Beyond the Edge Page #2

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and they return to their villages

and Sherpa porters take over,

The Sherpas who stay

on the expedition

might have had previous

experience of climbing,

although not many did,

Tenzing was an exception to that

in that he did have

quite a lot of experience,

In fact, he really

had more experience

at climbing on Mount Everest

than anyone else,

Without the Sherpas

you can't climb Everest

and my father was the head man,

People respected him,

They knew that he had been climbing

Everest with foreigners since 1935,

You know, he'd been up

six times already,

I knew Tenzing by repute,

You know, he'd done

a lot of mountaineering

and I knew he was

very highly regarded,

But I wasn't able really

to communicate well with him,

His English was very limited

and my Nepali was very limited,

He had a flashing smile,

absolutely charming smile,

It was impossible not to like him,

In the next fortnight,

we had a period of training

and testing ourselves

and our equipment at altitudes,

Well, in 1953,

getting to the summit of Everest

in terms of physiologic capability

was a big unknown,

It was like sending

somebody into space,

They knew from altitude

experiments in chambers

that altitude can make you seize

and one of the ideas was that people

would haemorrhage in their brains

because their blood vessels

would be so dilated,

There were lots of reasons to think

that there might be a stroke,

Nobody knew whether or not

it could really be done,

When Ed was heading

up the mountain in 1953,

13 people had already

died on the mountain

and I think that for anyone

who would be climbing at that time

it would be something

of a daunting statistic -

13 deaths and zero summits

at that point,

Now, about

six miles up from Tengboche

looking north is the Khumbu Glacier

where we were to place

our main base camp

for the attack on the mountain,

This icefall was to be

our next great obstacle

and I sent a party to explore it,

Ed Hillary led this first party,

The Western Cwm

is guarded by a great icefall...

..a tumbled mass of ice dropping

2,500 feet to the Khumbu Glacier,

We first had to discover whether it

was possible to ascend this icefall,

The icefall was a constant hazard

and we had no alternative

but to make a route through country

which we knew to be unjustifiable

in the ordinary alpine climb,

It's like a waterfall

that's come off and has frozen,

The weight of the glacier

above them is shoving,

It's all a jumble of ice,

It is unstable objective danger

that you have no control over,

Crazy! My God, You 're dumb

to be going up a route like that,

But you just can't go any other way

but through the icefall,

In '52, the Swiss

went up the icefall

and said, "It's a thing

that's always on the move,"

And it's a dangerous place

for that reason,

More people are killed in the icefall

than anywhere else on Everest,

It's immense,

It's 2,500 feet high,

And we had to go

up the middle of it,

Ed Hillary, George Lowe,

Mike Westmacott and myself

were the four of us chosen

to make the first route through

in a week or five days if we could...

..and then of course to make it safe

by a lot of step-cutting,

a lot of fixed ropes

so that eventually

it would be possible

for loaded porters to carry

the stores safely through it,

The icefall was a dangerous place

because things did collapse

without warning

and if you were in the way,

it was a thoroughly bad thing,

You had

these great towers of ice

and great lumps and strips

the size of a row of cottages

that could slump down at any moment,

We gave names

to the more dangerous parts,

There was Mike's Horror,

Hillary's Horror,

an area called the Nutcracker,

the Atom Bomb area,

There are certain...

..what climbers call objective dangers

which basically

you can't do much about,

There's also a risk

of falling into a crevasse,

We had these light

aluminium ladders about six feet long

which we could bolt together

across the crevasses,

And there were so many crevasses

that we soon ran out

of all the ladders we had,

So we had to send down

to where the nearest trees grew,

which would be about

three days' walk away,

to cut small tree trunks

to make little log bridges,

And you balanced

as well as you could,

For us, it was clearly going to be

the only way to climb Everest,

Ed Hillary wanted to please,

He wanted to be on the summit team,

He would've known

that only a few people

would get a chance

to go for the summit

so from very early on

he wanted to impress John Hunt

and he felt there

was time pressure on him

to recce the icefall

to get it prepared,

My father

was never afraid of hard work,

but part of that was to cover

I think what Dad felt

were a lot of psychological

or emotional inadequacies,

He had been raised

with high expectations

and they sent him off

to Auckland Grammar School

two years too young,

I was only 11 years old

and I was rather terrified, really,

When lunchtime came,

I would go out

the back of the school

and there were a whole lot

of ants living there,

When I first went

to Auckland Grammar,

the only friends I really had

were the ants,

I was a dreamer

until I started climbing,

The icefall was really chaotic

and yet they forced a way

and Ed's job of route finding

was a particularly good show,

The New Zealanders

had a lot more snow

and ice climbing experience

than the average European climber

because their mountains are

very like the Himalayas in miniature,

The Southern Alps -

the great mountain tangle

which sprawls northwards

in an almost unbroken chain

of rock and ice.

Well, Ed,

how do the Southern Alps

compare with the Swiss Alps?

That's where the English climbers

get their training.

Here in New

Zealand, with our terrific glaciation,

a greater amount of our climbing

is done on snow and ice -

in many ways very similar

to the Himalay a.

They're rather different

from the Swiss Alps

where the predominant feature

for climbing is rock.

Mount

Aspiring, New Zealand's Matterhorn -

a shark's tooth of a mountain

whose dangerous slopes

demand skill and careful climbing.

Our New Zealand mountains

are really a wonderful

training ground for the Himalay a.

Kiwis

have that tough resilience

so I think that

the younger British climbers

were somewhat in awe

of these formidable Kiwis

brought in to reinforce the team,

Now, the next big doubt

was regarding the lip

of the coomb itself

at the very top of the icefall,

You see, there was

an enormous, gaping crevasse,

Could we get into the coomb?

The decision

on who would be going

all the way to the top

was very much

the leader's prerogative,

John Hunt would evaluate the team

throughout the course

of the expedition,

So there was a fair amount of

sort of posturing

and positioning going on

as people tried to put

themselves in the best light

for that sort of opportunity,

I think

amongst the British

there wasn't any particular

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