Chapter 6 On the night of May 21, Corbet, Auten, and a team of five Sherpas led Hornbein and Unsoeld up to an 18-inch-wide ledge just below a stripe of sandstone layer known as the yellow band. “Ang Dorje got up to the top,” Corbet recalled in a post-expedition interview, “and he was gasping, and he sat down with his load and scraped his oxygen mask off his face, put a cigarette between his lips, and lit it.” They were at 27,250 feet. The team helped Hornbein and Unsoeld sculpt out a site for their two-man tent and said their goodbyes with the realization that it might be for the last time. “We all three admitted that we were bawling behind our oxygen masks,” said Corbet. That night, Hornbein and Unsoeld ate a four-man ration of chicken-and-rice soup and grapefruit segments. Hornbein wrote a letter to his wife, whom he would see again only if he summited. Around 9 P.M., Unsoeld stepped out of the tent to relieve himself, and Hornbein offered him a belay. “No thanks, Tom,” Hornbein recounted in Everest: The West Ridge. “A guide can handle these things himself.”

At 4 A.M. the two awoke, ate, strapped on their crampons in the dark, and, just before seven, abandoned their camp for good. They first made their way up through the couloir as it cut through the yellow band. Where it pinched in at the top, they had to climb two pitches of limestone, hammering pitons into the rotten rock. By noon they had reached the upper flanks of the mountain but had lost their bearings; they couldn’t figure out which route led to the summit. Up would seem like the obvious answer, but as Unsoeld observed, “The mountain is so immense, and you get such a different perspective when you are right in the midst of it, that we couldn’t tell whether we were in the westernmost couloir or eastern-most couloir.” They radioed down to Whittaker in Base Camp to see if he could offer some direction, but he’d barely seen anything from inside the ground blizzard of his summit day. When Unsoeld told Whittaker that they’d already passed their point of no return, Whittaker immediately tried to get them to turn around. “Uh, boys, I want you to reconsider this carefully,” Whittaker told them. “I don’t like the sound of that at all. You always want to have an escape route off the mountain.” “He was genuinely concerned,” recalled Unsoeld. “The main thing that we got out of these contacts was the reassurance of hearing Big Jim’s voice. Indeed, I can remember great difficulty in keeping my own voice steady just from the fact that he was talking to me. It just broke me up.” Hornbein and Unsoeld decided that traversing back toward the West Ridge would lead them to the summit. At 3 P.M. in the middle of the traverse, they hit a rocky slab and stopped for a lunch of kippered snacks. At nearly the exact same time, unbeknownst to them or anyone else on the expedition, Bishop and Jerstad were 1,000 feet above them near the summit. The team summited at about 3:15 in high winds. Though they had a radio—not light in those days—they never turned it on, so Dyhrenfurth and the rest of the men didn’t know what had happened to them. By today’s standards, Bishop and Jerstad arrived well beyond a reasonable turnaround time. When they saw no sign of the West Ridgers, they turned back, assuming the team had given up. Hornbein and Unsoeld, of course, didn’t have a turnaround time. When they finished their traverse back to the ridge itself, they were confronted by a series of rocky cliffs that would require “three or four leads of delight ful rock climbing and then a bit of rottenness,” recalled Hornbein, understating the challenge that lay ahead. They removed their crampons and began climbing—Unsoeld on lead— making slow progress toward the summit as the afternoon wore on, still unsure of how far they had to go.

The New Guard This spring, two expeditions will attempt new routes up Everest. Russians Denis Urubko and Alexey Bolotov are planning an alpine-style ascent of the southwest face, the sheer wall that rises above Camp II. Though the wall was first climbed in 1975, there are many variations that would still constitute a new route. In December, Urubko told a Spanish magazine that he and Bolotov are “ready to work hard and die if necessary.” Italian Simone Moro and Swiss Ueli Steck plan to climb a new route from the south side of the mountain but have remained coy about specifics. The options for a new route are limited to variations on the southwest face and an enchainment of Nuptse, Lhotse, and Everest, known as the Horseshoe Traverse.

“It was sheer pleasure to edge out over” the Cwm, said Unsoeld. “We felt like we were just climbing an alpine peak someplace.” Finally, around 6:15 P.M., Unsoeld stopped and began coiling the rope. In an interview with Bishop after the climb, he described the moment he saw the flag Whittaker had planted three weeks earlier. “Suddenly, plodding along … head to the ground, I raised my eyes, and about 40 feet ahead was the American flag, shining in the slanting rays of the sun and flapping wildly in the breeze. It was wrapped around the picket once and very slightly frayed.” They didn’t say much. “We did talk some,” Unsoeld later recalled, “but it was just an emotional expression of how closely together this climb had brought us. It was a testimony to interpersonal relations rather than overcoming a great mountain.” With daylight waning and another 2,000 feet to descend, there was little time to celebrate. Unsoeld keyed the radio, and Maynard Miller answered from Camp II. He was overjoyed but wanted to know if there was any sign of Bishop and Jerstad. Yes, replied Unsoeld. There was a faint set of tracks that in the fading gray twilight became a lifeline. “Without them,” he recalled, “I am sure we would have gone down the wrong ridge.” For the next hour, the pair blindly descended. They clumsily rappelled over the famous Hillary Step and were soon enveloped in darkness. “Willi was out of sight … out on the saddle … where Whittaker had taken his famous defecation 21 days earlier,” recalled Hornbein. “I yelled at him to wait.” Unsoeld’s torch was nearly dead, and they could no longer see the tracks. They wandered aimlessly downward until Hornbein suggested that they switch on the torch one last time. There were the tracks again. They shouted into the darkness, and somebody shouted back. “It’s the first time in my life I’ve used the international distress signal of three yodels in succession,” recalled Unsoeld. “We had just about given up hope when suddenly we heard an answer.” Bishop and Jerstad were still descending but had become lost themselves and were just sitting down—a dangerous precursor to giving up. With the tricks wind and altitude play with sound, they could have been a few hundred feet or half a mile away. “It was about 7:30 P.M. when we first heard their voices,” recalled Jerstad, who’d been reciting poetry to make sure he wasn’t losing his mind. “We were calling, ‘Who’s there?’ … They yelled again. The second or third time, we started thinking … this isn’t coming from below.” Hornbein crept down through the dark toward the voices but suddenly tumbled. “He stepped off a cut bank and disappeared in thin air,” recalled Unsoeld. “I gave him a great static belay, just crunch. Practically shattered his ribs.” Two hours later, Hornbein and Unsoeld came upon two hunched shapes—Bishop and Jerstad, who had stopped moving. It was 9:30 P.M., and the men were roughly halfway between Camp VI and the summit. They’d all been climbing for more than 14 hours straight, and only Hornbein, whose regulator had likely malfunctioned, had a bit of oxygen left. Bishop was in the worst shape of all. Hornbein fished a couple of pills of dexadrine—an amphetamine—out of his shirt pocket and gave one to Bishop and one to Jerstad. “We went on and on and on, stumbling, falling, and getting up again, waking Barry up when he’d fall asleep,” said Unsoeld. “He would sit down and he’d be gone just like that. We felt like beasts, but the Old Guide’s instincts came to the fore, and we’d flay the flesh off his bones to get him on his feet. We’d keep telling him, Anybody can walk 100 feet. … It’s only another 100 feet!”