The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  The team set out so late in the autumn season that they knew they would have no chance of penetrating even Everest’s lower defenses. Simply finding their way to the mountain posed a major challenge. The villages up the Dudh Khosi and Khumbu valleys, so thronged with trekkers today—Lukla, Namche Bazaar, Thyangboche, Dingboche, Pheriche, and the like—were so unknown to the outside world in 1950 that few of their inhabitants had ever seen Westerners before.

  On November 18, Tilman, Charlie Houston, and a single Sherpa pushed on through the upper Khumbu valley to the foot of the great icefall. They were stunned by the magnificence of their surroundings, but, perhaps surprisingly, took a dim view of the southern approach. Tilman declared the icefall “impracticable,” and Houston guessed (without gaining a clear view of the obstacles) that the slopes leading up from the Western Cwm to the South Col would be steeper and more difficult than the northeast ridge approach first reconnoitered in 1921.

  The major contribution of this first stab at Everest from the south was sorting out the approach march. That Tilman and Houston’s assessment of the Khumbu route ultimately proved to be unduly pessimistic in no way diminished the joy of the voyage. For the rest of his days—he died in 2009, at the age of ninety-six—Houston swore that the Everest reconnaissance was one of the best trips of his life.

  The 1950 thrust inevitably led to a more thorough reconnaissance, led by Eric Shipton. Although most of the team was British, Shipton extended an invitation to two New Zealanders—one of them a tall, fit beekeeper named Edmund Hillary. The 1951 team took a month to hike from the lowlands to Namche Bazaar, a trek made miserable by spanning the sodden weeks of August, with the monsoon still in force. But that decision meant the climbers would reach the foot of the Khumbu Glacier in early September, at the relatively mild onset of the autumn season in the Himalaya.

  Several members of the team scouted a devious and dangerous route through the icefall, while Shipton climbed partway up the satellite peak of Pumori to get a good view of the whole route on Everest from the south. Unlike Tilman and Houston, he was encouraged by what he saw. But he did not like the icefall at all. Though willing to run its gauntlet of crevasses and teetering seracs himself, he declared that it would be unethical to subject Sherpas to the dangers of that passage. Hillary disagreed. “In my heart,” he later wrote, “I knew the only way to attempt this mountain was to modify the old standards of safety and justifiable risk and to meet the dangers as they came; to drive through regardless.”

  How different the history of Everest would be if Shipton’s ethical qualms had won the day! Nowadays, every spring and fall, Sherpas make scores of load carries through the Khumbu Icefall. A small contingent of them, nicknamed the “Icefall Doctors,” are jointly hired by all the expeditions on the mountain to scout and secure with fixed ropes and ladders a new route each year through the labyrinth of ice. It’s the most dangerous job on the mountain, but the Sherpas who sign up for the task go about it with the confidence of seasoned veterans. They’re not oblivious to the hazards, just more comfortable in that environment, thanks to years of experience in that gauntlet of crevasses and seracs. Indeed, the icefall has proven over the last sixty years to be every bit as dangerous as Shipton feared. Starting with Jake Breitenbach on the 1963 American expedition, an inordinate number of climbers have fallen to their deaths in crevasses or been crushed by collapsing ice towers or avalanches in the Khumbu Icefall. And an inordinate proportion of those deaths have befallen Sherpas, simply because more of them make more trips through the icefall than do most of their Western employers.

  In 1951, it was not until October 28 that the whole team, aided by three experienced Sherpas, forced a route completely through the icefall. They emerged from the maze to stand on the brink of the Western Cwm. As Unsworth writes, “They had turned the key that unlocked the door to Everest.” But faced with two enormous crevasses that blocked their path, Shipton ordered a retreat—a decision that did not sit well with some of his teammates, particularly Hillary.

  His whole life, Shipton was more interested in exploring unknown terrain than in making first ascents. On this, his fifth Everest expedition, he had performed one of his finest reconnaissances, proving that the southern approach to the world’s highest mountain was feasible. But Everest was under his skin, and he longed keenly to lead the team that would ultimately claim its summit.

