He recalls the date of his death day — October 10, 1981 — as easily as he does his birthday. He was 20 years old, rock climbing on Mount Arapiles, not far from where he lives now on a secluded rural property bordering Grampians National Park in western Victoria. His climbing partner dislodged a two tonne rock from above where Muir was resting on a ledge. It struck him in the back, broke ribs and punctured his lungs. He remembers being conscious of only two things: He couldn’t breathe. He was dying. His distraught partner held his head as the colour drained from Muir’s face. No pulse, no breathing. He began CPR but all he could feel was crunching ribs and it was no use anyway because Muir was gone. “The next thing I know is I’ve drifted away from my body and I’m looking down on myself, dead on the cliff. I’m floating up and out, and as I get farther away the image starts ­getting blurry around the edges and I get smaller and smaller. Then it just fades away.”

Doctors told him his body must have made one last attempt to restart itself. He somehow got a pinch of air into the bottom of one lung and started shallow breathing. He was back from the dead.

“Dying was the best thing that happened in my life,” he says, as we sit by a tranquil waterhole outside his home. “It cemented everything I believed to be true. That life is a precious gift and that I had to make the most of it. I knew then that happiness comes from the world you create within yourself.”

Life is just another journey with an end. “I’m usually pretty disappointed at the end of a journey,” Muir says. He knows the end isn’t the aim, it’s what happens along the way that counts. As the great adventurer approaches 60 he knows the physical adventures will one day wind down. But he’ll always be free to journey to that place of beauty inside his own head, the one he’s spent a lifetime furnishing with the rich tapestry of the natural world. “When I’m old I’ll just sit out here and watch the changing colours on the mountain, make a fire. I’m very accepting of the reality that’s around me. That’s part of the journey.”

But he’s not there yet. He’s plotting a return to the big mountains. A glaciated mountain, location: planet Earth. He plans his adventures without ­fanfare, doesn’t announce ambitions in advance, won’t be goaded into revealing goals. “The goal might be irrelevant,” he says with a wink, “but it’s good to have one. It gets you off the couch.”

He starts every day sitting up in bed watching the morning news. The screen isn’t a TV but a window to the real world. Mostly it’s good news. Past the waterhole that gravity-feeds the garden is the huge, cleared paddock where kangaroos graze. Beyond is the classic dull green of Australian bush that grows like stubble on the lower slopes of the mountains. Muir calls the prominent sandstone peaks that tower over his land the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” To the right of the house is Chicken World, where 40 or 50 chooks have the run of a feral-free utopia among the fruit trees. The vegie garden is turning over good amounts of vegetables — radishes, silverbeet, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, artichoke. Everything is circular here. The beetroot leaves go to the chooks, the manure from the chooks goes to the fruit trees, the excess fruit goes back to the chooks. The 60ha property, Inanna, that he shares with his wife Suzy and their Jack Russells Toby and Charlie is completely off the grid. Rotating solar panels chase the sun and rainwater is piped from the roofs into the waterhole. Life is stripped down to its essentials. They have a fridge, but it’s never turned on. The sheep had to go because preserving the meat meant ­firing up the generator to power the freezer, which couldn’t be justified. Their protein comes from the chooks and rabbits that Muir shoots, usually when they interrupt his meditating. “My evening meditations often end with a bang,” he confesses.

Muir’s desert journeys, using the template of nomadic hunter-gatherers, have become his blueprint for living. What happens in the desert doesn’t stay in the desert. He’s imported the ­lessons gleaned from the wild to his home. Live simply, carry only what you need, because anything else is a burden. Be self-sufficient, don’t take existence for granted. Members of the public can come and stay at Inanna on a World Expeditions “Off the Grid” farmstay in November to hear his stories and learn the secrets of surviving off the land in a domestic ­setting. At 58, Muir’s spent his life guiding himself and others round the harshest environments on Earth; now he guides others around his home.

In a corner of the living room are a dozen ­moggies repurposed as evening wear. Muir made the cat skin poncho for a fancy dress party years ago. Come as your favourite explorer was the theme. Other partygoers would have been justified going as Jon Muir, but Muir went one better. He chose to go as the first person to cross the ­Bering Sea — or land bridge, as it was about 15,000 years ago when the first paleolithic hunter-­gatherers ventured from Asia to the Americas. It was these early explorers, like the Polynesians who paddled the Pacific seeking new lands, that Muir most models his adventures on. “For most of human history our journey was about going hunting and pushing yourself. Often there were dangerous creatures. You faced great danger and risk, and that was normal. I love that intensity.”

Mountaineering taught him about patience and solace. In the mountains sometimes the only place you can retreat to is the world inside your head, so you’d better make it hospitable in there. Muir’s secret is he’s fashioned a place within himself he can retreat to when times get tough. If you don’t have that place, you won’t get far. “I learnt to be able to retreat into the world inside my mind, and be comfortable there. That world is beautiful, and there are all sorts of places I can go. That place… that place is a place of love. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a place of love.”

