Experience of the attempt or the garnish of success?

• Author: Menon, Indira
• Position: Page from the Past

Eric Shipton was one of the finest mountaineers of the twentieth century. He charted the route for two historic ascents in the Himalayas but never made it to the top himself. The summits of Mount Everest and Nanda Devi eluded him, though he knew more about these two peaks than anyone else of his time.

Next year, we shall be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. The route followed by the successful team was first reconnoitred in 1951 by Shipton. Until then, expeditions to Everest approached the mountain from the north through Tibet, as Nepal was closed to foreigners. The Tibetan side is steeper than the Nepal side, with a formidable barrier to the summit in the form of the great Rongbuk glacier.

It was somewhere here, on the North-east ridge, that in 1924 George Mallory and his companion Irvine lost their lives. After 1950, this option was closed due to the political changes in Tibet. Fortunately, Nepal was then thrown open to foreigners. The British, who claimed Mount Everest as their mountain, lost no time in preparing for a reconnaissance expedition. Shipton was the natural choice for the leader, as he had been on all the Everest expeditions since the thirties. Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, joined the team at the last moment; Shipton was to mark him out later as a strong candidate for the summit party whenever the final climb was made.

The task before the team was to find an alternative approach to Everest from the southern side. It was an arduous one, but at the end, Shipton was able to establish that there was a feasible route to the summit and that the gradient was less steep than on the northern side. However, to reach the South Col, i.e. the pass between Everest and its neighbour Lhotse, one had to cross a treacherous icefall--a "frozen cataract" of broken ice, with chasms and crevasses 2,000 feet deep, formed by a sudden bend in the Khumbu glacier flowing down the flanks of the Everest group. Though they actually managed to force their way up the icefall, considered to be a feat in mountaineering history, Shipton decided, in deference to the wishes of the chief sherpas, not to push any further but to wait till the following spring. He wrote: "Angtarkay and Passang were still convinced that it would be madness in the present (weather) conditions to try to carry loads through it (the icefall) and unfair to ask the Sherpas to do so. Ther e was nothing for it...