Climbing Asia’s Forgotten Mountain, Part 1 | Nat Geo Live

It was harder than we anticipated and it was much, much colder. We're a team of six people. Our goal is to determine what the highest peak in Burma is and then climb it. Like to solve this fantastic geographical mystery. It never let up, just taken down to, like, nothing and how... how did that happen? (applause) I first learned of Hkakabo Razi in 2001. That's the name of the peak and so for, you know, 15 years I've dreamt of going to this place in Northern Myanmar, the eastern edge of the Himalayas, and exploring this mountain. And finally, in the Fall of 2014, this sort of imagined expedition came to pass. This is us, down to nothing at the end of our trip. One of the most incredible, incredible adventures I've ever been on in my life, and that's saying a lot. I've been on probably 40 different expeditions all over the world. In 2011, I led an expedition of about 12 athletes with North Face. Conrad Anker was one of those. And it was a really amazing success; we all summited, skied from the top and... That led to an invite to go on a National Geographic-North Face supported expedition to Everest. Mark Jenkins just happened to be on the trip as well. I'd never met him before. He was coming in late. We spent ten, ten days hiking into base camp together. And that's where we started talking about all these adventures and exploration that we'd done, and Mark is incredibly well traveled. And the story of Burma came up and... I didn't know the Himalayas ended in Burma. So, we started talking about Hkakabo Razi and Mark had actually tried to go and climb it when the area was closed and been, like, arrested and all these crazy things that Mark does. As we got further into the climb of Everest, and you can see here this is heading towards the summit and the people and the crowding. It was just a stretch from where I had started as this adventurer in new places, and here was this amazing mountain, but a lot of people and just a different way of climbing that I wasn't used to. Mark and I summited Everest together and when we came down as we were walking out, we're like, this is happening. We're gonna make Hkakabo Razi happen and that's going to be our next trip. And it's going to be anti-Everest and it's gonna be an adventure. (scoffs) Little did we know. (laughing) So, the idea behind it was to really explore and travel over land and find this mountain and... take GPS's with us and tag the summit and see if it was really the highest mountain in South East Asia.

So, planning the trip, this is pretty much what I had to work with. And you can see that the whole mountain is blurred out like it doesn't really exist. Then the next thing is, you know, you have to pick a team. So, this had to be a really unique team because we were going for two months and there's probably only, like, ten days of actual climbing. So, first of all getting a bunch of athletes together is like herding cats. They're all over the world, all the time and then we show up, you know, in Tokyo with a zillion bags. They all weighed about 70 pounds and we're used to Nepal standards of "you carry everything." You have jeans at base camp and you have extra shoes and flip flops and a sun hat and... We showed up with all of that stuff. It didn't last very long. Um, quick video about us getting into the country. (instrumental music) Usually on these trips you definitely don't take time to see a place so much which is definitely a drawback to a lot of expeditions. Is you land in this foreign place but you just beeline straight for the mountains. (instrumental music) -(bells ringing) -(indistinct chatter) All aboard! (instrumental music)

Mark: Hilaree and I conceived of this as kind of the anti-Everest trip. We were coming off of Everest together. Been successful and kind of wondered "Okay, what's an old-fashioned expedition?" Start in the capital of the country go over land all the way to your mountain. With this team, I think we have as good a chance as anyone of resolving the mystery of what's the highest peaks in Burma. (instrumental music) Normally, as a climber, you just fly through these countries and you go straight to the mountains, and it's actually a risk to travel over land because that's the time when you get sick; you wear yourself down unnecessarily. But, none of us had been to this country and all of us individually had spent so much time in Asia in general that we wanted to really experience the country and that involved going over land which was about 1000 miles and we took about every possible mode of transportation, you could imagine. So, I had this romantic notion of trains that is... I think it doesn't apply to this country. This was a gentleman that we thought was actually dead when they were putting him in there but he wasn't. He was alive and he was kind of being passed through this window to his family inside. This is as the train started. And I think from that expression on my face this was early on. And I was still thinking like "Oh my Gosh, this is so great like, wow, this is gonna be amazing." And then-- There's another video here that will give you a better idea of what the train was like.

Emily: I would say this is definitely another step above the Everest trip. More remote, more challenging and the worst travel experience I've ever had. -(train car buckles) -(screaming) Literally you'd be airborne and then just slammed back into your seat. And then you'd be launched again and slammed back into your seat. Doing that for 18 hours just sort of makes you insane.

