You’ve climbed the highest mountain in the world. What’s left? it’s all downhill from there. You’ve got to set your sights on something higher than Everest.

—WILLI UNSOELD

PREFACES PAST

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The events recounted in this book took place half a lifetime ago. Sometimes, feeling like a surrogate for a former self, I wonder if I was really there. In this present moment of Everest mania, reminders of the reality of having been there come unrelentingly, daily. In the original preface, I wrote with prescience, “Everest was not a private affair. It belongs to many men.”

Much has changed since 1963. The mountain has changed. Not in any noticeable geological way, yet the lammergeiers circling overhead cannot help but note increased numbers of tiny, multicolored creatures clinging to its flanks. Notoriety has altered Everest’s interface with man in ways that are the fate for all attractive mountains. The discovery of a high mountain leads to explorations to it from which a route to the summit can be contemplated. Initial attempts ultimately result in the first ascent. The next phase is the testing of limits: more difficult routes, hostile seasons, an aesthetically purer style, such as the fast, light-weight, do-it-yourself Alpine-style ascents without Sherpa support and without the use of supplemental oxygen. The seminal event of this phase was Reinhold Messner’s 1980 solo ascent of Everest’s North Face without the use of supplemental oxygen. Dick Emerson would have explained that these evolutions keep the outcome uncertain and motivation, therefore, at a maximum. Each pushes the envelope of possibility and thereby increases accessibility for future wanderers as well as the stakes for those with a creative flair.

Because Everest is the highest, it has become a magnet for climbers of many nationalities, of a widening range of abilities, who can test themselves and come home (if they are fortunate) wearing a small mantle of notoriety. With Dick Bass’s ascent in 1985, guided climbing came to Everest, as it has to all other major mountains of the world. The easier ways up the highest mountain on earth could be traveled, with appropriate support, by those less experienced if physically fit, motivated, and sufficiently affluent. In recent years the base camp beside the Khumbu Glacier has become a small city of tents filled with hundreds of would-be Everest summiters from all over the world, supported by a large number of Sherpas.

The goal now is to get not just a few, but rather all members of a group to the top. By this year’s end, ascents of Everest should have passed one thousand. The numbers, especially of climbers with lesser experience, add a new, complex dimension to the sociology of climbing on Everest and to the risk. When Willi and I headed toward the summit on May 22, 1963, we were alone. We had only ourselves to depend on and worry about. Our disconnection from loved ones and support added an uneasy seasoning to our effort. Now, with crowds common near the top of Everest on a fine spring day, too many perceive that help is at hand. This feeling of security lures driven but less-experienced individuals into situations where they lack the ability and judgment to manage by themselves. Others’ lives (and aspirations) are put at risk when a humanitarian need to assist arises. In addition, numbers bring queues with delays sometimes of an hour or more at bottlenecks like the Hillary Step as one waits one’s turn to go up or down. Getting up and getting down expeditiously is a time-honored precept of safe mountaineering; standing immobilized invites disaster. Everest has caught the attention of the general public. The tragic events that unfolded in the spring of 1996, as told in accounts such as Jon Krakauer’s powerful, introspective bestseller Into Thin Air, are part of the reason. Another contributor to what one anthropologist has referred to as the “new Everest boom” is the immediacy that modern satellite communication brings to what once was one of the most isolated places on earth, a near real-time window on the game being played out.

My feelings about this new Everest are mixed. My mind acknowledges the inevitability of what has come about, but my soul sorrows at the evolution, and regrets that a precious spiritual element of adventure is largely gone from this highest place on earth. I am thankful for having been born when I was, and having been in the right place at the right time.

We survivors of this adventure are thirty-five years older, no bolder, a little slower. Of our team of twenty, eight are dead. When I wrote the preface for the second edition in 1980, I ached from Willi Unsoeld’s death on Mount Rainier a year earlier. Willi and Dick Emerson, who died three years later of cancer, remain a vital part of my life, even though I cannot argue with them anymore. Jake Breitenbach was killed in the Icefall. Jim Ullman and Dan Doody died soon after the expedition. More recent subtractions were Barry Prather, Barry Bishop, and Jimmy Roberts. Barry Bishop’s camera caught the special moment that is the cover of this book. We who remain climb on—at least metaphorically. Everest has changed our destiny.

Only in the last couple of decades have I appreciated, or at least acknowledged to myself, that mountains formed my life. Early on I discovered that tree- and house-climbing in Saint Louis paled in comparison to the peaks and cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. My love of rock translated into a geology major at the University of Colorado, where climbing led to mountain rescue, rescue to first aid. After my junior year, I decided to apply to medical school. I imagined being a general practitioner in a mountain town in Colorado or Wyoming, but a medical school dedicated to training specialists soon disabused me of this goal. In spare moments I began to read about humans at high altitude and wondered why people responded physiologically as they did. My professor of surgery suggested specializing in anesthesiology as a way to combine my interest in caring for people with an academic career in physiologic research.

