The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  Norman, for his part, begged to differ. Though yielding precedence to no one in the “purity” of his mountaineering spirit, he believed that a major objective called for a major campaign. True, he conceded, there had been some notable climbs by small expeditions, among them Houston and Bates’s own forays on K2. But the fact remained that they had not reached K2’s summit. It was a large Italian party that finally did it. And on Everest itself, the British, after their many gallant but unsuccessful tries by comparatively small teams, had at last triumphed only when they put a powerful task force in the field.

  Dyhrenfurth’s argument could have been contested. His own excellent 1955 attempt on Lhotse had been with a team of only eight climbers. Masherbrum had been climbed in 1960 by a team of ten, three of whom were Pakistanis (among whom only Jawed Akhter was expected to go high). As for K2, in all likelihood the 1953 team would have made its first ascent had Art Gilkey’s thrombophlebitis not turned the expedition into a desperate fight for survival. For that matter, Dyhrenfurth had before him the shining example of the Austrian first ascent of Broad Peak, pulled off in 1957 by Hermann Buhl, Kurt Diemberger, Fritz Wintersteller, and Marcus Schmuck, using neither bottled oxygen nor high-altitude porters.

  Dyhrenfurth evidently felt so much pressure to succeed that he decided to stick to the conventional norm of a large team with massive logistics. Given the thinking of the day, that’s a rational decision. If the AMEE launched a small, compact expedition and failed, he’d catch the brunt of the blame. Others might say, “The Americans just aren’t up to the challenge of Everest. Leave it to us Europeans.”

  Big Himalayan expeditions persisted well after 1963, but by now, massive logistical assaults have fallen out of favor. My only experience with the mob approach came on Jim Whittaker’s Peace Climb in 1990, and as I said in chapter three, I never really felt much of the spirit of international brotherhood that was Jim’s goal for the expedition, and I would far rather have gotten up Everest for the first time as part of a small group of friends who’d climbed together before the expedition.

  Once the machinery of AMEE massiveness started cranking, however, there was no stopping it. In the end, Dhyrenfurth and his deputy leader, Will Siri, chose a team of twenty Americans. On the hike in, the expedition’s gear, weighing a total of 29 tons, was subdivided into no fewer than 909 porter loads. The total cost of the expedition rounded out at $430,000 dollars—the equivalent today of $3,233,000!

  Not surprisingly, fund-raising for such an extravagant venture soon proved to be the chief hurdle. The AMEE received critical help in the form of a hefty contribution of $114,719 from the National Geographic Society, provided its own staff photographer, the first-rate climber Barry Bishop, go along as the official cameraman on the expedition. Other major supporting institutions included NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. In the appendix of Ullman’s Americans on Everest, no fewer than 185 donors of gear and food are thanked. They range from the momentous (Eddie Bauer sleeping bags for the whole team) to the humble (mashed potatoes from Carnation).

  Man, if I thought stuffing individual man-day food packs in that Seattle warehouse before the Peace Climb was drudgery, I’m sure glad I didn’t have to run the gauntlet of two and a half years of getting the AMEE’s logistics in order!

  It was characteristic of the grandiose scale of the AMEE that the team hired James Ramsey Ullman to write the expedition book. Ullman had been a climber of very modest accomplishments, but he had become the most famous mountain writer of his day, after his 1945 novel, The White Tower, hit the bestseller list. (In 1950, it was made into a movie, starring Glenn Ford, Claude Rains, and Lloyd Bridges, among others.) By 1963, Ullman was fifty-five years old and not in good health. He hobbled along for a single day of the hike in from Kathmandu, before the team doctors declared that poor blood circulation in his right leg might pose a risk to his life. He ended up writing Americans on Everest from his armchair (as it were), poring over the diaries and reports of the team members. It’s a tribute to Ullman’s storytelling skill that the account feels as you-are-there real as it does.

  The AMEE climbers varied widely in technical skill and mountain experience. Several had done little more before Everest than guide Mount Rainier or hike up Colorado’s highest peaks. At the other end of the spectrum were driving, talented climbers such as Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein. And as the AMEE progressed in the field, it began to split along the lines of that dichotomy. The majority of the team wanted only to get up Everest by the South Col route. The minority, made up of the most ambitious and the technically boldest, hungered for a loftier goal. They wanted to pull off a climb the likes of which had never been accomplished in the Himalaya.

