Mountain Climbing: Up to the Gods

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Preparations took two years. The U.S. expedition assembled at Katmandu, capital of Nepal. Finally, late in February with 895 Nepalese porters and 32 Sherpa tribesmen (for high-altitude work), the climbers set out on an 180-mile northward trek. Along the way, team doctors took time out to battle a Nepalese smallpox epidemic, flying in vaccine and administering it themselves. At last the climbers neared the looming Everest itself. They set up their base camp at 17,000 ft., cautiously began to feel their way through the treacherous Khumbu icefall.

Never Silent, Never Still. A restless mass of ice that is never silent and never still, Khumbu is a frozen cataract, gashed by echoing crevasses and crisscrossed with cliffs that cannot be scaled. As the men struggled upward, cracks opened and little avalanches plunged down the slopes. On March 23, disaster struck: without warning, an ice wall collapsed and buried Wyoming's John Breitenbach, 27, as he was working to improve the trail. Breitenbach was the first American ever killed scaling Everest.

The U.S. mountaineers and their Sherpas pushed on, through the high valley of the Western Cwm (rhymes with tomb), across the snow-mantled face of Mount Lhotse to the South Col—the 25,850-ft.-high saddle that joins Lhotse to Everest. Goggles shielded their eyes from snow blindness; they learned to sleep with oxygen masks on. Now the going was savage. By last week, when they pitched camp No. 6 at 27,800 ft.—just 228 ft. below Everest's cloud-swathed summit—only four men were climbing.

The Message. In Katmandu, officials cursed bad weather that had blacked out communications with the U.S. climbers. Where were they? Were they safe? Had they reached the summit? Suddenly, the radio crackled. The message was laconic: at exactly 8 a.m. (Greenwich Time) on May 1, two men—an American and his Sherpa guide—had stumbled out of the mist onto the top of Mount Everest. A second assault team was waiting to start on its way. Then the radio went silent. Until both teams returned, Expedition Leader Dyhrenfurth refused to identify the men who had planted the Stars and Stripes at the summit of the world.