I returned from Everest in 1963 to my first real job, as a member of the faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine. I confronted the future full of uncertainty. Would I succeed in my academic aspirations as a clinician, teacher, and scientist, or would I forever be tagged as just the “doc who climbed Everest”? For many years I tried to separate my medical and mountain worlds.

Aging has allowed me to accept my accomplishments as well as my limitations. Now I understand that mountains and medicine are warp and weft of the same cloth. From mountains I learned many lessons that defined me and my relationship with those around me: my medical and scientific colleagues, my students, my climbing companions and other friends, my wife and children, and others whose lives this book touched in unexpected ways.

Climbing mountains, especially the risky Himalayan variety, is a selfish proposition. Yet I believe that something of value comes from this seemingly useless pursuit. As I worked and learned and taught as a physician practicing a high-risk critical care specialty, I found that risk is an essential ingredient to life. The ability to accept uncertainty enables one to stay cool during crisis. The willingness to risk also underpins discovery: creativity in science or art or other ventures into the unknown. Finally, accepting that outcomes are commonly uncertain and failure often possible (for that is inherent in the definition of risk) allows us as a society to better cope with the challenges that confront us in what we do to our planet and each other.

Sherpani porters resting (Photo by Tom Hornbein)

The climbing of mountains also gives us heroes who we might look up to and strive to emulate. My boyhood was replete with heroes. A little uncomfortably, I find myself cast in this role by others as this event acquires its niche in the history of mountaineering. I also discover that heroes are as important to me now as they were in my youth. Heroes are for all ages.

I now realize that this book is about accepting risk, and pursuing dreams. Perhaps its greatest value is not so much as a historical description of a Himalayan climb, but as a metaphor for a precious piece of life.

Tom Hornbein
Seattle, Washington
April 13, 1998

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Afew days ago a news report carried a story that jolted my fondest fantasies. A Chinese mountaineer, Wang Hung Pao, who had been a member of that country’s successful ascent of Everest from the north side in 1975, was killed recently in an avalanche while reconnoitering for a joint Sino-Japanese attempt by the direct North Face. Prior to his death he had communicated to a Japanese teammate, Ryoten Hasegawa, that in 1975, high on the limestone slabs near Everest’s Northeast Ridge, he had found the body of a man, garbed in tattered, decaying clothing of the English mountaineering style of half a century ago. Might this be the body of George Leigh Mallory or his companion, Andrew Irvine, who were last seen by Noel Odell heading toward the summit on the morning of June 8, 1924? That they might be preserved in substance more than myth was at once disappointing and exciting. Were a camera to be found, would it provide an answer to the tantalizing question whether they reached the summit before coming to grief?

This event lends counterpoint to my mood as I write in the early dawn of the first anniversary of Willi Unsoeld’s death in an avalanche on Mount Rainier. Willi has been as much in my thoughts this last year as before he died. I suspect it may ever be so, for like Mallory, there is a permanence to what he left us that lingers fadeproof as a fine photo. Yet, writing these words for a new edition seventeen years after our climb, I find myself almost dispassionate (but not quite; the tears still come at unexpected moments) as I look back at the toll that seems part of the price of a love affair with mountains. Willi would say you have to look death in the eyeball to really live. Sometimes it stares you down. Jake Breitenbach died in the Icefall on Everest; Dan Doody in a fall ice climbing Mount Washington soon after; Marc Emerson, Dick and Pat’s sixteen-year-old son, in a fall while rock climbing almost a decade ago; Nanda Devi Unsoeld in Willi’s arms high on the mountain for which she was named, two-and-a-half years before her father’s death. There is more, but to what end? I look back across sorrow seeking the rationalization to justify the loss. It is simple. There is no choice. The addiction is one we all shared, the risks more or less appreciated, the joys and depth of togetherness transcendent. We, who remain and remember, go on, our inspiration and vitality mellowed but intact, enriched by moments intensely shared and now an element of our living memory.

Willi was fifty-two at the time of his death. The Old Guide was attempting to extract himself and a group of Evergreen College students from a taste of winter mountaineering high on Mount Rainier. He had wobbled up there on a couple of artificial hip joints that had recently replaced the originals, which he had pounded to the point where they spoke their pain too loudly back at him. Descending in blowing snow, the first rope of four was caught by an avalanche that lacked the blustering benignity of one that Willi and I shared on Masherbrum in 1960. Willi and Janie Diepenbrock were too deeply buried.

