Word: tabin
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...rate, Allison, who was weathered out on Everest in 1987 after reaching 26,000 ft., then retreating and spending five days in a snow cave, was by several days the first of three climbers from her expedition to reach the top last fall. (A male climber, Geoff Tabin, made it to the top just ahead of Luce.) Thus she settled what she somewhat dismissively refers to as "the American-woman-on-Eve rest thing." (Tired of hype and of fund raising, she had put $9,000 of her own money into the expedition pot.) No doubt she also quelled some...
There is a priggish voice inside most of us that complains, on hearing about someone like Geoffrey Tabin, "Where would we be if everyone jumped off bridges on long rubber bungee cords?" Bobbing boozily up and down, yoing, yoing, yoing, that is where we would be. Can't have that; no one ever got any aluminum siding sold or orthodontia bills paid while dangling from a bungee cord. And Tabin, a Harvard medical student, admits that an alcohol-fueled, top-hat-and-tails leap off of Colorado's 1,053-ft.-high Royal Gorge bridge in 1980 required...
Thus it is gratifying to learn that Tabin, 27, who carried off his stunt with several other members of something called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club, has moved on to more mature concerns. He is in fact a member of an American mountaineering expedition in Tibet that intends to make an ascent without oxygen of Everest's forbidding and unclimbed East Face. George Leigh Mallory, the great British climber who died on Everest while making a summit attempt in 1924, had written of the East Face that "other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would...
...Tabin and Teammate George Lowe, 38, tried to climb the East Face in 1981 and failed. They are, of course, expert mountaineers, who know the formidable dangers they confront. But this seriousness presents a problem in comprehension for citizens who like to think of themselves as solid. Everest's weather is as foul and unpredictable as any in the world, the avalanches of its snow fields and the icefalls of its tumbled glaciers pick off climbers every expedition or so, and the deadly thin air toward its 29,028-ft. summit debilitates and stupefies the mountaineers it does...
...truth that much of what is grand and gallant has already been done. What remains is to repeat the great feats of the past in a more difficult manner or to invent stunts whose nature is often, necessarily, more than somewhat bizarre. Thus we see the attempt by Mountaineer Tabin's group to climb Everest by an approach once thought foolhardy, and the astonishing accomplishment of Italian Superclimber Reinhold Messner three years ago of reaching Everest's summit alone and without oxygen...