by Ed Viesturs
In a bravura performance of his own, Dyhrenfurth made it to 27,450 feet, where he helped chop out the site for Camp VI, even though he was “utterly exhausted and barely able to crawl into our tent.” As Dyhrenfurth later wrote, “I had no illusion about making the summit. My 45th birthday was only six days off.” The next day, roped up with Ang Dawa, the leader of the AMEE reached 28,200 feet on the final ridge. The Sherpa wanted to go on, but Dyhrenfurth knew that at the pace they were climbing, both men would run out of supplemental oxygen, and the wind was blowing hard. Sadly, the semiwhiteout stirred up by the wind prevented any filming of their two teammates going for the summit.
Big Jim and Gombu had set off from Camp VI at 6:30 in the morning. That’s relatively late by today’s standards, but it was the norm until well after the 1960s, as climbers were convinced that the brutal cold and darkness of a predawn start would defeat their best efforts. Given that hour of departure, the placement of Camp VI relatively close to the summit made all the difference.
No one had ever set out for the top of Everest as early as May 1. Hillary and Tenzing had claimed the first ascent on May 29. The year before, Tenzing and Lambert had made their bid on May 27. The four Swiss who had reached the top in 1956 did so on May 23 and 24. Even the controversial Chinese assault in 1960 had climaxed with a putative summit push on May 24.
The day that Jim and Gombu set out for the summit was really marginal, with a fierce wind that never let up. A midday temperature of minus 20 Fahrenheit was recorded at the South Col, leading Whittaker to estimate the temperature near the summit at minus 30. Each man carried two bottles of oxygen, which they breathed at the relatively rich rate of three liters per minute. In his pack, besides the bottles, Jim carried rope, a little hardware, two water bottles, a camera, food, and extra clothing. The total weight was an ungodly 45 pounds. That’s far more than summit climbers lug today, and far more than I’ve ever carried to the top of any 8,000er, let alone Everest. The consequence was that the men moved very slowly.
At least the snow was in good step-kicking shape. Jim and Gombu took turns breaking trail. As they climbed, the men searched for traces of the 1953 expedition’s Camp IX, which had been pitched a full 450 feet higher than the AMEE’s Camp VI, but found none. Apparently the tents and discarded gear had been blown off the mountain during the intervening decade. In mid-morning, to lighten their loads, the men cached one half-depleted oxygen bottle each, planning to pick it up and use it on the way down.
Jim and Gombu reached the South Summit at 11:30 a.m., later than they had hoped. The final ridge leading only 300 vertical feet to the top looked daunting. Now they roped up, with Jim in the lead, belaying each other on the more exposed passages. According to Ullman, back home in Seattle Big Jim had pledged to his family and friends that he would step on the summit of Everest, and Gombu had promised his uncle, “I will go where you have gone.”
Mercifully, the Hillary Step was an easier climb in 1963 than it had been in 1953, thanks to a thick coating of snow. Jim surmounted it by kicking steps in the snow, then scrambling left onto a rock platform at the top of the Step. Gombu followed on belay. They trudged on, sure now that they would succeed. Jim stopped, brought Gombu up to him, and said, “You first.” The Sherpa answered, “No, you.” They walked the last few yards to the top side by side.
It was 1:00 p.m. Jim got an American flag out of his pack, attached it to a four-foot aluminum stake, planted it on top, and took a picture. There followed a panoply of flag photos—the ensigns of Nepal, India, the National Geographic Society, and the Himalayan Institute of Mountaineering. Many photos of each other, and of lower mountains stretching into the distance in all directions. Then the two men probed the snow with their axes, in an effort to excavate the bust of Mao Tse-tung that the Chinese claimed to have buried there three years earlier. They didn’t find it.
It had been a smooth, if slow, climb to the summit, but the descent verged on desperate. Because the water in their bottles had frozen solid, neither man had drunk a sip all day. Jim has retold this story many times, but he still wonders why he put those bottles in an outside pack pocket, where he knew they would surely freeze. In fact, fairly soon after he and Gombu began their ascent, he knew the water had frozen solid, yet he still decided to carry the useless bottles all the way to the top and back!
