Sport: Still There

Howling gales whipped rocks around like baseballs. The numbing cold, 22° below zero, made even the simplest movement a major undertaking. The Mt. Everest assault team, camped at the 24,600 ft. level for twelve days waiting for the wind to abate, was exhausted just trying to breathe at that altitude. One veteran mountaineer described the feeling last week: “When you get that high, you just don’t care. It’s almost beyond human endurance.”

But the determined party of Swiss climbers still did care. Mount Everest was still there, unconquered. Headed by Swiss Guide Raymond Lambert, 38, who had come within 900 ft. of Everest’s summit last spring—the highest man has reached and lived to tell about it—the climbers clawed their way up the icy, rocky, windswept slope. They could no longer wait for the winds to abate.

One unofficial report had it that the team of Lambert, Ernest Reiss, 32, a Swiss military aviation mechanic, and Nepalese Mountaineer Bhotia Tensing, 44, came within 150 ft. of the summit. But it turned out last week that the tenth assault on unassailable Mount Everest— the first time an attempt had been made after the monsoon rains—had ended in failure again. The climbers, despite their new, improved oxygen equipment, never got beyond the 25,850-ft.. mark, were still some 3,700 windswept feet from their goal* when they gave up.

When the news reached Switzerland last week, veteran Alpinist René Dittert, who had been with Lambert last spring, summed up what every Everest veteran knows: “It will require a kind of miracle to reach the top.” British Alpinists, who have had a possessive feeling about Everest ever since 1924, when George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared in swirling mists less than 1,000 ft. from the summit, were not waiting for miracles. Britain’s famed Himalayaman Eric Shipton promptly announced that British plans for a new assault next spring would go ahead full steam.

*No one really knows how high Everest is. India’s official survey figure lists it at 29,002 ft. But Everest is growing (TIME, July 14). Latest estimate by the Swiss: 29,610 ft.