Mountain Climbing: Up to the Gods

Compared to Mount Everest, the Sahara is a sultan’s garden and the Amazonjungle is a farmer’s meadow. At its summit, the highest point on earth, 29,028 ft. above sea level, spores have trouble surviving. The hardiest of mountaincreatures—the snow leopard, the lammergeier vulture—stay clear ofits bitter cold (down to —50°F.) and raging gales (up to 150 m.p.h.), and even the Abominable Snowman—whatever he is—confines his ambulations to the Tibetan plateau, 12,000 ft. below. Transported suddenly to itsupper ridges, without an oxygen mask, a healthy man would die within hours—of physical deterioration. Tibetans call the mountain Chomolungma, “Mother of the World,” and insist that it is the home of the gods. Why the gods would choose to live there, with Elysium at their disposal, is beyond human ken.

Yet Mount Everest’s horrors have a powerful fascination for a peculiar species of human: the mountaineer. Since 1920, when Tibet first agreed to let foolhardy foreigners gamble their lives against an instant of immortality at the rooftop of the world, 15 expeditions have started for the summit. Two, perhaps three, made it: New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing, first conquered Everest in 1953; a Swiss party followed in 1956; and Soviet-Chinese climbers say they planted a statue of Mao Tse-tung at the top in 1960—a claim that most experts do not believe. Other expeditions met only heartbreak or death. In 1924, just 800 ft. from the summit, George Leigh-Mallory and Andrew Irvine vanished forever into the swirling mists. And in 1952, without sleeping bags or even a stove to boil water on, a party of Swiss struggled to28,200 ft., where sheer exhaustion forced them to turn back.

Specialists All. On that expedition was Norman Dyhrenfurth, a movie cameraman. In 1960, by then an American citizen and a producer of documentary films in Hollywood, Dyhrenfurth decided to have another go at Everest. He planned his assault with the precision of a man-in-space shot. First, he raised $326,000 (including $100,000 from the National Geographic Society), wheedled U.S. firms into supplying equipment at cut-rate prices: lightweight oxygen tanks, walkie-talkies, 13 tons of freeze-dried food, vitamins, Metrecal wafers. Then Dyhrenfurth picked his team: 20 men, each an experienced part-time mountain climber, each a specialist in his full-time field—a physicist, a psychologist, a philosopher, a geologist, a geographer, physicians, a sociologist. The expedition was more than a sporting assault: on Everest, Dr. William Siri planned to measure the effects of solar radiation, study the effects of high altitudes on the human mind and body. Even the team’s diarist was something of a specialist: Novelist (The White Tower) James Ramsey Ullman.

Preparations took two years. The U.S. expedition assembled at Katmandu, capital of Nepal. Finally, late in February with 895 Nepalese porters and 32 Sherpa tribesmen (for high-altitude work), the climbers set out on an 180-mile northward trek. Along the way, team doctors took time out to battle a Nepalese smallpox epidemic, flying in vaccine and administering it themselves. At last the climbers neared the looming Everest itself. They set up their base camp at 17,000 ft., cautiously began to feel their way through the treacherous Khumbu icefall.

Never Silent, Never Still. A restless mass of ice that is never silent and never still, Khumbu is a frozen cataract, gashed by echoing crevasses and crisscrossed with cliffs that cannot be scaled. As the men struggled upward, cracks opened and little avalanches plunged down the slopes. On March 23, disaster struck: without warning, an ice wall collapsed and buried Wyoming’s John Breitenbach, 27, as he was working to improve the trail. Breitenbach was the first American ever killed scaling Everest.

The U.S. mountaineers and their Sherpas pushed on, through the high valley of the Western Cwm (rhymes with tomb), across the snow-mantled face of Mount Lhotse to the South Col—the 25,850-ft.-high saddle that joins Lhotse to Everest. Goggles shielded their eyes from snow blindness; they learned to sleep with oxygen masks on. Now the going was savage. By last week, when they pitched camp No. 6 at 27,800 ft.—just 228 ft. below Everest’s cloud-swathed summit—only four men were climbing.

The Message. In Katmandu, officials cursed bad weather that had blacked out communications with the U.S. climbers. Where were they? Were they safe?Had they reached the summit? Suddenly, the radio crackled. The message was laconic: at exactly 8 a.m. (Greenwich Time) on May 1, two men—an American and his Sherpa guide—had stumbled out of the mist onto the top of Mount Everest. A second assault team was waiting to start on its way. Then the radio went silent. Until both teams returned, Expedition Leader Dyhrenfurth refused to identify the men who had planted the Stars and Stripes at the summit of the world.