  • • •

  Curiously, Dyhrenfurth himself initially suggested a more ambitious goal for the AMEE than simply making the third ascent of Everest (or the fourth, if the 1960 Chinese ascent was genuine). He proposed a triple assault on Everest, Lhotse, and Nuptse. Had the team succeeded in that campaign, it would indeed have been a major accomplishment. But few of the members showed much enthusiasm for Dyhrenfurth’s trifecta. Lhotse, of course, had been climbed by the Swiss in 1956, and the first ascent of Nuptse had come in 1961, when two members of a British expedition—the Englishman Dennis Davis and the Sherpa Tashi—had reached the summit.

  The bold new idea that did catch hold with the team was also partly Dyhrenfurth’s inspiration. As Tom Hornbein recalled its gestation in Everest: The West Ridge, on a visit to San Diego, Dyhrenfurth laid out maps and photos of the mountain, then queried Hornbein: “What do you think of trying the West Ridge?” At first Hornbein thought the idea too daring. “Wasn’t it enough,” he remembered thinking, “to climb by the regular way?”

  Yet “Norm had planted the idea and a boyhood dream was alive again: Everest, and by a new route.” For weeks, Hornbein kept an Indian Air Force photo of Everest from the west on his desk, as he brooded over the possibility, until he knew that the West Ridge was a challenge he was born to pursue.

  Ullman’s Americans on Everest is the official expedition account. But Hornbein’s Everest: The West Ridge, not published until 1965, when Sierra Club Books brought it out, is a priceless complement to Ullman. Just last spring, Hornbein’s memoir was republished by Mountaineers Books in a splendid new edition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the AMEE. In my opinion, The West Ridge may be the best book ever written about Everest, though many would put Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air in first place.

  Ullman quotes Dyhrenfurth from a taped discussion of expedition planning, voicing his perspective on the West Ridge: “If we can pull it off it would be the biggest possible thing still to be accomplished in Himalayan mountaineering.” But the caveat that follows prefigured the division that would split the team into two camps. In response to Hornbein’s suggestion that the AMEE throw all its resources into the West Ridge attempt, Dyhrenfurth rejoined, “This we cannot do. I’m all for making a serious stab at the West Ridge—a thorough reconnaissance to see if it’s feasible. . . . [But] we have—almost have—to have a success. If later on we say, ‘We tried the more difficult route of the West Ridge and bogged down,’ that will be a very lame excuse for all the people who backed us.”

  In other words, the South Col route came first. The West Ridge attempt could take place simultaneously, but it would get distinctly second billing, in terms not only of food and gear but of Sherpa support.

  Those would become fighting words to Hornbein, and to the contingent of other members who became his West Ridge allies. From the start, Dick Emerson, Willi Unsoeld, and Hornbein declared themselves West Ridgers. All three had been teammates on the Masherbrum expedition, where they became the closest of friends. A sociologist from Cincinnati, Emerson had spent summers in the Tetons as a climbing ranger and was regarded as perhaps the most talented rock climber there at the time. On Masherbrum, Hornbein had sacrificed his own chances for the summit after he st
opped a teammate’s long fall with an anchorless belay, then escorted the injured man down the mountain.

  Two young Dartmouth graduates and friends since adolescence, Barry Corbet and Jake Breitenbach, signed on to the West Ridge effort as well. In 1959, at ages twenty-two and twenty-three, respectively, Corbet and Breitenbach had formed half of a tight-knit four-man team that made the first ascent of the West Rib of the south face of Mount McKinley, the hardest route done to that date on North America’s highest mountain.

  Barry Bishop was on board, too—at least at first. In 1951, at the tender age of nineteen, he had joined Brad Washburn’s party making the first ascent of the West Buttress on McKinley—the standard route on Denali today. Ten years later, he had made the first ascent of the striking Ama Dablam near Everest, perhaps the hardest Himalayan peak climbed by 1961. Bishop turned his efforts to the South Col route only when it began to seem doubtful that a West Ridge climb might succeed. As the team’s official photographer and representative of the National Geographic Society, which had kicked so much money into the expedition, Bishop knew he had to be in place when any summit attempt got launched.

