ONE COULD SAY, quite literally, that the remarkable life of Helen Lee has been spent reaching for the sky.
The Arklow-born architect, now an Australian citizen resident in London after more than 20 years in Sydney and Tasmania, is currently attempting her greatest challenge yet: to climb Mount Everest, and to become in so doing, technically, the first Australian woman to achieve this feat. As I write, there are problems: having reached Camp Three, the highest level left before the final assault on the summit itself, Lee had to return to Kathmandu with an injured Sherpa guide, one of whose colleagues was tragically killed a fortnight ago in an avalanche. Lee has now returned to Base Camp, ready for another try.
Mysteriously, another Sherpa guide her group had employed has had to retire after being poisoned, in a scenario which is as yet far from clear.
But this indomitable woman is not afraid of or inexperienced in physical risk. As a teenage girl in Arklow, at the age of 14, she was “economical with the truth” when applying for a summer job as a lifeguard, diving off the pier head and swimming a half mile out to conduct a faux rescue to establish her credentials, when the age qualification was 16. She got the job.
After qualifying as an architectural technician at Bolton Street College of Technology in Dublin (now part of DIT), Helen immediately took off for Australia, where at the University of Tasmania she took two further degrees, becoming an architect proper and a specialist in environmental science.
You might think that with all this going on, and, later, working as an architect in Sydney, sport would have to take a back seat in her life. Not a bit of it. Practising judo, Helen, a small-boned woman who is about 5ft 6in tall, became a stunt performer and sky-diver. Once again being somewhat vague about her age, Helen applied at the age of 30 for a job on what she describes as a “Japanese Indiana Jones film” being shot in Australia, where she and a companion had to jump from roof to roof of carriages on a train travelling at over 70mph.
“I started very late,” she recalls today of her career in stunt-playing. “So, I had to tell them I was younger than I was; I was 30, but the cut-off age was 26.” Next up was sky-walking and sky-diving, which Lee, describes casually as “the usual stuff,” which led in time to a job in England, sky-walking on a bi-plane over Kent for an advertising shoot. This episode she describes as “really just a minor thing”.
At home in Sydney recovering from a sports injury and, infuriatingly bored, Lee searched for the next danger-fix on the internet, and it was then she came across an 850km ski race to the North Pole from Resolute Bay in Canada, being organised by Josh Wishart. Despite never having skied in her life, she applied and got a place on one of the six teams.
“Our ambition was not to come last. We came fifth.” Lee’s first mountaineering adventure was what she says was “really a stroll” up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa’s highest peak, which she made accompanied only by African porters.
Much more challenging was her conquest of South America’s two highest peaks, Ojos del Salado in Chile, and Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, both over 7,000 metres. The latter climb required particularly strong determination, being surmounted only on a third attempt.
“The first time I got bronchitis, and had to turn back. The second attempt, three weeks later, we had to abandon about six hours from the summit because of the (appalling) weather,” she recounts. “I had to go home then. But I returned a year later, and this time we had no trouble in glorious weather. But they [the Andes] were much tougher, much more difficult than anything I had previously done.” Further internet research threw up the Everest challenge, which Lee is undertaking with a Belfast-based adventure holidays specialist, Gavin Bates.
The internet has been a vital tool for her, but she has these words of warning for those thinking of following in her footsteps: “The opportunities are endless [in adventure holidays] but it’s important to research everything thoroughly.”
Some of these opportunities don’t come cheap; Lee’s present adventure up Everest is costing her €27,000, and she has had to take two months off from her architectural job in London.
“That’s why I’m always so poor,” she moans about this. “I don’t spend money on clothes. You make sacrifices to do the things you want to. I don’t regret it.” Describing her motivation, Helen Lee recalls, not surprisingly, that she always had an adventurous streak. “Challenging myself is the thing that appeals. There was always that sense of finding what’s out there.”
Now in her early 50s, Lee is still extraordinarily physically fit. Will she continue with adventure sports, despite her age (not that this has ever stopped her before)?
“The older you get, the less explosiveness you have. You tailor your adventure to your ambition,” she says.
So, after Everest, what’s next? “I’m going to walk across Antarctica.” What, all of it? “Yes, from one side to the other, via the South Pole.”