Two lost after Everest triumph

Press, 30 December 1982, Page 1

Two lost after Everest triumph

NZPA Katmandu Two Japanese climbers. Yasuo Kato and Toshiaki Kobayashi, were officially declared missing on Mount Everest yesterday. ' the Nepalese Ministry of Tourism said. The two climbers have failed to make radio contact since Monday, when Kato, aged 33, became the first man to climb Mount Everest in winter, when winds lash the summit at more than 180km/h and temperatures can drop to less than -50deg.C.

He reached the summit alone after leaving his frostbitten companion, Kobayashi, aged 35, 35 metres below. The Ministry said that Kato, an Omiya businessman, who reached the summit for the third time on Monday, has very good stamina and there was still some hope for his survival.-

But a spokesman was less optimistic about Kobayashi, who was said to have suffered frostbite and to have been exhausted and in poor condition when Kato reached him on his return from the summit on Monday night. The climbers had only 14

hours oxygen when they set out on their summit bid. A Sherpa failed to find the climbers on Monday and the temperature at the expedition’s base camp yesterday was -15 deg. It was snowing heavily.

Kato’s ,team climbed Mount Everest on the traditional south-east ridge route, the one he used in 1973 and the route pioneered by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing in making the first ascent of the peak in 1953. Everest has claimed the lives of 56 climbers and

Sherpas since the first British expedition on the peak was launched in .1922. Three of the victims were Japanese, including the only other climber to die in a winter assault, Norboru Takenaka, aged 28, of Nara, who died in a fall in January, 1981.

Kato, the “iron man of the Himalayas,” overcame physical handicap to become the first man to climb Mount Everest at the height of winter. He had lost all his toes and three fingers of his right hand from frostbite suffered when he first climbed Everest in 1973. Undeterred, he returned to the Himalayas three years later and, wearing special boots, took part in successful climbing expeditions. In 1980, he joined a 39member Japanese expedition in the first group allowed to climb Mount Everest from the Tibetan side since the Communist take-over in China in 1949.

Kato and three others of the team made the final assault, using the north-east route taken by Chinese expeditions in 1960 and 1975.

His fellow-climbers dropped back but Kato reached • the summit alone, recording another first by becoming the first man to scale Mount Everest from both north and south. Other Kato feats include climbing Mount Manaslu (8150 m last year without oxygen. In 1969, he was with a Japanese team which pioneered a vertical route on the north wall of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, an achievement that had defeated European climbers.

He was also a member of a Japanese party which set another first in Europe by climbing the previously

unbeaten north wall of the Grandes Jorasses in France in March, 1972. A bachelor, Kato said he wanted to stay single for another year or two because marriage might' sap his physical fitness. Sir Edmund Hillary yesterday applauded Kato’s climb, which made him the first man to scale Mount Everest in three different seasons.