Trailblazer: Steve Bell

TRAILBLAZERS The view from the top Story by Sally Watson.

Page left: Steve climbing Cornish granite. Above: Everest, Rongbuk Glacier. Photos courtesy of Steve Bell.

Passing Mount Jagged on the way to meeting the owner of international mountaineering company, Jagged Globe, was an irony not lost on me. For British mountaineer Steve Bell, Mount Jagged would be nothing more than a geographical bump in comparison to the elevations he has ascended.

But today, scaling high peaks is in Steve’s past and he’s embracing a new life on the more demure terrain of the Fleurieu and sharing his extraordinary experiences by writing his memoirs.

As an adventurer and expedition guide, Steve has achieved the mountaineer’s dream bucket list. He’s climbed the highest mountains on seven continents – referred to as the Seven Summits – including three expeditions to Everest. His 1993 Everest trip made global headlines as he became the first Brit to take a commercial expedition to Everest. His team included a sixty-year-old man, who at the time was the oldest man to have reached the summit. And, nearly three decades on, no one has again reached the same elevation on Everest’s west ridge as Steve did in 1992. These days, however, life is a lot less death defying. In his early sixties and dealing with an autoimmune disease which affects his back, his climbing is now limited. ‘My passion now is writing about my experiences,’ says Steve. Together with his South Australian wife, Rossy Reeves, Steve recently moved to the Fleurieu. He remarks how familiar the landscape feels, the rolling hills, cattle and granite reminding him of where he grew up in Devon, England.

Recounting his mountain experiences, Steve’s face lights up. He’s a passionate storyteller and has a way with words. The title for his coming-of-age book Virgin On Insanity published in 2016, juxtaposes his first sexual encounters with his early career, including climbing the north face of the Matterhorn at eighteen and the Eiger at twenty. As a young man he was drawn to the rush of mountaineering: ‘Doing things which were physically hard and feeling the tough elements ... after the suffering, the buzz just felt so good.’

Fear and danger also propelled the ‘high.’ ‘There’s a fascination to it, like our fascination with sharks, snakes and guns. Anything which threatens our safety has this strange appeal. In mountaineering the stakes are really high so there’s a real buzz,’ he says. He explores these feelings further in his current manuscript, writing ‘He doesn’t wish for death; it just happens to be a possible consequence >

Above: Early morning on the Balcony, 8400 metres on Everest. Below: Steve at Port Elliot.

of the need to prove himself, and he daren’t take the risk of avoiding it.’ He understands the stakes and their consequences intimately, having lost friends on Everest in the seventies and eighties. ‘It was like going to war,’ he says. ‘Young, strong men full of testosterone wanting to fight a war, to conquer and win. They don’t want to die but are prepared to put themselves on the line.’

The twinning of war and climbing has been significant in Steve’s career. After a harrowing experience climbing Annapurna III aged twenty-two, he reevaluated the dangers of climbing and took time out, taking up a post with the British Antarctic Survey for nine months. He then joined the Royal Marines for four years where he trained in mountain ranges under conditions designed to replicate warfare, involving logistical planning, a clear objective, teamwork and a real risk of dying. He gained more skills and began to ease back into climbing. In 1993, after military expeditions to India and Everest, he led his first commercial expedition to Everest.

Now, with a more mature perspective on his adventures, he is writing about his relationship to Everest and how it has changed over the last forty years. He’s reckoning with the recent growth of the ‘package tour’ approach to Everest while acknowledging his own role as an architect of that change. He explains that with the improvements in equipment and trip style, Everest is a ‘mountain getting lower.’ An expedition that used to take at least ten weeks, can now be done in four. Some people, at great expense, achieve pre-acclimatisation by sleeping in hyperbaric chambers before leaving home and then fly, rather than trek, into base camp. He believes this detracts from the authentic experience and undermines those who climb it by ‘fair means.’ ‘I sometimes feel quite resentful about people who just want the ego trip and the Everest tag,’ he says. ‘It becomes a process of getting to the summit by whatever means possible. That’s a pity.’

