Google's Dan Fredinburg was 'charismatic and always the centre of attention'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/26/google-dan-fredinburg-everest-avalanche

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In the scale of what’s happened in Nepal, the death of a single individual maybe doesn’t add up to all that much, but if there was one person who I felt sure would survive the devastating avalanche that swept through Everest base camp, it was Dan Fredinburg. He was one of life’s lucky people. A charismatic, outspoken, social media-obsessed, Google executive who was pretty much always where he liked to be: at the centre of attention. Only it turned out I was wrong. Dan didn’t make it.

Related: Google executive Dan Fredinburg among victims of Everest avalanche

Tom Briggs, the marketing director for Jagged Globe, the Sheffield-based operator, with whom he was attempting to climb Everest, confirmed that he had been killed by the avalanche that swept down the side of Pumori mountain and into the heart of base camp, right where Jagged Globe had made its camp. Briggs said that the group had seen the avalanche coming and had tried to make a run for it and while he rest of the team made it to safety – though two of them, Paul Greenan from Dublin and Richard Brooks from Sydney sustained broken limbs, pelvis and ribs – Dan didn’t.

I’ve just returned from two weeks with Dan on the long trek in to Everest base camp with the rest of the Jagged Globe team and he was the group’s natural extrovert. A teller of tall tales, a dedicated Instagrammer, a serial entrepreneur, he had been at Camp 1, above the Khumbu icefall, last year when the avalanche struck that had killed sixteen people and told me how he’d thought he was going to die then.

“There was this massive shudder and I thought I was going to die. It was terrifying. I grabbed my helmet and my ice axe and rushed out of the tent and threw my ice axe into the ground. Basically, we were the last people through the icefall before it happened.” He decided to come back and try again “because I took my lead from the Sherpas and they way they handled it, that Buddhist thing. Our Sherpa lost his brother and you could tell how sad he was. And then he said, ‘I must go and tell the family’. And we were like, ‘No, no, it’s too soon…’ And he said, ‘No, I was upset because I was thinking of all the ways in which I would miss my brother but I was being selfish. Because I know my brother is in a better place.’ That way of looking at life really affected me.”

When all climbs on Everest were cancelled last year, he said he didn’t have any problems accepting the news. “I realised I hadn’t come to climb Everest,” he said. “I’d come to spend time with myself.”

And get to the top, I pointed out. “And get to the top,” he agreed after a moment.

He told me how he’d gone on a nine-day Vipassana silent retreat in Nepal after the avalanche last year, and like all good techie west coasters, he was into meditating, but he had an obviously competitive edge that had served him well in his career so far. A software engineer by training, he’d been involved with a long list of startups but his most recent role was at Google where he was director of privacy at Google X, the company’s highly secretive, cutting edge ideas lab most famous for giving the world Google’s self-driving car.

He’d grown up on a farm in Arkansas but had shown an early wilful streak when he left home at 15, a streak that had served him well as the co-founder of the Google Adventure Group, two of whose members were with him at Everest base camp and who’d received sponsorship from a dizzying list of companies and products – everything from underpants to Google itself – to reach the summit.

Non-disclosure agreements had been signed and the Google press office refused to confirm exactly what Dan described as the “two or three different Google projects” out there were doing, but it was an open secret that one of them involved taking a Google Streetview camera to the summit of the world’s tallest mountain.

It was, possibly, his last big mountain. “I’m not a climber, I’m an adventurer,” he said. And while, Everest attracts people who want to tick off the world’s “seven summits” – the tallest mountains on seven continents – Dan had other ideas. “I’m doing the six summits,” he said. Six summits? “Any mountaineer will tell you the seven summits is a bullshit concept anyway,” he said. Another of the summits he climbed, Carstenz Pyramide in Papua, Indonesia, had involved a side-trip through the world’s biggest gold mine and one of his favourite stories: how he’d ended up in jail but had secured proof of the mine’s illegal expansion plans. His next plan was to kite-surf across Antarctica to Mount Vinson.

His greatest passion on the trek up, apart from finding a 3G signal and playing rap music from a speaker on the back of his pack, was playing Tigers and Goats, a local version of chess, taking on all-comers – climbers, Sherpas, trekkers, random elderly porters passing through the lodges. He usually won.

The last news I had of him was via Jagged Globe’s blog. Chris Groves, the assistant expedition leader, posted a photo of him in a lycra onesie, it was a typical Dan stunt, a promotional shot for one of the companies which had sponsored him. “They said they were Ninja suits,” said Chris. It was from the same set that his younger sister, Megan, posted the news of his death on Instagram.

Another type of person might have wanted another, different sort of last portrait, one which didn’t involve them dressed in a camouflage-coloured onesie but it suited Dan, his out-there-ness, his talent for promotion, and his dazzling, charismatic, properly adventurous personality right down to the ground.