'Ed! We made it!' Other trekkers pause to stare. In the world of adventure, Göran is a celebrity, not just for being daring and successful, but for his sense of fun, for being the life and soul of a high-altitude party. 'Double thumbs up!' he says, the ultimate accolade in the Kropp lexicon. He happily agrees to have his picture taken with his fans. The thumbs are up again, this time for the camera, the smile never off his face. That was less than three months ago. I have to keep reminding myself that Göran Kropp is dead.
'Larger than life' did not do Göran justice. He had, for example, gunned down a polar bear during an expedition to the North Pole. As anecdotes go, taking on a thousand pounds of teeth, claws and furry muscle is a show-stealer. And he loved to entertain. Before our climb up Kilimanjaro, our group lounged around a hotel room listening to Göran while he transported us to the High Arctic.
He and companion Ola Skinnarmo had been putting up their tents for the night when the bear caught wind of them. 'We got really worried when it started running towards us, y'know, doing the double back-paw thing,' he says and then his imposing physique takes over. His thick arms become the rear legs of the bear, pumping across the flat brilliance of the Arctic, rushing forward to attack its prey. Suddenly we got a very real idea of what it was like to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with a big animal that wants to eat you.
Audiences all over the world howled with laughter at the 35-year-old's on-stage antics, for the same reasons that critics lined up to cut him down. He was funny, and in the sombre, self-important world of adventuring, that was both revelation and heresy. In Britain, we have become used to a sequence of earnest, posh and often bearded men trudging across frozen wastes, or up snowy mountains, before coming home to lecture at the Royal Geographical Society.
This wasn't Göran. 'I've been to so many lectures that are boring. I want the audience to feel that I really have fun in the mountains. That's what I want to give. That it's life to go to the mountains, not just hardship and death.' In the days since his death, I have tried to analyse and comprehend this. Was he kidding himself? What was his motivation? What did he get out there that made it worth the risk?
His dad Gerard had been a climber and as a kid Göran would watch him through binoculars on the Italian Dolomites. They walked up hills together at home in Sweden. Gerard was a lawyer, eventually working for human rights organisations in the Middle East, but his marriage failed and Göran lived with his mother. Climbing became a thing of the past.
As a teenager Göran was almost uncontrollable. He got into punk and reggae, moved into his own apartment at 16 and became a 24-hour party person. He sought out the Swedish singer Eva Dahlgren backstage after a gig to ask if she could give him a lift home. (She put him up in a hotel and Kropp toured with her for a few days.)
He would pull pranks like locking the doors of the local courtroom and hiding the key. It was fairly mindless, but Kropp hated restriction or regulation of any kind. So it seems a little surprising that his next move was to join the army, where he opted for the paratroopers and tried out for the Swedish special forces. He lived Oscar Wilde's maxim that nothing succeeds like excess.
But military discipline didn't sit well with Göran's sense of freedom. When he met another young soldier called Mats Dahlin poring over climbing books he decided to reacquaint himself with his father's passion. He and Dahlin drew up a list of objectives that would carry them to higher and higher altitudes, culminating with Everest itself.
That was the other strand woven into the fabric of Göran's life of adventure: ambition. And not just to be accepted by other climbers. He loved that life, of being unlimited, beyond the conventional. Göran seems to have been a magnet for extreme experiences - such as the time he contracted typhoid in Ecuador and lay delirious in a doss-house next to a paranoid who claimed to be Bruce Lee's brother and kept a hand gun under his pillow. They were good yarns, but Göran wanted to do something exceptional, something unprecedented. Something that would count in the 'real' world.
From the days of Scott and Shackleton onwards, adventure has been about myth management as well as planting flags. To make your mark and generate the kind of cash required to keep returning to the world's more remote corners you have to give the public something it wants to see or read about.
Technology has brought us closer in than ever before. We can watch the latest generation of explorers, smothered in sponsors' logos, plodding through an exotic landscape, on cable TV or log on to read their breathless dispatches on the net.
Göran's career encapsulated all these changes and he stumbled into most of the pitfalls too. He was most famous for getting on his bicycle in his home town of Jönköping and pedalling off to Nepal, alone, with all his mountaineering equipment and supplies on a trailer. Then he climbed Everest, alone, without Sherpas to carry his equipment or breathing bottled oxygen. Then he cycled home.
In conception, Göran's plan was brilliant. It was a crazy stunt and it made him famous. With that kind of material and his manic lecture shtick, Göran couldn't fail. He did a thousand shows, each earning him a few thousand dollars. It made Göran a millionaire.
But his year-long effort spent climbing Everest had credibility too. It is surprisingly easy to get publicity as an adventurer, mainly because many media organisations either can't or won't discriminate between what is innovative and what is attention-seeking froth.
But Göran was not some media-tart with no track record. When he arrived at Base Camp carrying all his own gear, Göran was dubbed the 'Crazy Swede' by the top American mountaineers sipping lattes and chatting on their satphones. The year was 1996, a notorious season when a combination of complacency, bad luck and bad weather killed 11 people. Göran's expedition, however, was a triumph.
If many of those on the mountain thought he was one herring short of a smorgasbord, Göran's crazy exterior masked meticulous preparation and huge self-discipline. As a paratrooper preparing for his first expeditions in the early Nineties he couldn't afford his rent and air tickets to the Himalaya so he moved out of his apartment and lives in a tent pitched in a gravel pit. Preparing for expeditions, he would set his alarm clock randomly and the later he woke the harder he would train. If he woke at 6am then he would march in full kit for 60km. Late starts must have been frustrating.