  Mountaineers of my own generation often feel that we were born too late. On all my expeditions around the world—not only on 8,000ers, but in Alaska, the Andes, the Arctic, and Antarctica—I’ve never had the chance to discover unknown land. There are today, alas, no more blanks on the map. To be sure, there are still lots of unclimbed peaks around the world, but I was always drawn to the fourteen highest. Thus I envy the pioneers who first explored the 8,000ers. The joy of discovery that so motivated Shipton and Tilman is a reward that I, and nearly all my contemporaries, will never know. To critics who say, “Hey, Ed, you’ve never even made a first ascent,” I answer, “Every ascent I make is a first for me.” But there’s no getting around the truth that explorers such as Shipton and Tilman were able go where few or no humans had ever been—a fantasy that I nursed as a kid, when I first heard the siren call of adventure. (Shipton even titled one of his books, about a 1937 reconnaissance north and west of K2, Blank on the Map.)

  Back in Britain, public interest in Everest was at a fever pitch. The Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society appointed Shipton to lead a 1952 expedition that, nearly everyone assumed, would finally reach the highest point on earth.

  There was only one problem. The Swiss would beat the British to the mountain.

  • • •

  Just as Great Britain once boasted that the sun never set on its empire, so British mountaineers blithely assumed by 1952 that Mount Everest “belonged” to them. But the Swiss had been trying to get permission to go to Everest since 1926, and the Nepalese government finally heeded the pleas of the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research. For a while, the Brits lobbied for a joint British-Swiss assault, with Shipton himself as their trump card. But in the end, it would be an all-Swiss team that made the first serious attempt from the south—not once, but twice, on expeditions in both the premonsoon spring season and the postmonsoon autumn.

  Like the British expeditions of the 1920s, the Swiss parties were led by men whose talents lay more in the realm of organization than technical climbing. But both teams included a pair of superstars. One was the brilliant alpinist Raymond Lambert, thirty-seven years old when the team left Kathmandu in late March 1952. Lambert had under his belt a number of exceptional ascents in the Alps, but his tour de force was a survival feat, when with two companions he was trapped in a storm on the first winter ascent of the Aiguilles du Diable in the Mont Blanc massif in 1938. The trio took refuge in a crevasse at more than 13,000 feet, where they languished for five days. In the end, Lambert made a desperate foray out into the storm to locate rescuers, thereby saving the lives of all three men. But he paid a dire price, as all his frostbitten toes were later amputated. Despite this severe handicap, he continued to climb, and on Everest he was the driving force.

  The other superstar was Tenzing Norgay, thirty-eight years old that spring, participating in his fifth Everest expedition. Recognizing his abilities, the Swiss appointed Tenzing sirdar on both the 1952 attempts.

  On April 26, the team attacked the icefall. In a scheme that seems almost suicidal today, they established their Camp I in the middle of that seething, groaning chaos of crevasses and seracs. I can’t imagine trying to sleep in such a place—on every trip I’ve made through the Khumbu Icefall, I’ve moved as fast as was possible without being reckless. Each year, there are a few places within the icefall that look large and flat enough to accommodate a camp without the threat of serac fall from above. But often I’ve climbed past these seemingly benign places one day, only to find the entire area to be a shattered chaos of debris the next.

  In 1952, someho
w the Swiss got away with their risky gamble. During subsequent weeks, they laboriously built a string of camps across the Western Cwm and up the Lhotse Face, crossing the Yellow Band and climbing a buttress they named the Geneva Spur, which took them to the South Col at 26,000 feet. It’s commonly forgotten today that it was the Swiss, not the British, who pioneered the route by which Everest would finally be ascended.

  Nowadays, Camp IV is normally pitched on the South Col, but for the Swiss, doggedly ferrying supplies, it would take five intermediate camps, some pitched in precarious places, before they established Camp VI on the col. And they planned yet another camp, at around 27,500 feet, before going for the summit. Nowadays, with the development of lightweight equipment, warmer boots and clothing, and headlamps, we can tackle Everest with just four camps above base camp, instead of the original seven or more. Lighter gear allows us to climb faster and farther each day, so we can place camps farther apart. Warmer clothing and headlamps allow us to make predawn starts, rather than having to wait for the morning sun for warmth and light.