Even after retrieving their half-empty oxygen bottles, the men soon ran out of gas. For hours, they stumbled downward, hypoxic and dehydrated. A chunk of cornice broke loose between them, from which they jumped away in terror. Then, at the worst possible moment, Jim had to heed what Ullman euphemistically called “undoubtedly the highest call of nature in mountaineering history.” The hardest going of all came on the mere 30-foot rise back up to the South Summit. Both men were taking about twenty breaths per step.
I can sympathize with that minor ordeal. Coming down from the summit of Everest, it feels as though the climbing is over. Just when you think that you’re completely done with having to go uphill, you’re confronted with that climb up and over the South Summit. It’s all you can do to grit your teeth, put your head down, and plod upward again. Once you pass the South Summit, it’s downhill for 3,000 feet to the South Col. Many people assume that going down is easy. Yes, it’s easier and faster than going up, but by this point of the climb you’re often running on fumes. You’ve used nearly every ounce of energy just to get to the top, and it’s all you can do to keep your balance and check your downhill speed as you stumble along. The tents below become your beacons of safety and rest.
It was not until 5:45 that Jim and Gombu regained Camp VI. They had been going steadily, except for their pause on the summit, for more than eleven hours. In the second tent, the men found Dyhrenfurth and Ang Dawa, already in their sleeping bags. “All I could do,” Dyhrenfurth later reported, “was croak my congratulations.”
• • •
So, by the early date of May 1, the AMEE had succeeded in its primary goal. The team had pledged to keep the names of the climbers who first reached the top a secret from the outside world. Even in intercamp radio calls, the members camouflaged the identity of the victors. Gil Roberts, at advance base camp, announced to the others scattered around the mountain, “The Big One and the Small One made the top!”
By May 9, however, porters had carried the news of the AMEE success out to Kathmandu. As Dyhrenfurth later wrote, “The pressure from the outside world to release the names of the first summit team became unbearable.” That day he radioed the truth to the outside world.
The impact of the news on the American public was more powerful than anyone on the AMEE had foreseen. As a national triumph, the first American ascent of Everest ranked not far below putting the first men on the moon. And Big Jim Whittaker became Neil Armstrong. For at least two decades after 1963, Jim remained not only America’s most famous climber—he was for thousands of casual observers the only American climber they could name.
Throughout the April build-up on the South Col route, the West Ridgers were suffering one setback after another. The shortage of manpower had effectively stalled their progress. But on learning of Whittaker and Gombu’s success, Hornbein and Unsoeld were overjoyed, assuming that now the combined efforts of the AMEE could be devoted to the West Ridge.
It would not quite turn out that way, however. A premonition of what was to come arrived on May 2. During a rest stay at base camp, Hornbein and Unsoeld overheard Maynard Miller talking to Will Siri in a tent fifty feet away. A competent climber when he was in his twenties, Miller, now forty-one, had turned all his attention to glaciology. He told Siri, “Now that the mountain is climbed we’ve got to put our major effort into research.” Siri’s answer was inaudible.
By mid-April, the West Ridgers had established a Camp 3W at 23,800 feet on the west shoulder, but all the serious difficulties lay ahead of them. Finally, however, Dyhrenfurth provided Sherpas to help push the West Ridge assault. With Hornbein and Unsoeld in the lead, the team got Camp 4W pitched at 25,100 feet,
and they reconnoitered farther up a “Diagonal Ditch” to 26,200 feet, where they thought they might be able to place another camp. From that point, a couloir led straight upward toward the distant cliffs of the Yellow Band, a stratum of rock that girdles Everest on all sides. After 1963, that gully would forever be known as the Hornbein Couloir.
But in the middle of the night of May 16, a near-catastrophe took place. Huddled in their tents at 4W, eight men—four Americans and four Sherpas—listened as the wind rose to a thunderous roar. Suddenly two of the tents were ripped from their moorings. Inside them, the Sherpas and Barry Corbet and Al Auten tumbled helplessly down the slope. A void of 6,000 feet down to the Rongbuk Glacier lay beneath them, but a narrow shelf of snow stopped the slide a hundred yards below the camp. From the wreckage, only Auten was able to escape. He clumped up to the two-man tent containing Hornbein and Unsoeld, who put on clothes and boots and went out in the dark to rescue their teammates.
