Miles Hilton-Barber, a blind adventurer born in Zimbabwe, has defied his disability to conquer some of the world's most formidable challenges, including summiting Mount Kilimanjaro and Mont Blanc and climbing to 17,500 feet in the Himalayas.
Born in 1948, Hilton-Barber initially hoped to join the Royal Rhodesian Air Force, following in the footsteps of his father, who headed the nation's civil aviation. However, he failed the eyesight test. Three years later, he was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a rare genetic condition that also affected his brother Geoff and eventually led to total blindness. "The first sign was when I was hitch-hiking around Australia with a friend aged 19 and I realised my night vision was going," he recalled. "Until the age of 50, I believed blindness was a bad thing."
That outlook changed when Geoff became the first blind person to sail solo from Africa to Australia in a self-built yacht. The achievement served as a wake-up call. In the past 20 years, Hilton-Barber has been the first blind person to haul a sledge over 250 miles of Antarctica, completed the 150-mile Marathon des Sables across the Sahara, the Siberian Ice Marathon, an 11-day race from the Gobi Desert to the Great Wall of China, driven a lap of the Malaysian Grand Prix circuit at 145mph, made over 40 sky-dives and a solo Kamikaze Skeleton run down Lillehammer's Olympic bobsleigh track.
Among his most personal triumphs was overcoming claustrophobia during a wreck dive in the Red Sea, and surviving a deadly storm while flying a microlight from London to Sydney. In the Himalayas, his guide Jon Cook described the moonlight on the peaks as looking like "great big ice cream cones" with stars "as bright as diamonds". Hilton-Barber could sense the "absolute silence" and called it an "awesome, beautiful moment".
He finds similar peace in vast, empty landscapes such as Antarctica, the Sahara and the Himalayas. "Surrounded by thousands of square miles of nothing but ice, snow or sand, you realise you are not as special or important as you thought you were and also how fragile life is," he said. He noted that with about 80 per cent of information received through the eyes, cutting that off makes you listen more.