Hilaree: We're on an adventure and I think that was what got me started in expeditions in the first place. Just this excitement for the unknown. I mean, the funny thing about an adventure is that you never know when the unknown part is going to strike you. And we learned later-- Taylor, who was the base camp manager, she was like "So, before we left, I was kind of looking on the internet and I found this thing that the train in Burma is called the Death train." I was like, "Why didn't you tell us that before we got on the train?" But, yeah, so that's, don't ride the train in Burma. So, the train took us to Mytchina. We're now in the Kachin state. And there is a little bit of tribal fighting and everything between Mytchina and Putao. So, we were required to take a domestic flight to Putao which was kind of our final destination before we set out for the mountain. So, Putao, 205 miles to the mountain. We just had our own feet to get us there and motorcycles. At this point, we were put under town arrest in Putao. And we arrived on a Friday; we were supposed to leave on Saturday. We had our motorcycles ready, we had porters waiting for us in the jungle, and we couldn't leave town. And Mark and I were frantic; we were running around trying to talk to every government official, anyone we could. But, of course, it was the weekend and it was like some random, weird holiday and nobody would talk to us. And finally, Monday afternoon after we went through government in Yangon, we finally got clearance. But, we didn't actually-- we weren't actually able to leave until Tuesday. In the end, this four-day delay caused a lot of strife as the trip went on. So, the day that we were cleared to go, it started raining. Of course! And a lot of the motorcycle drivers had left. So, we ended up having to confine a lot of our gear on a on a smaller amount of bikes. This was Taylor. She was on the back of this guy's bike. And um... I just like this picture. She was kind of miserable. Um, and you'll see why here, from this next video. (sound of rain)

Hilaree: We finally got our permissions yesterday. We are packing up motorcycles, that looks totally sketchy. This is my driver... he just cracked a beer at 7:30 in the morning. I'm gonna ride with him. (motorcycle starts) Got a 50-pound backpack and a 30-pound Movi in my right hand. Not really sure how that's gonna work, but, see how it goes. (water splashing) I mean, I don't know, it's probably really hard driving, but I just feel like I have the shittiest driver. (instrumental music) We're in "Expedition 101" mode. And it's definitely, partly, you know... my mistake. I should've been keeping better track of where the bikes were and everything. But, right now, we're getting pretty spread out. On the way in we get 80 miles on motorcycles in four days. And then, we started the jungle walk. (insects buzzing) When we were first getting on the motorcycles, one of the drivers looked at me and I was wearing shorts. And he was like, "Shorts?" (audience laughter) He's like, "Pants, you should put on pants." I was like, "Oh, no, no, I'm fine. It's super hot. I don't like heat." Um, so I went out the first day in shorts. I thought he meant, because like you could get scratched by bamboo or you know, whatever. But, instead I just got completely mauled by these no-see-ums. So, there weren't mosquitoes, but there were these gnats and bees. All these bee stings. I had hundreds of bites just from that one day. And I put shorts on, even that, or pants, like I had, you know those trekker-zip on things, and I, I mean I put pants on by the end of the day because I kind of finally figured it out but it was already too late. And, so this was my first real test with suffering. I mean, I live at 9,000 feet for a reason because I don't really like bugs. I think, does anybody ever feel like this? Like if you have an intense dislike of something and then it seems to recur over and over in your life. Mine's like bugs and snakes and spiders and-- I must have come across five different snakes on the trek. And this was the first one that I almost stepped on within like, two hours of getting off the motorcycles and walking on the trail. There's a lot of snakes in Burma. Some leeches. Lots of leeches in the area. These actually were so common and frequent that they kind of became inconsequential by the end. But, the first time we were hiking at night through the jungle and just coming down and Emily got there before me, and she sat down. I had this white shirt on and she had her headlamp on and I took my pack off and I undid the buckle. And she looks up with her headlamp and the entire middle section of my white shirt was soaked in blood. And she screamed and started freaking out and it was from a leech. Like, I had no idea, I never even saw it. And just, when they fall off they put this sort of anti-coagulant in you and so you continue to bleed. So, it didn't hurt me or anything but it looked so gruesome. I thought Emily was going to faint. (laughs) But, the one thing that stood out was the water. And I think this is the reason that none of us got sick was because it was the clearest, bluest best tasting water I have ever seen in my entire life. And I think it's just because this area is so untrammeled. You had springs coming out of the side of the hills that we-- you know, we had all these water pumps and everything that we just stopped using and just drank the water straight and it was incredible, and none of us got sick. So, going back to that town arrest the porters didn't wait for us; for those four days, they left. We didn't realize we were coming right at harvest season. So, they all went back to the fields. And so, this was a major issue and we had enough gear for 80 porters. But, there's not this porter history like there is in Nepal or India or Pakistan. And so, none of them really cared. They thought we were just crazy people trying to get into a mountain with way too much stuff. So, at any given point, the most we had was maybe 30 porters. And what happened was we had to make some really tough decisions at this point. And that was hang on to those base camp booties and go home or cut a lot of our gear. We basically cut about two-thirds of our gear. At one point Renan who's like this big man's man was like, in tears. Because he had to get rid of all of his camera stuff. I mean, the most incredible... takeaway from this is what Cory and Renan were able to pull out as far as video and photography with literally sharing lenses and two camera bodies and nothing else.