The story of the climber Max Polyakov from EOS team, who dreamed of climbing the Mountain Everest
Climbing requires many skills as is it not a usual hobby for a normal office person. Max Polyakov can now be considered as a truly skilful alpinist. His story is quite fascinating. He was born in India to a family of British alpinists, in which his father, John Polyakov, was a highly experienced climber with a record leading up teams of professional to the highest destinations of the world. And so, as the metaphor says, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the trunk,” describes the life of Max Polyakov’s family in a perfect fashion.
Indeed, from the early earl of Max Polyakov’s adolescence, he started hiking with the EOS team on weekly basis. That was partly due to the fact that one of the team’s members was Max Polyakov’s future wife. Her name is Jessica, who is also a descendant of a British family that settled in India in the 1960s. So, the climbing experience of the two started from reaching the top of Lhotse within 5 days. This experience set the two for a long story together.
Max Polyakov’s team, the EOS, is another interesting group that is worthy of attention. It is an Indian-based climbing team with members from around the world. Its leader, John Sepp, is a US citizen who climbed Everest several times, and he is truly capable of leading the EOS team to reach it one more time. The crew has 15 regular members who do not hold back at any given challenge. As what they do best is climbing on top of mountains, to set records as the most enduring human beings alive.
The days that Max Polyakov realised that he enjoyed climbing was in 1996 when he first went hiking with his father to the mountains of Kilimanjaro. They did not go too high as max was still young, but they wild camped for 5 nights during their hike. The experience was a truly challenging one for Max Polyakov as he did not know much about surviving in the wild. Yet, his father John did a great job at leading both to their full enjoyment.
The only problems that they had to watch out for were the snakes and other wild animals that could easily kill them both. But John taught Max Polyakov well on how to handle such dangers. He gave him clear instruction, “do not provoke any animal that you see,” and “they are also extremely scared of you so, be kind to them.” Those bits of advice set the mind of young Max Polyakov just in the right direction, as he was not scared of venomous animals any more.
New Delhi hiking team EOS
Wishing to take the hiking hobby a step further, Max Polyakov joined a local hiking team in New Delhi called EOS with the leader John Sepp, who has a dear friend of Max Polyakov’s father. And so, during their first months of membership, the team travelled to Europe to hike in Tatras mountains. They stayed there for 10 days, but they were not allowed to wild camp in those mountains as the local authorities preserved the wildlife, including bears and lynx.
This experience was overall a great one, but Max Polyakov did not test his survival skills just yet. The team camped on camping sites and sometimes at hostels, where they found available showers and kitchen utilities at their fullest. Some of the enjoyable parts were watching the nature of the Tatras which included lakes and rivers.
After coming back from the Tatras hiking trip, Max Polyakov invited Jessica to go on another trip together to the Kilimanjaro. This was the time in which they were both teenagers and had a lot of ambitions towards climbing and hiking in the most challenging sites in the world. Therefore, the most ambitious idea of them all—was to climb mountain Everest. But they both knew that it was not an easy task. Many professional climbers died during their reach to the world’s top spot, and others simply lost their limbs and parts of their faces because of frostbites.
Altogether, climber Max Polyakov with his EOS team did a great job at climbing all around the Kilimanjaro. The leader, John Sapp, and 15 other members worked hard to get their team on a secure trip to the mountains. Yet, there are incidents that are worth mentioning as they are both fascinating in terms of how they managed to come out alive and how the team did not lose their ambitions and continued climbing in the future.
One of the incidents took place in 2003, in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine. The team got lost and failed to find a source of water for a few days. It was indeed a terrible experience, but they felt like they were all safe from dangerous animals. But the inability to find a source of water for a few days did increase some wariness in the team, and the crew members started to apply their survival savvy to escape that difficult situation.