"I rolled the dice": Athlone mountaineer on third and final Everest bid

By Rebekah O'Reilly

After ten years of extreme mountaineering experience, Athlone man Diarmuid Morrissey has finally closed the door on his Seven Summits dream.

It was a bittersweet occasion, with Diarmuid making the difficult decision to turn back on Mount Everest during his third attempt to reach the summit.

"I’ve climbed the highest mountains on six of the seven continents, all bar Asia," Diarmuid noted, adding that he was "fortunate" to have the opportunity to attempt them all.

Just over two months ago, he set out on his third attempt to scale Mount Everest, a feat which he had previously attempted in 2021, and again in 2022.

"My partner told me, 'You rolled the dice'. I said, 'I rolled the dice twice'," Diarmuid said. "I rolled it a third time. I came home, but this year five other people didn’t come home. There’s no doubt there’s a risk. It’s a tricky place to be.

"If I didn’t feel it was worth the risk, I wouldn’t have attempted this on the third attempt. There are other places that I’ve been that are, I would say, more risky. But Everest has a reputation that it deserves."

Diarmuid didn't manage to reach the summit of Mount Everest, leaving his dream of completing the complete set of the seven highest peaks behind him.

When Diarmuid decided to call it quits, he was just below Camp Three, but was "unable to put one foot in front of the other".

"You’re struggling to stand upright for a start because your balance is gone. You could push on through for a couple of hours, but then you’ve got another two days of fairly heavy-duty climbing to go to the top.

"If you’ve got a problem heading up there, it’s going to get worse. It’s not going to improve. Even staying at the altitude where I stopped to recover wasn’t an option. I’d already been there for a day, perhaps longer than I should have been. But you just don’t recover at those altitudes physically. There’s only one option then, and that’s to go down."

Speaking about the biggest challenges facing mountaineers when attempting to reach the summit of Mount Everest, Diarmuid said fitness, altitude, and ability to acclimatise are some of the biggest challenges.

"Physically, fitness is always going to be a challenge. How you physically react to altitude is a bit of a movable barrier, it isn’t always the same. Acclimatisation is important. Fitness is important. Nutrition is important. Personal hygiene is important," he said.

"I lost 12 kilos in seven weeks. A kilo and a half a week, when you’re eating normally, that’s a lot of weight to be dropping, especially when it’s not excess weight. You end up eating muscle, and that’s a problem. Humans don’t live at 6,000 metres because we can’t survive up there for extended periods of time. That’s a ticking clock once you go into those altitudes. It’s going to get you at some point.

"Base camp can be a difficult place to be. You’re in a confined camp for six weeks, more or less. You can take quicker routes. You can take quicker programmes, where you try to acclimatise at home before you set up the mountain, and spend only three weeks at altitude. Those are available, but they’re expensive."

Diarmuid said he is "still struggling" with sacrificing his dream of completing the seven highest peaks challenge. He noted that they lost one of his own climbing group during this year's attempt to reach the summit.

"I had to make peace with myself coming down. I did say before I left to go to Everest that this would be my final attempt. It’s too perilous a place to be going, and you keep rolling the dice. You could be one of those statistics if you’re not careful.

"We lost one of our own climbing group, one of the support crew, who died on the mountain this year. That’s an unpleasant experience. It gets very close to home. It’s a perilous place. It’s a dangerous place. There’s no question."

When asked what the next challenge on his horizon might be, he mentioned the seven highest volcanoes, of which he has already completed three to date.

"Seven volcanos sounds like a good plan to me. I’ve got three of them done, I think: North America, Asia and Australasia. It has to be a nice one, a little bit more amenable, not as perilous.

"Volcano climbing can bring its own peculiar set of circumstances. Some of them are active volcanoes, and they can bring their own dangers. There are special places. The highest volcano in Asia is actually on the border in Iran, which I’d love to go to. I’d love to do it. It’s a place called Mount Damavand. Not too many people go there!"

For now, however, Diarmuid is focusing on spending time with his family and friends. He intends to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with his family in the coming weeks.

"It’ll be my fifth time climbing that mountain, so there’s plenty more out there to be done. I’ll try and give them a little bit of what it’s like to climb these high mountains. I just don’t need either the expense or the peril that Everest brings."

Diarmuid extended his gratitude to his family and friends, and his partner Siobhan, for their support throughout his Seven Summits journey.

"The support I’ve had from Siobhan and from my family and friends has been enormous, especially in a positive way when you come back feeling quite deflated. Throughout the whole climbing thing, my kids were always asking, “Where are you now?” And I’m off someplace in the back end of the world, and they’re going, 'Oh yeah, well, there’s no surprise in that then.'"

He shared that he has been working on a book about his adventures over the last decade, which have brought him across the globe.

"I’ve just finished writing a book about my adventures on mountains over the last ten years. I first went to base camp ten years ago, almost to the day.

It was 2016, the first time I went. I’d never heard of the Seven Summits.

I had no clue what they were or what they entailed. I was going to base camp on a bucket-list trip with a friend of mine.

"Ten years on, I’ve been to all seven. I’ve had the privilege of attempting all seven, and I’ve been successful on six. I’ve climbed a few of them more than once. I’ve had a fantastic journey. It’s been an incredible ten years."