Word: everest
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...