  It was May 26 when the Swiss team finally gained the South Col, which they accomplished only after enduring a sleepless bivouac high on the Geneva Spur. All the climbers were aware that the days were numbered before the monsoon might arrive, shutting down their campaign. By this time, Tenzing and Lambert had forged a tight bond, despite sharing only a few words of English (French being Lambert’s native tongue). On May 28, four men set out for the top, carrying only a single two-man tent and one day’s food. Lambert and Tenzing took the lead, while two Swiss teammates followed close behnd.

  At 27,500 feet, they stopped to pitch the tent. The two teammates volunteered to return to the South Col to wait in support of the summit duo. Of that night’s vigil, Unsworth writes: “Lambert and Tenzing spent a miserable night in the little tent. They had no sleeping bags, no Primus stove, very little food. By using a candle flame they managed to melt a little ice in an empty tin to help relieve their raging thirst. Of sleep there was no question.”

  At 27,500 feet on the southeast ridge, there aren’t many places to pitch a tent. I can only imagine how cold and uncomfortable that camp must have been, especially without sleeping bags or a stove. The most logical place for their tent would have been on a shelf now called the Balcony, where the top of a rocky triangular face meets the base of the southeast ridge. With some work, a small platform could be hacked out of the snow. Shivering with cold through a sleepless night is hardly a good recipe to prepare you for one of the most grueling physical efforts of your life. And I can only imagine the guts and fortitude it took for a man who had lost all his toes to frostbite to endure such cold again in pursuit of the summit of the world.

  Full of hopes depite the grim night, Tenzing and Lambert set out at dawn on May 28. But the weather began to deteriorate. Even with bottled oxygen, the men moved at a snail’s pace, sometimes literally crawling on all fours. In early afternoon, the clouds dispersed, and they caught a glimpse of the South Summit, still 650 vertical feet above them. Since it had taken them five hours to climb the 650 feet from Camp VII, Lambert and Tenzing knew they had no chance of reaching the top. They wisely turned around.

  The two men had reached an altitude of 28,210 feet. Depending on Mallory and Irvine’s high point, it seems likely that no one had ever climbed higher on earth. Yet as they moved carefully down the ridge, Lambert and Tenzing tasted only disappointment.

  History is fickle. Mention the name Raymond Lambert to the average British or American climber today, and you will likely draw a blank. But had those two men reached the top of Everest on May 28, 1952, Lambert, not Sir Edmund Hillary, would reign today as the most famous mountaineer of all time.

  Still, the Swiss had every expectation, now that they had pioneered the southern route to within 800 feet of the summit, of finishing the job on their postmonsoon expedition.

  Fickle fate again intervened. The fall 1952 effort was jinxed from the start. The leader fell ill early on and had trouble recovering. Just below the Geneva Spur, Mingma Dorje, one of the strongest of the Sherpas, was struck and killed by falling ice. It was not until November 19 that Lambert, Tenzing, one Swiss teammate, and seven Sherpas reached the South Col—far too late. The weather, which had stayed ferocious throughout the autumn, never relented. During the single night the men spent at the South Col, the temperature fell to minus 30 Fahrenheit, with winds of sixty miles an hour. The next day, it took the men an hour just to cross the flat shelf of the col itself. Lambert threw in the towel.

  In the Himalayan Journal, Edmund Hillary later confessed that he had fervently hoped the Swiss would fail, despite the age-old sporting convention of wishing one’s mountaineering rivals success. “Let them get very high—” Hillary wrote, “good luck to them in that but not to the summit!”

  It seemed that Everest belonged to the British after all.

  • • •

  While the Swiss had attempted Everest in the spring of 1952, Eric Shipton had led a British team to Cho Oyu, at 26,906 feet the sixth-highest mountain in the world. Lying just inside the border of newly annexed Tibet, Cho Oyu had never been attempted. The British team, which included Edmund Hillary, was thwarted not so much by the difficulty of the mountain as by the uncertain politics of intruding upon Chinese Communist territory. (Cho Oyu, I’ve concluded, is actually the easiest of the 8,000ers to climb. Its first ascent would be achieved in 1954 by an Austrian party led by Herbert Tichy.)

