CLIMBING ON EVEREST

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21686, 21 January 1936, Page 9

CLIMBING ON EVEREST

SHORT PERIOD FOR POSSIBLE ASCENT SUMMARY BY MEMBER OF 1933 EXPEDITION (Received January 20, 10.45 p.m.) LONDON, January 20. Summing up the work of the 1933 Everest expedition,' in the "Daily Telegraph," Mr Eric Shipton says that . the expedition climbed 26 peaks, all more than 20,000 feet, high. The summits of only two of these had been reached before. He adds: "In the descent of the north col of Mount Everest, wc found that an enormous avalanche had recently broken away, mainly along the line of our ascent, peeling off the whole face of the slope to a depth of six feet, which was an alarming discovery. Eventually, what with other considerations, we decided to have nothing further to do with the north col in the monsoon period. "Later we proved that the monsoon snow neither disappears nor consolidates at altitudes greater than 23,000 feet in the region about Mount Everest until it is re-estab-lished by the winter gales. "Thus we were able to decide that the only time when there is a reasonable hope of reaching the summit of Everest is in the exceedingly short interval between" the end of the winter gales and the arrival of the monsoon; but in 1933 there was no such interval. "When we reached the Ronbuk Glacier at the end of August, wc found that above 22,000 feet we were floundering waist-deep in soft snow; while above 23,000 feet the snow was a bottomless morass. The stoves did not work, and we were unable even to melt snow for drinking, although later we devised a burner that could be used at an atmospheric "pressure equivalent to that at 35,000 feet."