Word: hornbein
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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EVEREST: THE WEST RIDGE by Thomas F. Hornbein. 198 pages. Sierra Club. $25. The sheer sight of Mount Everest, its 29,028-ft. summit supporting the roof of the world, strikes awe in the hearts of mountaineers and non-mountaineers alike. It is a pity that this otherwise magnificent full-color photographic record of the 1963 U.S. expedition includes only one full portrait of the mountain, and that a distant one. The book also could have supplied a map tracing the Americans' course, as well as the routes of the two other successful climbs, the first being the British...
...base camp. Expedition Leader Norman Dyhrenfurth waited for a walkie-talkie message from the climbers. Just below 28,000 ft., the West Ridge team faced its toughest obstacle: the "Yellow Band"-a 100-ft.-high cliff that resembles a shingled roof. Only pitons and rappel ropes kept Hornbein and Unsoeld inching upward. At last they radioed back that they had crossed the Yellow Band safely. But now they were past the "point of no return." Their supply of pitons was gone. They had to reach the summit and head down the easier South...
What of Bishop and Jerstad? Where were they? Nobody knew. Jerstad's walkie-talkie battery had run out of juice. At 6:33 the base camp got another message -a whoop of triumph. The West Ridge team had done it! Hornbein and Unsoeld were on the summit and starting down...
...Shelter. Then fate played a capricious hand. The South Col team had also reached the summit-at 3:30 p.m.-looked around for the West Ridgers, given up, and headed back to wait at the South Summit, 328 ft. below. Unaware of all this, Hornbein and Unsoeld wasted valuable time at the summit searching for Bishop and Jerstad. Not until 9 p.m. did the rendezvous take place. By now it was so dark that the four climbers could not find Camp 6 on the South Col route. Huddled against each other they spent the night at 28,000 ft.-without...
...night in the open, but under their own power, and with an unprecedented record of mountaineering firsts. Dyhrenfurth & Co. had achieved every goal. All told, five Americans had reached Mount Everest's lofty summit. For the first time, Everest's "impassable" West Ridge had been conquered. When Hornbein and Unsoeld finished their return trip down the South Col, they completed the first transverse crossing in the history of Himalayan climbing. Only Sally Dyhrenfurth took it all calmly. "What," she asked her husband, "are you going to do for an encore...