Michael Thexton

I then went into teaching accountants because that was a job a bit like Pete's jobs.

You could teach a course for accountants and then you could take

a couple of months off yeah if you wanted to and do something else and i decided that i would try and do some adventurous things so i went to china as a backpacker in the summer of 1985. i don't really have the appetite for being a backpacker either it was uh that was pretty hard but you know at least at least i'd sort of done something i'd gone somewhere

interesting and come back with some traveller's tales and that could have been what I would do after that.

And so they had an expedition in his memory, which went to Kenya and they climbed Mount Kenya.

My friends who I'd gone climbing with, with Pete, they happened to be also in Kenya that summer.

And I got a postcard from them saying, have met the Pete Thexton Memorial Expedition.

Pete will be turning in his grave, that these guys were perhaps not quite as competent climbers as Pete had been.

But at the beginning of 1986, they said, we had a really good trip to Kenya and we are going to go to Lobsang Spire, this last mountain that Pete climbed.

And we're going to, you know, this is the area where Pete died.

Would Mike like to come and be the base camp manager?

So I was supposed to be the base camp manager.

Obviously, I had to go.

There's no way I was not going to take that opportunity.

I would never get another opportunity to go to the place.

They weren't planning to go to base camp at Broad Peak, but it's only a couple of days further on from where we were going to be based.

And so we reckoned I could probably walk up there with some equipment

companions.

And so that's what we did in July of 1986.

The thing that I find amazing now looking back, I suddenly thought my parents took me to the airport, you know, exactly the same as they had taken Pete to the airport.