  The division between West Ridgers and South Colers (as they called themselves) never amounted to a true schism. It was a united party of twenty under Dyhrenfurth’s competent leadership that established base camp below the Khumbu Icefall on March 21. The next day, several members reconnoitered a route through the icefall. And the day after that, disaster struck.

  • • •

  On March 23, three members and two Sherpas set off up the route pioneered on the twenty-second to a gear dump in the icefall, hoping to improve the wanding and securing of fixed ropes along the way. The lead rope of three was composed of Dick Pownall, Jake Breitenbach, and Ang Pema. At about 2:00 p.m., belayed by the Sherpa, Pownall started to climb a 30-foot-high ice cliff. Suddenly the men heard a noise that one of them later described as “a deep ominous rumbling, then a shattering roar.” From out of sight above the cliff, a gigantic serac—“about the size of two railroad cars one on top of the other”—spilled over the rim.

  The second rope of Gil Roberts and Sherpa Ila Tsering was knocked off its feet by the tumbling ice debris. They slid 40 feet, but emerged uninjured. When they scrambled back up to look for their teammates, they found Pownall buried up to his chest in ice, but no sign of Ang Pema or Breitenbach. It took ten minutes to dig Pownall out of his near-tomb. Then the men heard a groaning sound, and located Ang Pema buried facedown under nearby rubble. They dug him out in another fifteen minutes. Miraculously, Pownall had not been seriously hurt, though Ang Pema had a dislocated shoulder and blood streaming from his head.

  But the only sign of Breitenbach was the rope linking him to Pema, which disappeared under what evidently was tons of ice blocks. The men shouted, pulled on the rope, and dug frantically with their axes, to no avail. At last, Gil Roberts cut the rope that had linked Pema to Breitenbach—a deed that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Back at base camp, as the news spread, the whole team received the secondary shock. Worst afflicted was Corbet, Breitenbach’s best friend in the world, who collapsed in weeping and screaming out loud to no one in particular: “Stupid goddamned gentleman’s sport that kills people in their prime and happiness.”

  One of the worst decisions expedition members ever have to face is what to do after a teammate dies on the trip. I’m eternally thankful that I’ve never lost a partner on any climb.

  There have been expeditions that have shut up shop and gone home after such a death. Chris Bonington’s team on K2 in 1978 did just that after Nick Estcourt was killed in an avalanche, though not before taking a vote on the question that found the members evenly divided as to whether to continue or go home. It may be cynical, but the outcome seems directly propotional to the size of the expedition. The larger the team (and the more money invested in the project), the more likely the expedition will still pursue its goal. In 1963, with Breitenbach killed on only the second day of climbing, there seems to have been no suggestion made by any member (not even Corbet) of calling off the show. I suspect that had I been on the 1963 expedition, I would have decided to stay on as well.

  Jake Breitenbach was the first climber ever killed in the Khumbu Icefall. There have been many deaths in that chaotic labyrinth of ice since 1963, and it’s now recognized as perhaps the most dangerous place on Everest—at least on the two “standard” routes. His teammates judged that Breitenbach’s body was buried under so much debris that it would never be found, but the constant movement of the icefall disgorged it only six years later, when a Japanese party discovered the corpse.

  During the month of April, the team slowly built its pyramid of supplies and camps through the icefall, across the Western Cwm, and up the Lhotse Face. Midway across the cwm, the West Ridgers took a hard left and started climbing slopes that had never before been trodden, as they worked out a line up 2,400 feet of steep snow and ice to a shoulder on the west side of Everest. Their numbers, however, were badly depleted. Not only had Breitenbach, one of the most enthusiastic West Ridgers, been killed, but Dick Emerson was having a very hard time acclimatizing. Barry Corbet had his troubles, too: acclimatization difficulties of his own, on top of the shattering psychic blow of losing his best friend. It was now that Hornbein and Unsoeld surged to the forefront of the effort.

