HILLARY PARTY RUNS INTO TROUBLE

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29384, 10 December 1960, Page 10

HILLARY PARTY RUNS INTO TROUBLE

Hazardous Journey Through Pass [By DESMOND DOIG, Official Reporter with the 1960 Hillary Expedition} KHUMJUNG BASE CAMP. IT was realised from the start that crossing the 19,000 foot Tashi Lapcha pass would be an ordeaL And it was. According to Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first European to cross over (in 1951) it is probably one of the world’s most spectacular and difficult passes. On one side are precipitous rock slopes and the track is a series of crumbling ledges; on the other are sheer ice falls. Both are swept by rock avalanches.

We got to the top of the pass on October 28, without incident and only a loss of breath.! And ’then, as if deliberately to steal our thunder, there at the very -top of the impossible pass was a herd of goats and another! of yak making the crossing with' dumb unconcern. Behind us was the vast Tolam! Bau glacier on which we had spent a 15-hour night, huddled in our double sleeping bags, eating little because of the altitude, doing little because of the cold. Our sherpa porters slept on the ice, a blanket of yak hair beneath them and a canvas awning above. Ahead were the valleys and spectacular mountains of Solo Khumbo, the true land of sherpas, and as if a knife-sharp ridge could mean the difference between great and greater beauty, we were poised suddenly between mountains we had considered indescribably lovely and others that were even more outrageously exquisite. When Hillary Came “Home” Ed Hillary sat at the top of the pass, his shaggy mane riding a near gale and icicles forming in his beard. From the rugged unemotional character we have come to know him as, he suddenly and unexpectedly nostalgic. He confessed to being moved, experiencing a feeling of coming “home,” to air the things in fact that are the powerful Himalayan bug and sherpa Siren. The mood was infectious. We were all soon wallowing in the heady atmosphere of- Solo Khumbo, romping like school children, forgetting the wear and fatigue of the weary haul to the pass. It seemed we might never prize Marlin Perkins, George Lowe and Mike Gill from the top of the pass where they clung to rock and ice ridges shooting hundreds of feet of film. Trouble Just below the pass was trouble. To avoid an impossible ice-fall we had to crawl down a long, treacherous tunnel of couloir on to 1000 feet of unstable scree. We had just begun descending the route pioneered by Hillary when there was a crack and rumble high up above and within seconds a rock avalanche spewed about us. I was in the middle of the couloir, where I had stopped to take a photograph. Hillary and some sherpas were below me, George Lowe above. There were shouts from below, a “Look out” from George Lowe. As I flattened myself into the couloir wall, arms folded above my head, a small stone thudded into my pack; others, some the size of suitcases, went pinging and chugging by. The terrifying business might have lasted minutes or seconds; I do not remember. Fear is always measured in eternities. More terrifying was the silence that followed with dust swirling about and the mind braced to bear the shock of calamitous news: were Hillary and his sherpas safe? No reassuring sound. What had happened to George? Where were Marlin Perkins and Mike Gill and their sherpas? They were behind me; still no sound. Reassuring Shout Then, as if in answer, there was a shout from somewhere above and out over the scree slope from high over my head sailed a basket from which tumbled tins and blurred, objects to explode deafeningly on the rocks below. All of us who saw it expected a body to follow. Happily none did. Apparently rocks crashing about our porters the couloir had carried one load with them. In it was our only radio which when retrieved looked like a broken crate full of scrap. Down on the scree slope, congratulating ourselves that we had all escaped so lightly, we were electrified by another, more violent explosion, another shriek of “Look out!” and another vast spiralling, whirling, tumble of rocks. Somehow we survived, but not heroically. We all were now distinctly unnerved and the rest of the descent was made with eyes constantly on the heights above and our lungs, pumping with more than the strain of altitude. To make things more alarming there, at the bottom of the scree slope, was a rock cairn topped by. a wooden cross. What previous calamity did it commemorate? Drama Watched From Above Marlin Perkins and Mike Gill had watched the drama from above. It is to their credit that they made the descent through the couloir in spite of having been so spectacularly warned of its dangers. All that seemed to worry Marlin was that he did not have his camera handy at the time to record the dangers of Himalayan travel for audiences back home in Chicago. The rest was an easy, delightful descent through sherpa villages and fallow potato fields across streams of wondrous clarity and through growing forests of

