Explorer's Grand Slam: Canadian man wants to be first disabled person to complete wild adventure
With "health complications too numerous to mention," Patrick Belton, 57, is now ready to reach new heights
Throughout history, only 12 people — so far, and ranging from South Korea to Russia to Canada — have managed to complete the Explorer’s Grand Slam. This hallowed goal set out by only the wildest of adventurers involves skiing to the North Pole and South Pole, and climbing the Seven Summits (Everest, Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Vinson, and Puncak Jaya or Kosciuszko) — though, not necessarily in that order.
Various goals have branched off from this one, including skiing the South Pole along the Messner route, which is over 900 kilometres long. Only four people have managed this as part of the Explorer’s Grand Slam.
Patrick Belton, a 57-year-old Toronto native now based in the Rocky Mountains who lives with chronic disease would like to be the fifth — and the first disabled person. When you hear him detail his journey, you believe he will be.
But it’s tough: his health history includes Crohn's disease, cancer, flesh-eating disease, 14 surgeries, and more than a year spent in hospital “among other health complications too numerous to mention," he tells Yahoo Canada. During one memorable hospital visit, he was given 24 hours to live due to blood clots in his lungs and right leg. As his ailments progressed, they also torpedoed his career, financial stability and personal life. At one time, he recalls not being able to mountaineer for 10 years because he was so sick with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Recently, however, Belton went into remission, and this new lease on life has him dreaming of the wildest possible adventure — to prove not only that he can do it, but that anyone living with illness can. In fact, he’s been planning it for years, and has a team behind him. They call themselves The Ostomy Athlete, and are a group of four men and women mountaineers who live with Crohn’s and have had an ostomy procedure. Their goal is not only to inspire others, but raise funds to help those living with Crohn’s.
Below, Belton shares more about the team, and how they plan to reach a few more peaks, and how he is sure to tackle one of the toughest.
Q: Tell me about the Ostomy Athlete. Why did you start this group, and when?
A: There’s a huge global community of people with an ostomy, inflammatory bowel disease and cancer on Instagram. There, you can find a lot of friends who understand exactly what you’re going through. You become not just fast friends, but lifelong friends. When you have a chance, you meet up and talk about how it affects your career, how it affects your personal life, and the different life choices you’ve had to make because of it.
That’s how I met Charlotte, Rob and Jessica, about two years ago. They come from Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. We all share our health histories to a large degree. We all have a form of an ostomy, we've had a large intestine removed, a bunch of our small intestines have been removed, we've all had 10 to 20 surgeries in our lives. Most of us have gone through cancer, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the list goes on. But, we also all have interest in the outdoors. We like to climb, and we want to climb the tallest mountains in the world.
So, the goal is to challenge each other to, essentially, do the impossible?
The Ostomy Athlete was established to educate, inspire, create awareness, have public conversations about our bodies and disease, and raise charitable funds while we climb many of the world’s tallest mountain peaks, a.k.a. the 7 Summits. We want to [accomplish] the Explorer’s Grand Slam, which is comprised of climbing the 7 Summits, and skiing to the North and South Poles.
We enter into expeditions in Earth’s most hostile natural environments while pushing ourselves to our human limits psychologically, emotionally and physically. We use the expeditions to raise funds for registered charities pertaining to IBD, ostomy and cancer.
In taking this on, for any individual, there are considerable challenges. What do those look like for you and your team?
There are crevasses, avalanches, difficult weather, people fall. That’s the kind of danger typical to mountaineering. Beyond that, the higher you go, elevation-wise, the harder it is to breathe. Once you’re above 8000 meters, there is 65% less oxygen, which can lead to dehydration. Your calorie-burn rate also increases substantially as you increase altitude. As it is, my body’s ability to absorb fluids is a challenge.
What you have to do is extreme, and it's harder for us because of the weaknesses of our bodies. I have problems at sea level with hydration and dehydration, and getting calories absorbed into my body, which is exacerbated in higher altitude. I have to be mentally, emotionally and physically prepared to deal with that.
How can the activity of mountaineering be made better and more accessible?
In terms of accessibility, there are risks that are inherent to climbing rock faces and ice. When it comes to hiking, I’ve seen people in specially designed wheelchairs but we need more accessible trails, rest stops, and accessible campgrounds.
Why do you feel the Ostomy Athlete needs a wider platform?
The vast majority don't comprehend what people with my body look like and live with. I'll take my shirt off, and you can see this appliance bag sitting on my stomach ... We can draw eyeballs by doing that, we can tell stories, like if you're in an epic blizzard on Denali (the highest mountain peak in North America) for four days. It’s to create awareness, inspire people, educate.
They don’t know that, when I was isolating and struggling for those 10 years, I was on the precipice of death. It took three years to recover from that decade of illness, injustice and surgeries. But medicine saved my life, and I am in remission. Now, I'm one of the lucky ones able to do this, so I have to give back to the community. We want to help people, by example. We're going into the most challenging natural elements, and that's part of the point.