Word: ices
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...eastward end of the Cwm is sealed by the South Col, a 25,850 ft. ridge that joins Everest to Lhotse. Westward, the Cwm falls away in a giant ice fall that leaps precipitously down 4,000 ft. Beyond, at the foot of Nuptse, is the Khumbu glacier, the only known entrance...
From Thyangboche camp, the climbers skirted Nuptse and pitched Camp I on the scree of Khumbu. All around were towers of ice that rumbled by day and creaked and moved by night. Above was the great ice fall, savage and unstill...
...ice fall is a labyrinth, gashed by echoing crevasses where a cathedral spire might be lost, crisscrossed by sharp seracs (ice towers) that no man can scale. In the deepest ice corridors, the air is foul and weakening; often as the climbers moved, ice blocks the size of houses vanished into chasms that yawned at their feet. Always, there was snow...
Camp V was at 22,600 ft. at the head of the Western Cwm. Here the South Col rose 3,000 ft. sheer. Ice boots were changed for high-altitude footwear soled with microcellular rubber (to keep out - 50° cold). Goggles protected the men from snow blindness; padded smocks enclosed their bodies. One by one, Hunt and Hillary, Bourdillon and Evans, Noyce, Wilson and Tenzing, put on their oxygen masks and learned to sleep in them...
Climb to the Col. Thus, fully accoutred, they struck at the face of Lhotse. Heavy icing is dangerous on a slope of 30°; Lhotse, in many places, is close to vertical. Wilfred Noyce, a Charterhouse schoolmaster, took two days to hack an ice staircase diagonally up to the -col. Camp VI and Camp VII were established on the face; finally, Noyce and a Sherpa gang reached the col and stood in a clear sky on the threshold of Everest. Here they made Camp VIII...