I would never learn why the Chinese government allowed me to organize the first attempt by American climbers to summit the eastern face of Mount Everest, the Kangshung Face. But I was surprised and delighted in 1981 when they did. The only non-Chinese climbing team allowed anywhere inside Tibet since the Dalai Lama’s exile in 1959 had been from Iran.
Our team would feature some of the world’s best climbers, all with experience on the most difficult peaks. Dr. Louis Reichardt was our lead climber. Two years earlier he had summited the world’s second highest peak after Everest – K2, in Pakistan. My dear friend Sir Edmund Hillary came as well as an adviser. At age sixty-two, he couldn’t pass up another opportunity to see Tibet and rough it with us for weeks in an Everest base camp.
Our expedition numbered about twenty people in all, including climbers, guides and porters at base camp, and a hundred yaks for carrying several weeks’ supplies and equipment. The ascent had to be completed before the onset of potentially extreme blizzard conditions in early October.
With base camp operating by end of August, the climbing team made progress but it was fits and starts. Rock was unstable and snow knee deep on many ridges. Avalanches were common. One was incredibly thunderous: snow and ice plunging more than nine thousand feet, tearing through tents and wreaking havoc in our base camp at 16,000 feet. Luckily, no one was hurt.
The team remained unbowed initially, yet slowly as weeks passed our numbers dwindled. By September’s end, some members had left for medical reasons — intestinal parasites or injuries. Others because they sensed too many dangers.
On October 5, Louis yielded, reluctantly. “The summit looks so close, you could almost walk there,” he radioed to us at an advance base camp. He spoke from a precarious foothold on a slope above 21,000 feet. “But the conditions are terrible. We just have too few people. We’re going to get someone killed. We have to give up.”
While that outcome was a big disappointment, our ’81 team forged a route with its fixed ropes that enabled another expedition two years later to complete the ascent. Louis and five others from the ’81 climb were part of it. “We knew exactly where to go, and those fixed ropes were a huge deal,” he said later. Much drier weather from a timely El Nino helped, too: the team navigated the most difficult part of the climb, the buttress, in three days in contrast to four weeks on the first attempt.
Waking each day on the ’81 expedition to the serious concern that we could lose someone made a profound impact on me.
Imagine our world today if Louis Reichardt, to name just one of our lead climbers, had not returned: a gifted neuroscientist, he leads path-breaking research at the Simons Foundation, charting discoveries that might one day be hailed as the foundation for curing autism spectrum disorders.
At the same time, though, once you’ve witnessed extremely talented friends confront and overcome the physical and mental challenges of a Kangshung, your own ability to take on risks goes up even more.
Richard Blum
Thomas C. Hayes
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