Adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes: Spiders terrified me Sir Ranulph, 68, who was the first person to visit both the North and South Poles, then decided to conquer his vertigo and scale Everest. I thought, 'Well, I'm 60 now and I've still got this stupid vertigo thing. By confronting it, I could get rid of it. Last month, a court heard that the adventurer suggested fake "accidents" during a filmed trip to Ecuador, in which a woman climber was injured. Natalie Harrison, 38, hit her head and suffered neck injuries in two stunts designed to produce more exciting footage for a television documentary. Harrison volunteered for the hair-raising stunts, first "pretending" to fall down a crevasse in a glacier, then later to fall again, this time during a climb. Sir Ranulph "suggested" to her that she perform the crevasse fall because he "was not willing to perform it himself," the Appeal Court was told.