On Everest, Göran broke his own trail through the mountain's notorious icefall above Base Camp, a relentlessly shifting glacier that is normally equipped with ladders and ropes to protect climbers. He was also the first to try for the summit that season, in mid-April, but climbed too slowly.
Running out of daylight, he turned back a few hundred feet from the summit. Many climbers would have given up then, but Göran went back twice, reaching the top a few days after the terrible storm that killed so many of those he had met at Base Camp. He passed their bodies frozen in the snow where they had collapsed.
Very quickly, meandering up the sticky trails through the forests which fringe the base of Africa's highest mountain, all of us understood that the lunatic Swede who seemed to live right on the edge was in fact a shrewd and thoughtful operator. For most of us, climbing Kilimanjaro was tough and relentless, but Göran was relaxed, as though on a trip to the beach. Sitting on a boulder, looking up a few thousand feet to the summit of the mountain, he became serious and reflective.
'You do this thing on stage of being a crazy Swede, but you're not really crazy at all, are you?' I asked him.
'No,' he said. The Viking cliché was put aside for the evening.
'You do seem to judge things very precisely.'
Göran allowed himself a rueful grin. 'I hope so.'
The polar bear incident is a good example. Skiing to the North Pole was part of what Göran described as the 'triple crown' of adventure. Climbing Everest was the first part and reaching the South Pole would have been the last. Starting from the Russian Arctic island of Mys Arkticheskiy in early 2000, Göran and Ola Skinnarmo aimed to ski unsupported to the North Pole and then return, a round-trip of 1,250 miles.
Göran had skied during his stint in the military and like many Swedes found cross-country second nature. But the Arctic held unexpected dangers. 'You know,' he told me, 'it's really boring. The closer you get to the North Pole, the flatter it becomes. You're skiing along in your own world, relaxing. I was too relaxed.' This is not something Ranulph Fiennes ever admitted.
But then, part of Göran's problem was talking so ingenuously. It left him wide open to attack in his home country. I asked him again about the killing of the polar bear.
'So you had a rifle with you?'
'No, a hand gun.'
'What, like a Magnum?'
'That's right.' He paused. He wanted accuracy, not approximation, just as he did preparing for his adventures. 'It was a .44 Magnum.'
Göran held the gun in his bare hands for half an hour, risking frostbite in the freezing air, calculating precisely the moment when an attack became inevitable. And at that moment he pulled the trigger.
Göran would talk about the environmental impact big expeditions make. He even mounted his own clean-up of Everest, removing the detritus left by previous expeditions. His views were well meant but environmental moralising left him vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy. And when he shot the polar bear, another sort of predator came to haunt him.
The writer Jan Guillou, creator of Coq Rouge, Scandinavia's James Bond, attacked Göran in his newspaper column under a headline which accused him of being an international criminal. Guillou claimed that Göran's hero status meant no one in Sweden dared say a word against him, but after his article appeared dozens of journalists waded in. It was a miserable time for Göran. From being a hero in Sweden he had become a villain.
Out in the Arctic things got worse. Göran's lack of concentration skiing across the vast whiteness of the ice resulted in his thumb freezing inside his mitten where it was trapped against his ski pole's leash. When he took the mitt off that night he realised he had suffered a severe frostbite injury. After more than a decade of high-altitude mountaineering, Göran knew what the injury meant.
'I realised that I would ski to the North Pole and probably lose my thumb. I was really disappointed. I'd made a basic mistake.' He called in a rescue and flew back to Sweden. His thumb turned black but when Göran pulled off the wizened carapace of dead flesh a month later his thumb was still intact.
Before, Göran's antics had usually charmed the Swedish media, but now his jokes were cast as puerile. One journalist wrote how he deserved to lose the thumb for shooting a polar bear. 'I felt like a hunted man,' Göran told me, seemingly unaware of the irony.
Determined to clear his name, Göran started a libel action against Guillou and announced that if he lost he would abandon Sweden altogether. When he lost, he sat down at his computer and bought a condo in Seattle. He clearly felt happier in America where celebrity didn't seem to carry the same threat as it did in Sweden. Magazines like Outside and National Geographic, still surfing on the tide of Everest mania, beat a path to his door.
But Göran knew that he still needed one more big adventure to tip the scales forever in his favour. He conceived the ultimate expedition, the last great challenge that he intended to make his own. Starting from his new base in Seattle, he planned to sail to McMurdo Sound, the setting-off point for expeditions, drag his boat on to the shore of Antarctica, trek the thousand miles to the South Pole in six or seven weeks and then turn around and retrace his route all the way home.
There was the small matter that he hadn't sailed in his life and that everyone thought him crazy. Then there was the million dollars he needed to fit out a boat. But Göran was never happier than when he had an apparently insurmountable challenge to overcome.
Over the years I've got to know the tone of voice at the other end of the line that means someone else has died in the mountains. Göran had been killed on a short climb in Washington State after falling 75 ft onto a rock shelf. He was roped but something went wrong anyway. After all the danger he had faced high on Everest, the circumstances of his death seem banal.
People ask me why anyone would willingly risk their lives for something as trivial as climbing a mountain. I find it almost impossible to articulate an answer. People take risks, it's part of being human. We drive too fast, cut corners, marry the wrong people. Some of us acknowledge how fragile it all is - most of us leave that thought in the shadows. All I can say of Göran's death is that he lived how he was and did not have the air of a man who had found the world a disappointing place.
