Jim, you told Gombu to go first to the summit, but he wouldn’t, and you summited together. "There was a great debate about who got to the summit first with Hillary and Tenzing, and I felt it clouded the fact they had both climbed the mountain. So we walked side by side and reached the summit together."
Twenty-one climbers and scientists took part in the 1963 Everest expedition. Here are the major players mentioned in our sneak peek of The Vast Unknown.
On May 1, 1963 (at least in a small way), when Jim Whittaker of Seattle and Nawang Gombu of Darjeeling, India, became the seventh and eighth people to stand on Everest’s summit. Three weeks later, Lute Jerstad and Barry Bishop followed them, also summiting via the Southeast Ridge. Three hours after that, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld traversed Everest’s summit, having made the first ascent of the West Ridge.
With Climbing magazine's 11th annual Golden Piton Awards, we celebrate the biggest, hardest, fastest, and scariest ascents of 2012. Prepare to be inspired. Winners include The American Alpine Club, Cameron Hörst, Brooke Raboutou, Ashima Shiraishi, Alex Honnold, Kyle Dempster, Hayden Kennedy, Sean McColl, Adam Ondra, Tomoko Ogawa, and the Red River Gorge, Kentucky.
Hours before sunup, we click on our headlamps and follow the blue-hued cones of light on the first steps of what will surely be a very long day. We’re embarking on a 20-mile traverse of the Mummy Range in Rocky Mountain National Park, over the course of which we’ll summit seven peaks over 13,000 feet. For the first half hour or so, our crew of eight military veterans doesn’t say a word—the only sounds are gravelly footfalls and varied degrees of labored breathing in the thin alpine air.
Prominent Norwegian climbers Bjorn-Eivind Artun, 45, and Stein-Ivar Gravdal, 37, died while attempting a new ice route on the big wall of Kjerag, Lyesbotn, in southwest Norway.
Doug Buchanan was filled with hospitality, humor, wit, intelligence, incredible drive, insight, and honor. His last adventure was a fight with cancer.
On frozen Karakoram peaks, fierce alpine faces, and crags around the world, climbers killed it last year. Here, Climbing presents the 10th annual Golden Piton Awards for top performances in six disciplines: mountaineering, big wall, traditional climbing, crack climbing, sport climbing, and breakaway success.
We surveyed readers and more than a dozen climbing historians and writers in North America and Europe to collect 25 stories of stamina, ingenuity, and human will, some well-known, others not. Our hope is to remind readers to take care and prevent accidents--to"do nothing in haste, look well to each step," as Whymper famously said after the Matterhorn tragedy.
Survival tips from climbing rangers - Nobody expects to be loaded onto a litter and evacuated off his first big wall. Or stuck in a snow cave, out of food and fuel, hypothermic, and praying that a storm will quit and someone will find him. Yet it happens, every year, and not just to newbies. Climbers make mistakes, or get unlucky, and rescue rangers drop from the sky and save our asses.
Avalanche danger will always be a hazard for those seeking to climb some of the world's most sought-after peaks. Here's a look at some facts about the deadly snow slides.
4/25/11 - Nawang Gombu Sherpa, who accompanied Jim Whittaker to the summit during the first American ascent of Mt. Everest, in 1963, died at home in India on April 24.
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