101 Things #83 - Ascending La Tour

The good folk who make up well-meaning sets of bucket-list items frequently throw in all sorts of physical challenges. Slog up this mountain here, plunge into that bottomless ocean chasm there, run until your lungs try to climb out of your throat to escape, that sort of thing. I tend to ignore these as I steadily add to my collection of anti-bucket-list tropes that the world knows only by the name of 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die.

However, I find myself strangely drawn to an idea proposed on the Location Rebel website. By "drawn" I certainly do not mean that I wish to do it, or to wish that I had done it once, or to suggest that you may wish to do it. What I mean is, I am moved to say what a ludicrous idea it is to

Walk to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Pic: www.ce.jhu.edu

The highest one may reach on the tower is 276m but this is only attainable by lift to the general public. Walkers may go no further than the second platform, a mere 116m above ground. The stairs leading on up from there are not accessible to the public.

That height is, nonetheless, pretty high. At some 380 feet it is the equivalent of a 34 floor building. I used to work on the tenth floor of a block at Waterloo and tried on most days to walk up. I could do it, but often had to stop by the seventh floor for breath and then struggled on, wheezing a little, to my desk and an essential cup of tea. To climb more than three times that height would have been doable but would have needed a fair amount of time and a number of rest breaks. But to climb up the full height of the Eiffel Tower, assuming one was allowed to do so, would be do to attempt something like an 80 floor building. This would not be fun. It would a gruelling slog up an unyielding metal staircase. The usual rule of thumb for hikers is to allow an hour for each 1000 foot of ascent, which is almost exactly what we have in this case.

So why have this one on your bucket-list? You can't do it anyway and if you could, it is just another endurance test. Why not ascend the staircase in your own home instead - the "faux-Everest" technique pioneered by this very column. The 984 feet of vertical ascent is the equivalent of just 106 strolls up my own stairs and can be accomplished in a couple of days or so. The views are not quite so compelling, I must concede, but there is plenty of tea to be had (unlike on the barren wastes of the upper Eiffel), it doesn't cost €25 either, and nor is there a queue.

I can cheerfully grow old [older: Ed] without ever worrying that I missed out on climbing the Eiffel Tower. In fact, I am fairly happy never having gone up it at all, given the length of the queues the last time I passed that way. I have no plans to wear out my own stair-carpet either. If Location Rebel and those of his ilk wish to try their luck on La Tour, good luck to them, and I am fairly sure that, when they finally stagger down and reel along the unforgiving concrete of the Quai Branly, they will be asking themselves why.