  But it was also now that Dyhrenfurth decreed that the vast majority of manpower and supplies be devoted to the climb by the original South Col route. In Americans on Everest, Ullman soft-pedals the conflict this decision spurred, making it sound like a polite debate between Hornbein and Unsoeld on the one hand and Dyhrenfurth and the deputy leader, Will Siri, on the other. Hornbein was convinced that both routes could be pushed at the same time, but Dyhrenfurth disagreed. Invoking the “backers” of the expedition again—all the societies and companies that had donated food and gear and money to the AMEE—he emphasized the catastrophe that would ensue should nobody on either prong of the assault reach the summit. The West Ridge, he agreed, was “a great challenge, a great adventure.” But he was going to pour the team’s resources into getting at least two men to the summit via the South Col route. The West Ridge was a secondary priority.

  In Everest: The West Ridge, Hornbein is more candid about this rift. On April 3, Hornbein observed, “This was the first sign of a conflict that was inevitable between the two routes. From now on we would be competing for manpower and equipment to accomplish our separate goals.” Over the radio, voices grew strident, as “each team found the other increasingly more vigorous and dogmatic in its own defense. The thing that saved it was that usually we were aware we overstated our cases.” Privately, even Hornbein and Unsoeld had grave doubts as to whether the West Ridge would go.

  It was not surprising, then, that through April the procession up toward the South Col proceeded with military efficiency, while the West Ridge assault suffered one setback after another. On April 16, Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad, accompanied by the Sherpas Nima Tenzing and Chotari, reached the South Col, where they left a small depot of supplies. It was earlier than any of the five previous expeditions to assault Everest from the south in the spring season (two Swiss, one British, two Indian) had gotten to that crucial staging point. But then bad weather intervened, as progress ground almost to a halt. It would not be until April 27 that the team’s Camp V would be established on the col.

  Like the British in 1953, and the Swiss the year before them, the AMEE planned another camp between the South Col and the summit. That was finally accomplished on April 30, though it took ten men two hours to carve a suitable tent platform out of a steep snow slope at 27,450 feet, where they erected Camp VI.

  Dyhrenfurth had already chosen the duo to make the first attempt. They were Jim Whittaker and the Sherpa Nawang Gombu. Big Jim, as everybody called him because of his six-foot-five stature, had proved a workhorse on the mountain and seemed unstoppable. In the spirit of the 1953 first ascent, which had paired Hillary with Ten
zing, the AMEE wanted to have a Sherpa collaborate with an American to reach the summit first. But Gombu deserved the place on his own climbing merits. On the 1960 Indian expedition, with two Indian military officers, Gombu had reached an altitude of 28,300 feet on the southeast ridge before the trio was forced back. It was no coincidence that Gombu was Tenzing Norgay’s nephew.

  I was only three years old when the AMEE took place, but I later got to know Big Jim very well, through our Mount Rainier and Seattle connections. Jim’s twin brother, Lou, ran RMI, the outfit that first hired me as a guide in 1982. And in the 1960s, Jim became the CEO of Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), at the time the leading outdoor equipment firm in the country. Jim and I have always gotten along well, and he was completely supportive of my first efforts in the Himalaya. And, of course, in 1990 he invited me along on the Peace Climb. By then he was sixty-one years old, but he still managed to reach an altitude of 23,000 feet on the north side of Everest, carrying a load to our camp IV at the North Col in support of us summiteers. Big Jim was in fact legendary for his stamina and drive in the mountains. After Everest, he continued to grow REI even while he mingled with movie stars and politicians, but I was impressed by how comfortable he seemed in his own skin. Knowing what he himself had achieved in the mountains, he was unstintingly complimentary toward younger climbers as he encouraged them in their own goals.

  The first attempt on the summit was originally supposed to include Barry Bishop and Sherpa Ang Dawa, but the team had decided that it would be vital to try to film the summit push. Dyhrenfurth himself was the only filmmaker on the expedition besides Dan Doody, and Doody was hors de combat after April 21, when he developed thrombophlebitis in one leg. His life was saved by anticoagulants administered by the expedition doctor, and by ten days “flat on his back.” With no hard feelings, Bishop agreed to swap places with Dyhrenfurth in the first summit party.