When Steve climbed Everest thirty years ago, it was an entirely different achievement to climbing Everest today – one which was much harder won. For Steve, it meant managing his ego and taking calculated risks in order to survive. ‘When you are on the mountain and you feel your fragility – how easy it would be to fall, sit down and fall asleep and never wake up again ... that’s the great leveller,’ he says. ‘Ego can’t stand up against that. Sometimes ego will stand up and then it’s too late. You don’t have the energy to get down or you’ve got frostbite and that’s where it’s gone wrong in the past for people. I’m more inclined to turn back than I am to push on, which is probably why I’m still alive. We are taught that risk is a bad thing, but we should take risks and learn which risks to take, or not.’

It goes without saying that lessons learned on the side of a mountain are just as life changing when employed back at sea-level. And while most decisions we make are not matters of life and death, they do provide opportunities – big and small – to make a difference in our lives and the lives of others, even where frostbite is not in play. ‘In life when faced with an easy or hard choice, the harder choice is always the one to follow,’ says Steve, ‘because that’s what leads us to progression.’

Change is cool

Story by Nina Keath.

This is the second in a series of features profiling climate leaders from across the Fleurieu Peninsula. In this issue, we meet the people working to cool and green our towns and suburbs.

Above: Jenni McGlennon heads up the City of Onkaparinga’s sustainability team. Photo by Jason Porter.

Heatwaves are one of climate change’s most ferocious calling cards. While the black summer of 2019-2020 showed the scale of destruction heatwaves can cause, what many do not know is that they also act quietly and perniciously on our towns, streets and right inside our homes.

Heatwaves are a ‘silent killer’, responsible for more deaths than any other natural disaster. The work of responding to this threat also largely happens quietly, away from the headlines and political struggles. Local councils are on the front line and these are just some of the quiet achievements of my colleagues at City of Onkaparinga as they work to build the resilience of our region. areas. The project revealed some obvious things – trees, vegetation, water and lighter colours all have a cooling effect – and some surprising things – dry, bare earth can be hotter than bitumen and the hottest of all materials is fake turf, which can be up to a staggering thirteen degrees hotter than real grass. Jenni’s work inspired every metropolitan council in Adelaide to do the same, resulting in an interactive online Adelaide Urban Heat Map, that allows residents to check their home’s vulnerability to heat.

This map showed where it was hot, but Jenni also wanted to know where it was cool, so she also mapped vegetation. Research tells us we should aim for thirty percent vegetation cover in urban areas to achieve optimal wellbeing. In Onkaparinga’s urban areas, the mapping revealed we’re averaging 12.5 percent. This gap led council to adopt an ambitious urban greening target and stimulated a host of collaborative strategies and on-ground action right across metropolitan Adelaide. >

Above left: David Gregory, urban planner for the City of Onkaparinga. Photo by Jason Porter. Right: Ian Seccafien heads up the planting work being done in hotter zones in the council. Since council’s greening target was initiated in late 2017, Ian’s tireless work ethic, and passion for trees of all kinds, has resulted in 35,000 new urban trees. Photo by Heidi Lewis.

Dry, bare earth can be hotter than bitumen and the hottest of all materials is fake turf, which can be up to a staggering thirteen degrees hotter than real grass.

Jenni reflects, ‘When I started this work in the early 1990s I had to explain over and over why the environment mattered… It was hard going and threatening for some people. Now I have to argue the why less and can focus on the how. This is still very challenging, but it means we have shifted… My patience is constantly challenged but there are committed people around the council and across the state who follow through every day. We all play our part.’

Dave Gregory is one of the many people following through on Jenni’s strategic work. As council’s urban designer, he’s taken the heat and vegetation mapping and assessed it against data on social and ecological disadvantage to create a sophisticated numerical scoring system that prioritises plantings in our hottest, most disadvantaged suburbs. His work built the case for significant state government Greener Neighbourhoods funding, resulting in thousands of additional trees being planted and real-world cooling and liveability benefits for our most vulnerable residents.

A humble man of rigour and empathy, Dave says, ‘I’m motivated to do this work because we have a responsibility to counter the effects of climate change and worrying patterns of development in outer Adelaide – single storied, eave-to-eave homes with no space for trees or gardens. Trees simply aren’t being planted on private land and we will be living with that legacy for decades.’ Climate change resilience is one thing, as Dave explains ‘there are so many social and economic benefits that spin off from tree-lined streets and gardens – health, safety, kids and the elderly getting out more, higher property values, amenity and wellbeing.’

