Stephen Venables - The Legend of Eric Shipton

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Mountaineer and writer Stephen Venables has had an extraordinary life of adventure, which famously included his lonesome, costly (in frozen toes) night near the top of Everest after succeeding as the first Briton to summit the mountain without supplementary oxygen in 1988. Born in 1907, Eric Earl Shipton tried his luck as a tea planter in East Africa before dedicating his life to exploration. Shipton was a team-member on all four Everest expeditions during the 1930s and found the route that Hillary and Tenzing would follow to the top of the world. He famously missed out on Hillary's historical 1953 ascent after being sacked from the expedition - his small-team, minimal logistics approach to climbing just didn't fit with the grandiose, large-scale expedition style of the British Empire. Instead, Shipton went on to explore untouched mountain ranges all over the world, from the mountains of East Africa to the ice-fields of Patagonia in Tierra del Fuego, and is now considered one of the greatest mountain explorers of the twentieth century.