South Lakes climbers set sights on Everest (From The Westmorland Gazette)

South Lakes climbers set sights on Everest

8:43am Saturday 27th March 2004 in News By Lisa Frascarelli

A LAKE District mountaineer who is preparing to take on Everest could find himself meeting up on one of Earth's remotest spots with his local GP, reports Lisa Frascarelli.

Kendal man Barry Roberts may end up fulfilling his boyhood dream of bagging the world's highest peak along with his doctor, Michael Brennan.

The 42-year-old, who has been training in the French Alps, discovered during a visit to his surgery that his doctor was also heading out to Nepal with a South Lakeland expedition within the coming week.

"We were talking and realised we were both going to Everest at the same time," he said. "We will be at the same base camp as we're taking the same route just with different groups. It's quite funny really it's not really the kind of place you expect to meet someone you know."

Mr Roberts, who will be attempting to reach the summit by the notorious North Ridge with a New Zealand-based expedition group, is recovering from two small back fractures.

"It's not going to hamper me. I realise this is not going to be a picnic but I have been planning this in my head since I was 19 it's been my icon."

Leading the South Lakeland expedition up the North Ridge of which Dr Brennan is part along with Windermere man and avalanche forecaster Paul Noble, 40 is Dave Pritt, director of Bowness-based mountain expedition company Adventure Peaks.

Mr Pritt, who has reached the summit of Everest twice and was involved in a dramatic rescue on the mountain in May last year when one of his group broke their leg on the 8,848 metre climb, said he had never come across a fellow South Lakelander on the remote peak before.

"Mountaineering is a small world and you do meet up with people, but I'm not aware of ever meeting someone from Kendal on Everest before," he said.

The 11-strong Bowness group, who hope to reach the summit in mid-May, will be tracked by a BBC film crew filming for a programme called The Challenge. The documentary, due out in the autumn, will follow a mountaineering novice on his attempt to conquer Everest.

Dr Brennan, who is bracing himself for his seventh Himalayan trip, said it had always been a boyhood dream to conquer Everest.