As Unsoeld later wryly reported, “Corbet and the Sherpas seemed comfortable enough, buried securely in the wreckage, and besides if we had dug them out, there would have been nowhere to put them. We therefore contented ourselves with lashing the flapping rags to axes with climbing ropes and telling the boys not to run off as we would be back in the morning.”
Despite the jocular tone of that account, the tent disaster came close to ending the whole West Ridge venture. The next day all eight men limped down to Camp 3W. The Sherpas, badly spooked, wanted nothing more to do with the assault, so continued down to Camp II in the Western Cwm. Those Sherpas had been the best available. “This left only a mixed handful of old-timers and raw beginners upon whom it was unwise to depend for the sustained effort called for by repeated carries,” Unsoeld later wrote.
In Everest: The West Ridge, Hornbein revealed how low the men’s morale plunged during that retreat: “We were finished, demolished, literally blasted off the mountain. We hadn’t even sunk our teeth solidly into the climb.”
Dyhrenfurth had scheduled a second team, composed of Lute Jerstad and Barry Bishop, to head up the South Col route, aiming for a summit date of May 18 or 19. The original plan, if the West Ridgers could get up their new route, was to have them meet Bishop and Jerstad on the summit and descend the other side. But after the tent catastrophe at 4W, such a schedule was impossible.
The conflict between the members at base camp who wanted to wrap up the expedition and head home and the West Ridgers came to a head in a radio conversation between Barry Prather (speaking for Dyhrenfurth, whose voice was hoarse with laryngitis), and Hornbein:
Prather: The porters are coming in on the twenty-first and we’re leaving Base Camp on the 22nd. Over. . . .
Hornbein: O.K., we realize time is running out but we envisioned that there were a few more days beyond the twentieth or twenty-first so far as summit attempts by our route are concerned. . . . How do you read that? Over.
Prather: Only comment is, there are three hundred porters coming in here on the twenty-first. Over.
Hornbein: Well, I guess we’ll see you in Kathmandu then.
On the next day, Dyhrenfurth agreed to postpone the Jerstad-Bishop attempt to a summit date of May 22. This meant leaving advance base camp on the eighteenth. Hornbein and Unsoeld still doubted that they could pull their tattered contingent together in time to meet a May 22 summit deadline.
But now the whole West Ridge team—Hornbein, Unsoeld, Corbet, Auten, Emerson, and five game Sherpas—spurred themselves to extraordinary efforts. They had originally planned two more camps above 4W, but now Hornbein boldly proposed a single Camp 5W, to be pitched as high as possible, maybe even partway up the Hornbein Couloir. The Sherpas got caught up in the fervor of the campaign. One of them, Ila Tsering, jokingly told Unsoeld, “All good Sherpas down Base Camp. All bad Sherpas up here 4W.”
On May 21, Corbet and Auten led up the Diagonal Ditch, followed by all five Sherpas roped together. Hornbein and Unsoeld came last. In a spirit of true brotherhood, the seven supporting teammates were carrying the gear and food to allow the two leaders to make their bid for the summit. By late afternoon, they had all reached 27,200 feet, where they pitched a single two-man tent on what Unsoeld called “the first possible campsite since entering the couloir.” It was a ledge only eight feet long, narrowing from a width of twelve inches to only three. Unsoeld and Hornbein shook hands with their gutsy supporters, who headed down in the gathering dusk to Camp 4W.
After too short a night, the two men set off from Camp 5W at 6:50 in the morning of May 22. They had a discouraging start. Despite their breathing bottled oxygen, the terrain was so difficult that after four hours, they had gained only 400 feet. They still had 1,400 to go to reach the top.
Somewhat higher, they confronted the Yellow Band. The rock was so loose that it offered, as Hornbein put it, “an unlimited selection of handholds, mostly portable.” Hornbein exhausted himself leading most of the crux pitch, then lowered off so Unsoeld could finish it. Once the Yellow Band was behind them, the men realized, they had passed a point of no return. There would be no hope of getting rappel anchors in the rotten rock, and it was too difficult to down-climb. The only option left was to get to the summit and head down the South Col route.
Slowly the tricky mixed ground gave way to easier snow slopes. Inexplicably, both men felt a burst of new energy as they got near the summit. “The going was a wonderful pleasure, almost like a day in the Rockies,” Hornbein later recalled. They reached the summit at 6:15 p.m.
