Modest life plan: become a surgeon,
have adventures, write books

Man mentored by famous mountaineer
Alfred Noyes finds satisfaction in Whitehorse

By Erling Friis-Baastad

"You say you enjoy it, but in fact, you don't..." admitted Dr Peter Steele recently from the comfort of a commodious, wing-back chair in the cosy, knotty-pine-lined living room of his home in Whitehorse. The elegant, craggy-faced surgeon turned GP wasn't talking about medicine. He wasn't referring to a four-month camel-trek he once took across the Sahara, looking for a legendary mountain either. And he was emphatically not reflecting on the appalling storm he endured on Mount Everest in 1971. He was talking about the sweat and tears that go into writing books.

For the writer in him, the satisfaction comes only when he holds the finished book in his hand and marvels, "Did I really do this?" It's a satisfaction the 68-year-old author-adventurer has had six times -- most recently with The Man Who Mapped the Arctic, a biography of 19th-century arctic explorer George Back, which made it onto the Globe and Mail's non-fiction best-seller list last fall.

Growing up in Gilford, England, Peter Steele had only one career in mind. "I never had any doubts that I would be a surgeon like my father," he says. His idea of a career in medicine shifted slightly but remained steady when he went to one of England's finer boys' schools. "At Charterhouse, one of the masters was mountaineer Wilfred Noyce, who was on the 1953 Everest expedition (in which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norguay climbed to the peak for the first time.) He took an interest in me and encouraged me to go to Britain's Outward Bound Mountain School." On that program the lad met Eric Shipton, another great climber and world traveller, who would become a subject of one of the doctor's books. Though he didn't realize it at the time, the three paths his life would take -- medicine, writing and adventuring -- were already well in motion.

At Cambridge, he joined an active mountaineering club. Between climbs in Wales, the Lake District, Scotland and the Alps, he began writing articles for mountaineering journals -- still with no intention of becoming an author. During his final undergraduate year, he and two pals headed to North Africa in search of "an 11,000-foot mountain that sits right bang in the middle of the Sahara. It had been rarely visited and no one had really climbed it." The trek took four months, and as Steele recalls, the camel ride was harder work than climbing. The next year, he and a friend took donkeys across the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Then it was back to London and medical school and a gruelling challenge of another sort. He received his medical degree in 1960.

"Around that time, I had a series of friends who were killed climbing," he says. "That put a severe brake on it. I wasn't any less interested in mountains, but less interested in getting killed there." As if to fill the gap for adventure this left the life in the young doctor, an opportunity opened up in northern Newfoundland and Labrador. In the early '60s, his duties took him into the back country by bush plane and dog sled -- experiences he drew on when writing The Man Who Mapped the Arctic four decades later.

CRISIS IN LABRADOR
Thinking back to his time in Labrador, Dr Steele calls it a formative experience that was a harbinger of his life to come. He tells of one emergency in which a 200-pound woman in a remote community went into labour, became toxemic and had an epileptic fit. The young doctor squeezed them both into a bush plane, which connected in Goose Bay to a scheduled flight south. He stayed with his patient all the way to Montreal. "I had no time to change out of my sealskins and mukluks. Sitting on the nice warm plane, I suddenly was surrounded by the smell of rotting fish." The powerful stench still wafted off his thawing mukluks when he arrived at a friend's home in Westmount where he'd been invited to spend the night. They refused to let him in unless he left his footwear outside. The smelly journey had a happy ending; the woman and her baby lived.

A KINGLY INTEREST
Not long after, on a visit home to London, the newly wed doctor was introduced to the king of Bhutan, who invited him to visit his tiny country, then all but off limits to foreigners. The chance came in 1967 when Steele received a grant to study thyroid goitre, endemic to mountainous regions where glaciation has leeched iodine out of the soil. He and his wife Sarah, a nurse, and their two children, Adam, three and a half, and, Judith, one and a half, became "probably the first Westerners to do a complete crossing of the country."

All in all, the children had a marvellous time, says Dr Steele. The one near-disaster was charmingly benign. "We started off the journey with 12 bright-yellow plastic soothers for Judith. One by one they got dropped and trampled on." They tied the last one around little child's neck, but she dropped that one too and a big raven swooped down and stole it. Steele recalls the family chasing down a trail, tossing rocks into the air, trying to get the precious object back. The raven eventually relented and dropped it, to the comfort of both Judith and her parents.

Back in England two years later, Dr Steele embarked on another great adventure. "I suddenly realized what a spectacularly interesting thing we'd had a chance to do." Namely, write a book about a region of the world about which very little was then known. Two and Two Halves In Bhutan, published in 1970, was his first book.

He returned to Bhutan shortly afterward and hiked into the Everest region. There, in a teahouse, he met an American climber who was reconnoitring for an attempt on the 29,028-foot mountain -- and seeking a doctor for a 1971 expedition. "The expedition itself was a failure. We had appalling weather," Dr Steele recalls. "One of the climbers died. I was on the attempted rescue. We were way up at about 25,000 feet in the night in a storm trying to locate this guy. It was a horrific experience."

Looking back on it 33 years later, he speculates that had the expedition been a success, a better known author might have picked up the story. As it was, Dr Steele recorded the ill-fated attempt in Doctor On Everest. "I wrote most of it at night, waiting to operate," he remembers.

Sobered by the experience, he turned down an opportunity to climb Everest in 1973 as part of an expedition that succeeded.

"I was fairly disappointed," he says, clearly understating the depth of his feeling. To cheer him up, his wife suggested a three-month hitchhiking jaunt around South America with their nine-year-old son. It seemed to do the trick.

Not the sort of family to be intimidated by the unknown, in 1975 the Steeles picked up again, this time moving to the Yukon where they've lived ever since. As often happens when surgeons take up rural practice, Steele became a family practitioner. As it turned out, the switch and the closer contact with many more patients fuelled his writing. "I always keep an ear open for a good story," he explains, " if you're patient enough and let people up here talk, they all have stories to tell."

The family thrived in the Yukon and in nearby lakeside town Atlin, BC, where they established a second home and which became the subject of the doctor's 1995 book Atlin's Gold. New northern wilderness experiences also formed the basis of his one of his most popular books, a guide to back-country medicine called Far From Help.

The move north also focused attention away from mountaineering and onto canoeing and hiking. Now a widower, he continues to ski nearly every winter day. (The youngest of his three children, Lucy, is a Yukon heroine, having pursued cross-country skiing all the way to the 1992 Olympics.)

In 1995, he reduced his work load at the clinic to two half days a week to devote more time to writing. Eric Shipton: Everest and Beyond and the Back biography were the result. Not that he was exactly desk bound. Ever a wanderer, between books he's managed to fit in travels to Africa, Siberia and Mongolia, among other colourful places. His next project: his memoirs.