Flying Off Everest (9 page)

From a more cosmic perspective—let’s say, looking down at earth from the moon—there are four mountains other than Everest that would appear taller from space (if you could actually see them from such a distance, which you can’t).
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This is on account of the earth not being perfectly round. The planet, along with its atmosphere and oceans, actually bulges 26.5 miles outward at the equator. Ecuador’s 20,565-foot Chimborazo, the tallest among these bulging peaks, sits closest to the equator and thus sticks nearly 1.5 miles farther out from earth’s center than Everest. If you were going to put a hat on top of the world, it would be on Chimborazo.

The truth is there is no real beginning to any mountain—and even the ends of them are maddeningly elusive.

On December 20, 1920, news reached London that the Dalai Lama had agreed to allow a group of Britons to approach Mount Everest through Tibet. With official approval finally in hand, it took a year for the Royal Geographical Society to decide what they were going to do with it. They had been sending “pundits,” a corps of trained “Tibetan-looking Indians,” into both Tibet and Nepal to secretly map the countries for the British Empire since the 1860s. The pundits calculated distance by counting their own steps, using a Tibetan rosary as an abacus, and altitudes by timing the boiling point of water. They hid their field notes in prayer wheels they carried, and their thermometers in their staffs. Now they had permission to do it.

It wasn’t until May 15, 1921, that the first official reconnaissance expedition to Everest actually started out from Darjeeling, India, 400 miles away from where they would eventually start climbing. It consisted of seventeen Sherpas, twenty-one Bhotias, two Lepchas, two Scots, five Englishmen, and one hundred government-of-India-issued mules. After five days all of the mules were either dead or abandoned to the steep and muddy Sikkimese jungle. The team bartered for what local yaks and horses they could find along the way. Every member of the expedition contracted dysentery. One died. Coincidently, he was the only one who knew how to use the crude bottled oxygen apparatus they were carrying for climbing at extreme altitude, so they abandoned it as well. It was a month before they even found Everest, spotting it for the first time on June 16 from a ridgeline 57 miles away. George Mallory, still one of Everest’s most iconic legends, wrote of the experience:

It took the expedition another three months to find a route to the base of the mountain’s North Face, winding their way through the maze of boulders, melt channels, and towering 50-foot ice pinnacles
called
penitentes
that make up the Rongbuk Glacier. Amazingly, they still attempted to climb the 10,000-foot wall of rock and ice they found once they got there. Even more surprising, they managed to make it up to an elevation of 23,000 feet in hobnailed leather boots, hand-cutting steps with their ice axes, wearing wool gloves, before being turned back by fierce winds, extreme cold, and frostbite. “As it is,” Mallory wrote to his wife later, “we have established a way to the summit for anyone who cares to try the highest adventure.”

Mallory, as it turned out, cared to try again. And again. He departed England for Tibet six months later, in early March 1922. Once in India, the team set out with over two tons of luggage. This time there were forty Sherpas, thirteen Europeans, five Gurkhas, a Tibetan interpreter, an exceedingly large and undefined number of porters, and over three hundred horses, yaks, and donkeys. The expedition ended with the climbing team reaching a new high point of 27,300 feet, just shy of the Northeast Ridge, and an avalanche sweeping seven Sherpas off a cliff to their deaths on the North Col.

The failure and gratuitous loss of life seems to have only further fanned the flames of Western enthusiasm for getting someone to the top of the mountain, however. Almost immediately, Britain requested permission from the Dalai Lama to send another expedition to the north side of Everest. It was granted, and on June 8, 1924, George Leigh Mallory found himself in Tibet for the third time, now within striking distance of the summit along with Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, a bright twenty-two-year-old engineer from Birkenhead, England, who had almost no previous climbing experience. At the time, Mallory was thirty-eight and married with three young children. A schoolmaster back home in England when he wasn’t mountaineering, he and his expedition partners would read aloud from
Hamlet
and
King Lear
while tentbound. On the surface, his reasons for climbing were simple: “Because it is there,” he famously retorted to a newspaper reporter who asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. Of course, his friends and colleagues had also assured him that climbing the world’s tallest
mountain would be good for his career as a writer and lecturer. That climbing the world’s tallest mountain, and being known as the person who did it first, would give him fame and possibly even fortune.