I’ve always deeply admired the West Ridge exploit. I never knew Willi Unsoeld, who was killed in an avalanche on Mount Rainier in 1979, but Tom Hornbein, who’s still climbing well at age eighty-two, has become a good friend of mine. He’s one of the most intelligent and thoughtful people I have ever met—not the sort of guy to make a rash decision. He and Willi must have very carefully calculated their odds of success and survival. Yet given my relatively conservative approach to climbing 8,000ers, I think I might have turned back on May 22, 1963, when I realized that if I got up the Yellow Band, I wouldn’t be able to get back down it. That’s exactly the decision Eric Simonson and I made even closer to the summit of Everest in 1987. And yet. . . . Perhaps my perspective would have been different in 1963, and I might have pushed on. That’s something I’ll never know.
It would never occur to me to second-guess Unsoeld and Hornbein. In climbing past a point of no return, and in reaching the summit as late as 6:15 p.m., they were really sticking their necks out. But they were superb mountaineers, and they knew what they were doing. I’ll always believe that I can’t prescribe safety limits for anyone else. That margin is a very personal thing, one that every climber has to figure out for himself. I truly believe that what Unsoeld and Hornbein did that day was beyond spectacular. They made a 100 percent commitment and climbed toward the heavens.
On top, Hornbein later wrote, “We hugged each other as tears welled up, ran down across our oxygen masks, and turned to ice.” They spent twenty minutes on the summit, then, with the sun setting, started down the southeast ridge, a route they’d seen only from 8,000 feet below it in the Western Cwm.
On reaching the top, Unsoeld and Hornbein had found fresh footprints in the snow. They had to be those of Jerstad and Bishop, who had in fact reached the summit at 3:30 p.m. With only a single flashlight, whose batteries were fading, Hornbein and Unsoeld crept down the Hillary Step and the knife-edged ridge below it, peering into the gloom for footsteps and the scrape marks left by ice axes. And they kept yelling “Hellooo!”
At last they heard an answering cry. When they caught up to Jerstad and Bishop, who had no flashlight at all, they found that their friends were in worse shape than they were. All four staggered down another few hundred feet until, deciding it was too hard to find the route, they stopped to bivouac at 28,000 feet—higher than anyone had ever spent a night out and survived (unless the two Chinese in 1960 had really bivouacked just below the Second Step).
The four men had the great good fortune
to have a clear and windless night. They laid their pack frames down in the snow, then half-sat, half-lay atop them. All four men had lost feeling in their feet. Unsoeld offered to warm Hornbein’s feet on his stomach, which seemed to help, but, misreading the absence of pain in his own toes, declined the reciprocal favor.
They got through the night, then hobbled down toward camp VI on the South Col route, when they met Dave Dingman and Girmi Dorje coming up, looking for Bishop and Jerstad. Eager to get low and warm up, they kept going, making it all the way down to advance base on May 23. Both Bishop and Unsoeld would later have many toes amputated because of severe frostbite.
On the twenty-fifth, the whole AMEE team started the hike out. From Namche Bazaar, Unsoeld and Bishop were helicoptered to a hospital in Kathmandu.
In the eyes of the public, Hornbein and Unsoeld’s feat never won them even a fraction of the fame that Whittaker earned for being the first American on top of Everest. But in the minds of climbers all over the world, the fast-and-light, do-or-die ascent of the West Ridge, in an era dominated by ponderously equipped, slow-moving expeditions, seemed truly revolutionary. As Doug Scott, himself a genius of Himalayan ascents, declares today about the West Ridge exploit, “In terms of sheer commitment, it’s the finest climb ever done on Everest.”
Many years later, Hornbein told my co-author, David Roberts, that he still felt guilty about Unsoeld losing his toes. “For a long time,” he said, “I had a really potent feeling that I failed to recognize the condition of Willi’s feet. I felt, if only I had done something differently.”
Despite the competition that persisted throughout the AMEE, the former teammates stayed in touch with one another over the decades after 1963. In 1999 the surviving members held a reunion in a mountain hut near Vail. “For the first time,” Hornbein told Roberts, “I walked away feeling I’d been part of one expedition, not two.”
