TORONTO -- Rob Ferguson’s plan to climb Mount Everest got postponed due to the pandemic. But instead of skipping out on all that leg exercise, he decided to climb the equivalent height of the famous mountain -- by going up and down his apartment stairs 6,506 times.
Ferguson, who lives in London, U.K., documented his climb on Zoom. Uninspiring stairwell walls stood in for ice cliffs and open skies.
“The views certainly weren’t as nice as Nepal,” Ferguson told USA Today. The 51-year-old is a photographer, writer and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
"Sometimes the end task can seem insurmountable, but for this it was a similar approach – but literally taking it one step at a time.”
It took him just under 25 hours to cover the equivalent of a hike up and down Everest. He only paused for snacks and hydration breaks.
Mount Everest is around 8,800 metres tall.
The goal for Ferguson wasn’t just to fill his quarantined days, but to promote staying indoors during lockdowns and raise money for frontline workers.
"Medical professionals don't have the option to stop and quit," Ferguson told USA Today. "Every expedition I've been on, no matter how difficult, I had the option to quit. Nobody is saying you've got to carry on. But emergency workers are physically exhausted and mentally drained. They don't say, 'That's it, I'm done.' They don't have that choice. So I kept telling myself, they are the reason I'm doing this."
He had to remove his shoes and finish his walk barefoot in order not to wake up his neighbours towards the end of his trek. Several partners joined him through social media to form a tiny Everest team, but some had to throw in the towel before reaching the finish line.
Other quarantined adventurers have had the same thought -- John Griffin, a 53-year-old who hails from southern England, spent four days going up and down the 30 steps in his three-storey house to travel to the height of Mount Everest.
He told CNN that “seeing the same staircase again, again and again” was definitely draining.
It took 1,363 trips to the top floor of his house and 40,846 steps in all to beat Mount Everest. According to CNN, the idea initially came from a quip he made to his wife: that he would have climbed Mount Everest by the time quarantine was over with how many times he was ascending the steps to the top floor to bring her tea.
He used his trip to raise money for a food bank charity.
Endurance runner Rory Southworth also used trips up and down a set of stairs to climb higher than a mountain. He told CNN he climbed the height of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the U.K., then the height of Snowden, the tallest mountain in Wales, before he set his sights on Everest.
He gathered a group of around 30 people on Instagram and they took on the challenge of climbing to the equivalent of Everest’s base camp, which is 5,364 metres.
"Having something where we have a focus, giving ourselves some purpose, and having a team support us through this was very important,” he told CNN.
