last source, I have not been able to identify the photographer. The other new element of this edition is Doug Scott’s perception of the evolution of mountaineering style on Everest and where this 1963 climb of the West Ridge fits in the larger and ever growing history of The Mountain that Doug knows better than most. His own several journeys to the Southwest Face culminated in 1975 in its successful ascent by Doug and Dougal Haston. Doug is now struggling with a history of Everest, which according to the latest reckoning has seen 105 pairs of feet upon its summit since it rose from the sea. But that is a tale I shall leave for Doug to tell.
Tom Hornbein Seattle, Washington March 4, 1980
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Climbing Everest is one thing, writing about it quite another. Still the reasons for writing seemed compelling enough to overcome doubts of my ability and a yearning for the privacy a mountaineer tends to prize so highly. Besides which, as I soon learned, Everest was not a private affair. It belonged to many men.
And so therefore did our story. Realizing this, I found myself challenged to convey something of the less dramatic but more deeply meaningful reality of an expedition, using the climb not as an end in itself but as a stage on which men could act, and interact.
This is the West Ridge story. It is only a small part of what was accomplished by the American Mount Everest Expedition, but the rest—the two ascents by way of the South Col route, the scientific endeavours—has been told elsewhere, most powerfully by James Ramsey Ullman in Americans on Everest. Hopefully his account will justify my gross omissions. To narrow scope even further, this is a personal account, seen through the eyes, and the bias, of one of a team of twenty. Obviously much more could be said, but the West Ridge is all that I personally experienced; it is all that I am qualified to write about.
My goal is to place the drama, the hardship, the toiling up windswept heights into a setting of day-to-day reality, a setting of grubby unbathed living, of hours of sweaty boredom and moments of fun or aloneness for introspection, a setting where men are human beings, nothing more … and nothing less.
In this sense a mountaineering expedition is like a marriage. Close living for many weeks rubs away the veneer. A man may appear before his companions burdened by an excess of faults and annoying habits that challenge the joy of daily living. Weaknesses show, but also strengths; personal ambitions, but also the ability to compromise. The result, to my taste, is always for the better, and when the team is right (here the skill came in Norman’s choosing) the experience becomes more meaningful day by day.
Stress is inevitable in such a situation, particularly when goals diverge. To ignore disagreement and the ability of individuals to forge from compromise that which was accomplished is to ignore much of the accomplishment. This is what I have attempted to portray.
The story is written as I experienced it at the time, not as I feel looking back upon it now. In recapturing feelings and reconstructing events, in separating fact from bias, I have been helped immensely by my diary and letters home and by tape recordings of radio conversations and group discussions made during the expedition. Most of the dialogue of group discussions and all the radio conversations on the mountain are taken directly from these tapes with editing only where necessary for clarity and pace.
In many ways the writing of this book resembles the climbing of the mountain it is about. It was difficult, and, like Everest, it remained so to the last. It evoked the same pleasurable feelings of finality as the end came near. And, like the climbing of Everest, this account results from the work and caring of many besides myself.
Norman Dyhrenfurth started it by conceiving the expedition. His dream brought reality to the dreams of those who joined him. He will have to sense my gratitude for the opportunity, for words cannot do it justice.
In the writing Dick Emerson has provided a constant and solid belay. He shared generously of his own ideas and carried my thoughts to depths that would otherwise have remained unplumbed. His wife, Pat, typed and edited incisively. She and Twink Stern tried to keep my writing honest with my philosophies, as best they could understand either. Joan Green typed early in the game when the idea was still a fear, and Chuck Huestis helped to tie loose ends as the effort neared completion. Dave Brower’s confidence when there was little cause for confidence and his skill in polishing what finally came were still less than his contribution of his son, Ken, who helped put chaos in order when time grew short.
Unidentified Sherpa, Al Auten, Noddy, Will Siri, Willi Unsoeld, Nick Clinch (visiting), and Tom Hornbein at Base Camp in early May (Photo by Maynard Miller)
To all these people I owe far more than thanks. And to the team, about whom this story is written. Though some are here more than others, in the event of which this is just a small part such distinctions did not exist.
Tom Hornbein Seattle, Washington September 17, 1965
Willi Unsoeld at Camp 4W promontory (Photo by Barry Corbet)
A school in Those (Photo by Richard M. Emerson)
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…our vivid and day-long consciousness of the mountain, of each other, and of the drama which we and the mountain played out at length together, cannot be faithfully reproduced. It has even escaped all but our own general recollection. The mountaineer returns to his hills because he remembers always that he has forgotten so much. |
—GEOFFREY WINTHROP YOUNG
INTRODUCTION
by William E. Siri
Other mountains share with Everest a history of adventure, glory, and tragedy, but only Everest is the highest place on earth. More than two-thirds of the earth’s atmosphere lies below its summit, and for an unacclimatized man without oxygen, the top of the mountain is more endurable than outer space by only two or three minutes. The primitive, often brutal struggle to reach its top is an irresistible challenge to our built-in need for adventure. But more than this, Everest became, with the first attempt to scale its ridges, a universal symbol of human courage and endurance; an ultimate test of man’s body and spirit.
The discovery in 1852 that Peak XV was the highest mountain in the world emerged from a page of routine survey calculations. When a clerk in the Trigonometric Survey of India offices excitedly informed his superior of his discovery, a careful check of his calculations, which were based on observations made three years earlier, confirmed his claim and the summit was set at 29,002 feet. (Careful modern observations have settled on an elevation of 29,028 feet, the value now generally accepted.) Peak XV now rated more distinction than a file number and was given the name Mount Everest after the first Surveyor-General of India, Sir George Everest. There was no way then of knowing that the Tibetans long ago recognized it as the greatest of mountains and called it Chomolongma, Goddess Mother of the World.
For sixty-nine years following the clerk’s exciting discovery little more could be learned about Mount Everest. It stood astride the Nepalese–Tibetan border, remote and inaccessible. Nepal and Tibet were tightly sealed against foreigners and hostile to intruders. From India, Mount Everest was all but hidden from view by lesser but nearer peaks.
Not until 1921, after years of negotiation, was permission coaxed from the Tibetan government and a reconnaissance expedition launched from Darjeeling. The route circled 400 miles over the high, windy Tibetan plateau to reach the north side of Mount Everest at the head of the Rongbuk Glacier. In the course of this first reconnaissance the most famous of early Everest climbers, George Leigh Mallory,