he recalls.This was Arjun’s second attempt at scaling Kanchenjunga. He credits his success this time to better planning, training, team coordination and weather conditions. Arjun is used to attempting mountains multiple times before he succeeds. He tried scaling Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak, thrice before succeeding in his fourth attempt in 2016. The first time he lost his way; the second time, he lost a team member to high-altitude pulmonary edema; and his third attempt was thwarted by the Nepal earthquake. But he kept at it because he’d promised not to return to his nemesis, Mt Cho Oyu, until he had scaled a tougher peak.Scaling Cho Oyu in 2012 almost cost Arjun his life. That year, a snowstorm had forced the team to remain huddled in their tent for three consecutive days. One morning, Arjun woke up to find himself paralysed on the left side because of cerebral thrombosis – a condition in which a blood clot causes severe swelling in the brain. He couldn’t feel his left arm, drool pooled on one side of his face, and his vision turned yellow because of retinal haemorrhaging. Arjun told his team to keep going and called his mother to say he wouldn’t be returning home this time. She collapsed from the shock.That’s when Arjun spotted a dead man’s boot – jutting out of the snow – through the open flap of his tent and he began contemplating how he wanted to be remembered. “I realised I didn’t want to die as someone who gave up,” Arjun told Mountain Dew India, which partnered with him for the ‘Risk Takers of India’ campaign, and documented his journey on YouTube. “I wanted to be a person who died trying.” So, Arjun crawled out of the tent and kept struggling to move until he fell unconscious. The next day, he was rescued by two sherpas, who wrapped him in a sleeping bag and carried him down even though he had no pulse.Arjun’s love of mountaineering started at the age of 10 when his grandfather made him climb Hanuman Tekri in the Sahyadris. Today, his goal is to scale all 14 eightthousanders – peaks over 8,000m. As a mountaineer, he experiences global warming firsthand, and has seen the weather get more unpredictable and nasty, especially at high altitudes.Despite the challenges, Arjun considers himself lucky to have seen the pinkpurple hues of the Milky Way or to have sat above the clouds while the sun sets over the mountains he has scaled. “Few get to behold the true face of nature,” he says, “and they’re blessed.”(The writer’s visit to Nepal was on invitation from Mountain Dew)

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