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Members of First U.S Team to Top Everest Reunite
By Lisa Leff
BERKELEY,
California (AP) — It might be hard to conceive now, in an era
of extreme sports and ultra-light equipment, but there was a time
when Americans who set out to conquer mountains engaged in a pursuit
that was as lonely as it was dangerous.
But four men — Norm Dyhrenfurth, now 94; Jim Whittaker, 84; Tom Hornbein,
82, and Dave Dingman, 76 — remember. The leather boots that stayed wet
for weeks. Oxygen canisters that weighed 15 pounds. The shrugs of indifference
most of their countrymen gave a half-century ago to what it would take to get
a U.S.-led mountaineering expedition to the top of Mt. Everest.
“Americans, when I first raised it, they said, 'Well, Everest, it’s
been done. Why do it again?”’ Dyhrenfurth recalled as he and three
other surviving members of the 1963 expedition gathered in the San Francisco
Bay area, Friday, Feb. 22, for a meeting honoring the 50th anniversary of their
achievement.
The American Alpine Club is hosted lectures, film screenings, book-signings and
a dinner recognizing the pioneering climbers and what their feat, captured in
a Life magazine cover story, came to represent in the years after President John
F. Kennedy honored the Everest team with a White House Rose Garden reception:
the birth of mountaineering as a popular sport in the U.S.
“When they were talking about a reunion three years ago, I thought, who
the hell cares about that? I figured we’d just get together for some beers,” Dingman
said between interviews with National Geographic, Outside magazine and the Alpine
Club’s oral history project. “It’s turned into this big event,
and I’m glad it has.”
Whittaker, who lives in Seattle and went on to become chief executive of outdoors
outfitter Recreational Equipment Inc., was the first American to summit Everest.
He and his Sherpa companion, Nawang Gombu, reached the top of the world on May
1, 1963, a decade after New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and about six weeks
after another climber on the U.S. expedition, Jake Breitenbach, died in an avalanche.
Memories of how close he came to his own death on Everest — he and Gombu
ran out of oxygen on the summit and had to climb up and back without water after
their bottles froze — infused every day of his life since with gratitude
and child-like wonder, he said.
“I think I will probably take it with me into my next life, if I have one,” Whittaker
said.
Three weeks after Whittaker’s ascent, two other Americans, Hornbein and
the late Willi Unsoeld, became the first men ever to scale Everest via a more
dangerous route on the mountain’s west side. The next day, they descended
by the southern route that Hillary, Whittaker and by then, two more members of
the American team, had taken to the summit.
The adventure, which included spending the night without sleeping bags or tents
at 28,000 feet, made them the first men ever to traverse the world’s highest
peak — and cost Unsoeld nine frost-bitten toes.
Dingman has been lauded over the years for sacrificing his own chance to scale
Everest to belay Hornbein, Unsoeld and two other climbers, Barry Bishop and Lute
Jerstad, who had gotten stuck out in the open with them, back down to base camp.
Dingman never made it back to Everest. As a doctor in training, a Vietnam War
draftee and then a physician with a young family, he never could find the time
to make the trip. He said he had no regrets then and has none now.
“It would have made no difference to get two more people on to the summit,
but if we had lost two or three people on the way down that would have been a
very different story,” he said.
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Metropolitan News Company, Inc.