  In any event, the Cho Oyu venture had served as a useful shakedown for the 1953 British campaign against Everest. It would be Shipton’s sixth expedition to the mountain that he knew better than anyone else in the world—better even than Tenzing Norgay, who would be the sirdar on his own seventh Everest expedition. Given how close the Swiss had come to reaching the top in 1952, the whole of the British mountaineering world was confident of success in 1953.

  Shipton viewed the upcoming campaign as the pinnacle of his career. Although he was forty-five years old, he was as fit as any of the candidates for inclusion in the all-star British team. But then strange things began to happen.

  Behind the closed doors of the Himalayan Committee, the grand pooh-bahs started questioning Shipton’s fast-and-light style of mountaineering. Was he too casual in his preparations, too laissez-faire with his teammates on the mountain? Some of the committee’s pundits began to argue for a larger, more regimented, military-style expedition. Everest could not be conquered, they implied, by notes jotted on the back of an envelope in a pub.

  The scuttlebutt ever since 1953 has swirled around another possible reason for choosing a leader other than Shipton. An immensely charming and handsome man, Shipton had a bit of a reputation as a womanizer. There were no particularly scurrilous rumors imputing clandestine affairs—it was simply that Shipton’s bohemian lifestyle stuck in the craw of certain strait-laced committee members. Shipton’s very charm was viewed almost as a failure of character. The committee began to consider other candidates, among whom the most promising was Colonel John Hunt. Only three years younger than Shipton, Hunt had a modest alpine record and had participated in five expeditions to lower peaks in the Himalaya. But he was a graduate of Sandhurst and had served with distinction in the British Army in India and in World War II on the Italian front. An expedition led by an officer such as Hunt would be the antithesis in style from one led by Shipton.

  The hard news came in September 1952, when the Himalayan Committee asked Shipton to co-lead the 1953 expedition with Hunt. Cut to the quick, Shipton refused, and then declined to go along as a mere member of the party. It was the most painful setback of the man’s whole life. Many of Britain’s foremost climbers, as well as Hillary, voiced their outrage, but the committee had made up its bureaucratic mind.

  In Shipton’s 1969 autobiography, That Untravelled World, he handles the mess with his characteristic dignity and pride, but the pain of rejection leaks from his sentences: “The chagrin I felt at my sudden dismissal was a cathartic experience which d
id nothing to increase my self-esteem. I had often deplored the exaggerated publicity accorded to Everest expeditions and the consequent distortion of values. Yet, when it came to the point, I was far from pleased to withdraw from this despised limelight; nor could I fool myself that it was the manner of my rejection that I minded.”

  The choice of Hunt over Shipton had far greater consequences than hurting the feelings of one of the twentieth century’s finest explorer-mountaineers. The ultimate success of Hunt’s massive, regimented assault on Everest fixed the pattern of big-range mountaineering for the next three decades. Fast-and-light as an approach to the world’s highest mountains slipped into a limbo from which Shipton (and Tilman) would not live long enough to see it reemerge.

  So the 1953 expedition left Kathmandu in early March with 14 principal climbers, including Tenzing; 19 crack high-altitude Sherpas; 362 porters; and 7.5 tons of gear and food.

  The story of the first ascent of Everest has been told and retold so many times, there is little point in rehashing it here. As a commander, Hunt indeed proved himself to be a master of logistics. With no major mishaps and no acrimonious fallings-out among the teammates, the small army of climbers built its pyramid of supplies through the Khumbu Icefall, across the Western Cwm, up the Lhotse Face and the Geneva Spur to the South Col. Outdoing even the Swiss in the tight spacing of camps, the British established their Camp VIII on the South Col, and managed to erect a Camp IX at 27,900 feet on the southeast ridge—400 feet higher than the sketchy tent platform from which Lambert and Tenzing had set out the year before.

  On May 26, Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon launched the first summit attempt from the South Col. With a gutsy effort, they reached the South Summit at 28,700 feet, setting a new record for the highest humans on earth, before having to turn back. Three days later, taking advantage of the high Camp IX, Hillary and Tenzing crested the South Summit, traversed the final ridge, solved the tricky obstacle that ever since has been called the Hillary Step, and stood on the summit at 11:30 a.m.