While Dave secures the funding, it’s Ian Seccafien who’s responsible for the planting. If you thought the council chamber was political, you should try taking a call from the community about street trees. Ian uses goodwill and humour to diffuse tension and build shared ownership around the need to green our spaces. Since council’s greening target was initiated in late 2017, Ian’s tireless work ethic, and passion for trees of all kinds, has resulted in 35,000 new urban trees. Ian echoes Dave’s concerns about the loss of trees on private land, cautioning, ‘It’s too easy to remove a big tree from private land… there is a simplistic mindset that these can be easily replaced by planting more trees. The reality is… a new tree will take thirty plus years to get back to that size and we’ll never achieve the canopy cover we need if we’re only planting on public land.’

Phil Boulden and Paul Harding are council’s landscape architects. They’re the dream team who make sure Ian’s trees get the water they need. Phil says, ‘I started out with an engineering background building roads and hard surfaces, but I’m a bit of an environmentalist at heart. It used to be that the road design came first, then you’d try to fit trees around that. But then I learned about softer engineering like rain gardens, swales and biofilters that reduce flooding and improve water quality and also increase the vegetation, cooling and

Above left: Phil Boulden inspects ’stormwater inlets’ which passively irrigate the roots of the street plantings. Photo courtesy of Onkaparinga Council. Right: Scott Murray is part of a team using technology to optimise water use in local parks. Photo by Heidi Lewis.

‘It’s too easy to remove a big tree from private land… there is a simplistic mindset that these can be easily replaced by planting more trees. The reality is… a new tree will take thirty plus years to get back to that size.’

beauty of an area. Now we’re getting better at thinking about the streetscape as a whole and making sure we consider the human and environmental aspects up front.’

This was the approach he and Paul used for the Aldinga township upgrade in 2018. Paul explains, ‘The design provides tree canopy and shade to cool and mitigate the heat generated by the road and other sealed surfaces. Large, deciduous trees were selected to provide winter sun and summer shade. And by doing away with traditional kerbs and gutters, stormwater flows directly towards the tree roots.’ A similar outcome is achieved in McLaren Flat, via small TREENET Inlets in the kerb, providing a free, passive source of irrigation every time it rains.

Greg Ingleton, SA Water’s Manager of Environmental Opportunities, is helping us to find even more water savings. With disarming enthusiasm, he’s taking all we’ve learnt about the power of water and vegetation for cooling to trial innovative approaches to getting water into the landscape.

In partnership with Greg, the cheerful and unflappable Scott Murray has installed soil-moisture and air-temperature sensors in some of our local parks. Linking to the Bureau of Meteorology forecasts and sophisticated software, Greg and Scott have optimised council’s watering regimes, providing both water efficiency and cooling benefits. Greg says homeowners can achieve the same effect by watering their garden a few days prior to a heatwave rather than during it.

An interactive Cooling the Community map on the SA Water and council websites now allows residents to check the temperature of irrigated parks across Adelaide, with the option to shelter from heat waves in natural outdoor heat-refuges, rather than being forced to shelter indoors.

Greg’s next plan is to promote the benefits of misting systems around people’s outdoor entertainment areas, with a focus on low-income households. He enthuses, ‘A $40 misting kit, using a tiny amount of water, can reduce outdoor temperatures by up to 10°C and indoor temperatures by 3°C, reducing the need for expensive, carbonintensive air-conditioning.’ I tested Greg’s theory when I gifted my parents a misting system last Christmas and we’re all converts.

The work of my colleagues is yielding benefits but it’s incremental. And, just like the growth of a tree, it’s often invisible to the casual observer. However, it isn’t overstating it to say that vulnerable people will be less likely to be injured or die in heatwaves because of their steady perseverance, and our suburbs will be cooler, greener, more liveable, attractive and biodiverse. I think that’s pretty cool.

Next issue, I’ll share the stories of homeowners, builders and developers who’ve created climate resilient homes and gardens across the Fleurieu.