stunted rhododendron, jumper 1 and pine. I And always the great peaks i towering above us: Ama Dablam, Thamserku, Khang Theka, and Makalu, the formidable peak some of our party eventually will j climb. j Awaiting us at the first village 'of importance, Thami, was NorI man Hardie, who had led our I Thyangboche party in from Katmandu. Stirring Tales Norman had some stirring tales to tell. Where we had trekked in (walk is too gentle a word) from Katmandu to the Rolwaling Valley ,in 12 unevenful days Norman’s party, which included Dr. Jim Milledge, Barry Bishop and Wally Romanes, had struggled. They had 310 heavy loads of building material for the high altitude winter huts, food, mountaineering and scientific equipment. That meant 310 porters; in the words of Norman Hardie, a veteran Himalayan climber, “one of the biggest single caravans that ever has entered the mountains of Nepal.” They ran into bad weather, their porters got separated, they had to cross a 15,000-foot pass, their Nepali porters in cotton clothes. / The pass has a bad reputation: it has taken porters’ lives before now.-Nearly 200 porters decided to turn back and had to be replaced; valuable time was lost and then, when the pass was reached in still unfriendly weather, it was dark and the porters hopelessly scattered. Dramatic Entry In Diary An entry in Norman Hardie’s diary graphically describes the bitter crossing: “Fifty feet from the top I found a boy of 15 curled up in the snow, whimpering and almost frozen. I helped him with his load to the summit. Then he called out and was answered in the mist by an even smaller boy. Neither. was able to cope with the glazed rocks, the heavy loads and the miserable temperature. * * Evenually the cumbersome party was brought together and replacements found. The pass was overcome without mishap and the destination was reached after an arduous journey of 18 days from Katmandu. The destination was Thyangboch, a beautiful monastery village two days’ walk from the Everest base camp and a day from Khumjung, where I write this report in a fallow potato field, our mos f recent temporary base. Here 'for the first time our whole expedition has got together; Barry Bishop, Dr. Jim Milledge and Wally Romanes coming down from the high snowy reaches of the npper Mingboo Valley’ where they have been heroically establishing the two wintering huts under difficult conditions at 19,800 feet, and Dr Griffith Pugh, only recently arrived from Katmandu, coming in from Thyangbochs, our final base camp, to meet us.

There were other reunions. Many of our sherpas come from Khumjung so that all the village turned out to greet them—every mother, wife, brother, sister and girt friend And there were cele-brations;d-t>inking chang and

watching sherpa dancing in sherpa houses. So it goes. . . And along our way through the exquisite Solo Khumbo Valleys, there were the tales of the yeti. One had been found lying dead on a high mountainside above Thani only a few weeks before, and its remains taken into custody by the police at Namohe Bazaar. We went to Namche Bazaar, the sherpa capital and frontier check post, and were shown a bagful of bones and a large exhibit of dark hair. Unmistakably it was dog—a, large Tibetan mastiff to 'be precise. We were offered the lot for sale, but declined.

There is a now famous yeti scalp in the local monastery, and a yeti claw in the head-man’s house. The members of a local family tell how, only a month ago, they saw a yeti, “like a small man, ginger to black in colour, standing on its hind legs, and it loped off when it saw us. One of the children thought it was a nun.”

Dr Pugh, Marlin Perkins, Bhanu Banerjee and myself are to remain in Khumjung to explore yeti legends. Ed Hillary and the rest leave almost immediately for the upper Mingibo to get on with establishing the two high-altitude huts before the present brilliant weather changes. Tonight sahibs and sherpas have one last hectic party.

Copyright 1960 by World Book Encyclopedia, Chicago. Destributed by Opera Mundi Paris.