Tsang - Tibet - page 320

THE ASSAULT ON EVEREST
There had been 13 attempts to climb Everest before Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing
Norgay finally reached the summit as part of John Hunt's major British expedition of
1953. Some of them verged on insanity.
In 1934 Edmund Wilson, an eccentric ex-British army captain, hatched a plan to fly him-
self from Hendon direct to the Himalayas, crash land his Gypsy Moth halfway up Everest
and then climb solo to the summit, despite having no previous mountaineering experien-
ce (and marginal flying expertise). Needless to say he failed spectacularly. When his
plane was impounded by the British in India he trekked to Rongphu in disguise and made
a solo bid for the summit. He disappeared somewhere above Camp III, and his body and
diaries were later discovered by the mountaineer Eric Shipton at 6400m. A second solo
effort was later attempted by a disguised Canadian from the Tibet side. It was abandoned
at 7150m.
From 1921 to 1938, all expeditions to Everest were British and were attempted from the
north (Tibetan) side, along a route reconnoitred by John Noel - disguised as a Tibetan -
in 1913. The mountain claimed 14 lives in this period. Perhaps the most famous early
summit bid was by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine (just 22), who were last seen going
strong above 7800m before clouds obscured visibility. Their deaths remained a mystery
until May 1999 when an American team found Mallory's body, reigniting theories that the
pair may have reached the top two decades before Norgay and Hillary. It was Mallory
who, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, famously quipped 'because it is there'.
With the conclusion of WWII and the collapse of the British Raj, the Himalayas became
inaccessible. Tibet closed its doors to outsiders and, in 1951, the Chinese invasion
clamped them shut even more tightly. In mountaineering terms, however, the Chinese
takeover had the positive effect of shocking the hermit kingdom of Nepal into looking for
powerful friends. The great peaks of the Himalayas suddenly became accessible from Ne-
pal.
In 1951, Eric Shipton led a British reconnaissance expedition that explored the Nepali
approaches to Everest and came to the conclusion that an assault via Nepal might indeed
be met with success. Much to their dismay, the British found that the mountain was no
longer theirs alone. In 1952 Nepal issued only one permit to climb Everest - to the Swiss,
extremely able climbers who together with the British had virtually invented mountain-
eering as a sport. British climbers secretly feared that the Swiss might mount a success-
ful ascent on their first attempt, when eight major British expeditions had failed. As it