Willi lived life and preached it close to the edge. He used his years to the hilt and his impact on the world around him was a potent one. Over the years, he touched many lives, especially young ones. I have tried on several occasions lately to encapsulate on paper my view of the essence of Unsoeld. The ambition proved ill-conceived. There were too many essences, and their total turned out to be too crazily vast. That may be part of Willi’s plan, for he had an uncannily slippery way of provoking questions in others without blowing his own cover. Dick Emerson described it thusly in last year’s American Alpine Journal:

So I am left as perplexed as always. Is there some central principle which held the many parts of Willi Unsoeld together? A principle that will help me comprehend him as a single, mortal man? I have been trying for years to find it, to “figure Willi out”; and every time I thought I was getting close he changed before my very eyes.

It was a game we played between us. Willi, always searching for the key to his own character, knew that I was looking for it too; so he made the search into a game we played together. (“Willi,” I once said, “if you’ll just hold that pose a minute more, I’ll have you figured out; then I’ll tell you all about you.” My grin met his roaring guffaw, the one we can still all hear. “Di-i-ck! Do you really think I would let that happen? I’ll change before I let you figure me out!” I thought I had him then. “There’s the answer, Willi. You just did it again. You always compete, whether on a climbing rope or in this ‘search for self’! You’re more interested in beating me to the answer than you are in the answer itself! You would rather compete with me, than acquire all those virtues you like to call ‘self-knowledge’!” Willi returned my grin, and he spoke softly for maximum effect: “Perhaps, … Just maybe. But competition takes two. So, now, Dick, let’s talk about you!” Zap! Try again tomorrow.)

Willi Unsoeld taking shelter from the midday heat at Camp 2 (Photo by Tom Hornbein)

The Unsoeld that I find in The West Ridge still feels real seventeen years later, just incomplete. For most of us this adventure occurred at the beginning of our efforts to identify and realize our aspirations. For Willi, I believe, Everest was not high on the list. Another good climb, an essential seasoning to life, but not an ultimate challenge. Willi extracted a lot of mileage from the accomplishment and the notoriety, but it was mostly as a means to an end. He used Everest as a magnificent metaphor, actually multiple metaphors. “Outward Bound” on Everest was one, the theme to reach beyond one’s known limits, only he expressed his philosophy more powerfully and flamboyantly. The mountain became a medium for messages about such things as human striving, closeness and interrelationships, and the ecological assault on fragile environments. Everest provided Willi a visibility that he used to help accomplish the goals he set for himself, which amounted to provoking the rest of us to reexamine our philosophies of life to broaden our view of the world, and to learn to live in it with minimal trauma to the substrate or to each other.

I would guess none of us who were part of that 1963 expedition were left unaltered by it, for better or (and?) worse. Not so much by the climb itself, for that must have been a sense of incompleteness, of what might have been, of dreams unfulfilled. For a few the notoriety could be parlayed into recognition, either as an end in itself, or as a means to other ends, as Willi was quick to recognize. For me, this visibility seemed a liability as I returned from climbing Everest to begin my academic career as an anesthesiologist and physiologist. I feared being ever “the doc who climbed Everest,” and this concern added to the many doubts associated with the transition from the isolated simplicity of the mountain world to the more nebulous one of real life.

Perhaps I am haunted still by those searchings with which that adventure ended, for I have willfully and pleasurably traded off one sort of challenge for another. The current one, directing an academic anesthesia program, asks the same commitment and caring as climbing a mountain. There are occasions totally analogous to climbing out of a warm sleeping bag before dawn and into frozen boots. The pace must of necessity be a bit slower, for the task is measured in years rather than days or weeks or months. Moments of sorrow and joy related to the rise and fall of the tide of lives and friendships are similar, as are the risks, uncertainty, and resulting motivations. A difference is the lack of a clear simple endpoint, both literally and figuratively. Success is ill-defined, rarely absolute, and therefore, even more than with the climbing of a mountain, the pleasure is perhaps more in the playing than in the view from the top. And that is what makes tomorrow so enticing.

I shall not explore these intervening years further. They are after-Everest parts of our individual lives and while influenced by the event, sometimes profoundly, are not relevant to the story being resurrected here. This new edition, though, deserves some comment, for it too bears the stamp of time and change. Both rising costs and the loss of plates makes replication of the original Exhibit Format version an impossibility. We have salvaged a few of the more cherished (by me) quotes and started from scratch on the photographs. The pictorial orientation is now more toward the climb than the beauty of the approach march, and here Willi’s camera was particularly busy. The Emersons, Jolene Unsoeld, and Hornbeins combed our collections, added a few favorites from Jim Lester, and borrowed from the original “lecture” set. Unfortunately for too many from this 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)