He speaks the word “Yeah” in a way that furnishes that bland monosyllable with an emphatic power. It’s spoken slowly, with a knowing rise of bushy eyebrows, as the revelation spreads across his face. His mind constantly searches for truth as he speaks; as words are formed and when the ­sentence holds true, there it is: Yeah. Yeah!

Muir thinks about time a lot, and why it seems we’re always waiting for something, not living in the moment. A journey’s success shouldn’t be measured by whether you achieve the objective. He says some of his most successful adventures were the ones that didn’t achieve the goal. “The summit might be the objective but it’s not the essence. And it’s the essence that I’m interested in.”

Then there’s Suzy. The woman he wakes up to watch the morning news with; the woman who’s taken him on the hardest journey of all, who he fell in love with, who plaited a necklace from her hair and hung it round his neck. Someone who didn’t run with the pack, who took responsibility for her life and is so strong in every way he can’t believe how close he came to losing her. She’s made this place with him.

Jon Muir grew up in Wollongong, south of Sydney, and an early indication of his fragility in coping with emotional stress came in his second year of primary school when he was separated in class from his twin sister. He immediately fell behind in his schooling and never caught up. So he turned his gaze outwards from the classroom. The climbing bug hit at age 14 after he watched a documentary about a British expedition to scale the south-west face of Everest. He started climbing the brick veneer walls of the family home before dropping out of school at 16 to devote his life to the mountains. He started rock climbing on nearby Mount Keira before progressing to the ­bigger mountains of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. His reputation as a tough, dedicated climber grew, and he was soon pioneering new routes on the peaks of Europe and the Himalayas. Within a climbing community then stereotyped by ­middle-class, private school boys with a hint of old England, Muir was a maverick. He was rough, a larrikin who climbed routes no one else thought of attempting, with a ragged jumper, a bottle of whisky and a broad ocker twang.

In 1984, two Australian expeditions were attempting to be the first Aussies to climb Mount Everest by different routes. One ended in triumph, the other in tragedy. Tim Macartney-Snape and Greg Mortimer reached the summit via a new route up the north face while Muir and his team were making their way up the west ridge. The next day two members of Muir’s team, Craig Nottle and Fred From, slipped and fell to their deaths as Muir and expedition leader Peter Hillary watched on helplessly. The team immediately abandoned the climb and went home. The deaths made Muir question people’s motivations for high-risk adventure and showed him the consequences of striving to achieve the goal at all costs. He finally reached the summit of Everest in 1988 as part of Australia’s Bicentennial expedition. The 18-member team was climbing without assistance from Sherpas and had fractured under the strain of the mission. Muir was the last man standing. He made the final summit push alone, celebrating in typical Muir fashion by having a smoke on the top of the world. He’s scathing of the mass tourist experience that Mount Everest has become; the mountain crammed with climbers who require no skill other than the ability to clip a carabiner onto a fixed rope and trudge obediently upwards in the footsteps of the hordes before them. That’s not mountaineering.

Macartney-Snape went on to become one of Australia’s most lauded mountaineers. He describes Muir as a world-class survivalist, someone who can completely tune in to his surroundings. “He’d make it anywhere. Muir has this ability to make the toughest situation feel like home. He’s humble and he doesn’t take life too seriously, but mostly he just has a knack for feeling at home, wherever he is.”

The changing nature of climbing, coupled with a hellish 12-day ordeal in 1990 on the rarely attempted south face of South America’s highest mountain, Aconcagua, led to Muir walking away from ­mountaineering. A storm lashed the team — which included his then wife Brigitte — relentlessly, but still they pushed on, climbing 2200m through horrendous weather before retreating. “It took us three days to get off the mountain, down-climbing, abseiling — technical, scary stuff. It was raw survival.”

He spent a lot of the 1990s facing his greatest fear — water. “We’re terrestrial creatures, not marine. Water is not our environment. You can’t survive there without equipment. Mentally that was a huge challenge.” The solo sea kayak trip from the Daintree River to Cape York was partly to practise hunting and gathering, but it was also an exercise in understanding your own fear. Muir jokes that he’d like to change the famous T-shirt that says “No Fear” to “Know Fear”.

For Muir, the antithesis of struggle is complacency. To push through real struggle and survive is life’s great reward. In extreme situations you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not. There’s no Facebook facade to present to the world, and you can’t put up a pretence against nature, because nature is a mirror, and the reflection is sharpest when you’re alone. “People have been cold and wet through the ages,” says Muir. “Did it kill them? Well, sometimes. What am I going to do? Overcome it. Yeah. Stay on task. Yeah. Push on through it. Yeah. Yeah. Life’s good like that. Yeah. Life’s good.”

The essence is life. That message in the bottle reads like it was written for Muir, like something in the universe conveyed it across the Southern Ocean to wash up at his feet. He reads the final lines: Will life pass us by as we wait for time? It may not come again. It may be quick. It may be slow. Then again, who knows how long life is? So have you the time… for life?

He rolls the message and slides it back into the bottle.

“That’s the thing isn’t it? Life isn’t a dress rehearsal for anything. It’s about the now. It’s a wonderful thing to be this living, breathing, moving being on this extraordinary planet. I just want to live and breathe as much I can. Yeah. Yeah.”

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Ricky French
The Weekend Australian