A heavy mist blew in across the summit pyramid, prohibiting the rest of the climbing team from monitoring Mallory and Irvine’s progress from below. At 12:50 p.m. the clouds parted, and their teammate Noel Odell caught a brief glimpse of the pair slowly making their way toward the top. From what he saw, they looked to be about five hours behind schedule. Then the clouds closed in, and neither Mallory nor Irvine was ever seen alive again.
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No one would get as high up the mountain as they did until 1953. And it was thought for some time that no one would go higher.

In 1932 England’s Captain Maurice Wilson, MC, happened on some old newspaper accounts of the 1924 Everest expedition at the same time that news of the Houston aerial expedition, which aimed to be the first to fly over Everest in an airplane, also came out. Out of this random mix of Everest-oriented suggestions, he somehow decided it would be a good idea to buy an airplane, fly it to India, crash it on the lower slopes of Everest, and then climb the tallest mountain on earth alone. With no previous flying experience he managed to navigate his Gipsy Moth
Ever Wrest
to Purnea in Bihar solo in two weeks—a stupefying, amazing act in itself. Here, despite his best efforts, he was unable to obtain official permission to fly over the forbidden kingdom of Nepal. Rather than stop his eccentric crusade, Wilson sold his airplane, proceeded to Darjeeling, recruited three Sherpas, and snuck into Tibet disguised as a Buddhist monk, similar to how Noel had snuck into the country previously. Somehow, with absolutely no mountaineering experience whatsoever, he reached the then-traditional Camp III at the North Col, one week short of a year after taking off from Edgeware, England. He died before reaching
the summit, succumbing to exhaustion and cold. The final entry in his diary read, “Off again. Gorgeous day.”

In 1949, after centuries of isolation, Nepal finally opened its borders to the world. A year later, the new Communist regime in China claimed neighboring Tibet as its own and closed down all access to Everest from the north. If anyone was going to climb the mountain, it was going to have to now be from the south, accessing the base of the peak through an even more steep and harrowing-looking glacier than the Rongbuk: the Khumbu Icefall, a river of ice and stone so steep that it moves 3 to 4 feet each day, opening and closing vast crevasses, collapsing massive 50-plus-foot ice pillars every few hours.

Nepal also proved to be even less advantageous than Tibet for accessing the mountain. In the 1940s the only semblance of an entry route into the country—other than the footpaths taken by the Sherpas across mountain passes from Tibet or Sikkim—was at the Indian border railhead at Raxaul, where travelers transferred to the narrow-gauge, toylike Nepal State Railway. Using this mode of transport, it took four hours to cover around 25 miles to Amlekanj, where passengers then transferred to car or bus for a 24-mile trip that brought them up through the Shivalik mountain range and descended on the far side to the village of Bimpedi. Here, an electrically powered towrope was installed to help haul a small amount of luggage to Kathmandu over two additional mountain passes, which had to be traveled by foot. A single telephone line linked the capital to its neighbor, India.

Still, in 1953, after a few transportation improvements had been made, the third British expedition to mount an assault on Everest from the Nepal side not only managed to negotiate getting into the country, to the mountain, and up the icefall, but also made it to the top, ascending via the South Col. Just before noon on May 28, after two and a half months of climbing, setting up various camps to store supplies, a New Zealand beekeeper named Edmund Hillary and a Sherpa
named Tenzing Norgay finally stood on top of Everest. It had taken over thirty years since the first attempt to climb Everest for anyone to actually make it to the summit. They stayed for fifteen minutes. Hugged one another. Took a few pictures, and left a small cross and some chocolates behind them in the snow. News reached England a few days later via a coded radio message, just in time for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. James Morris, the reporter who coded the message, later wrote in
Coronation Everest: The First Ascent and the Scoop That Crowned the Queen
:

Hillary was knighted and became one of the most famous men on earth overnight. His image appeared on postage stamps, magazine covers, and even in comic strips. Norgay likewise became a national hero in Nepal, where the then-illiterate climber was made to sign a false statement he didn’t understand claiming that he had made it to the top before Hillary.
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To this day their names, along with Mallory’s and Irvine’s, are inextricably linked with the idea of Everest: ordinary men—a schoolmaster, a beekeeper, an engineer with no climbing experience, and a climbing Sherpa—accomplishing, or at least attempting to achieve, the impossible. And with the idea that there is some sort of glory, or at least personal redemption, to be had in that.

Perhaps it’s because people are occasionally willing to die for this idea that we listen. Everest undoubtedly still beckons.