The Mountain by Ed Viesturs

Author:Ed Viesturs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

6

The West Ridge

It took only three years to disprove Sir Edmund Hillary’s prognostication that after the first ascent, no one would ever bother to climb Everest again. In 1956, a strong Swiss team put four climbers on the summit, and two other members made the first ascent of Lhotse, at 27,940 feet the fourth-highest peak in the world. That expedition approached the mountain as the British had in 1953, retracing their route through the Khumbu Icefall up to the South Col and on to the top of Everest. High on the Lhotse Face, part of the team diverged from that route to bag their secondary goal—or perhaps their primary, since the Swiss got to the top of Lhotse five days before they summitted on Everest.

After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, all approaches from the north were off-limits to Western climbers. So the north side, on which the seven British attempts in the 1920s and ’30s had been prosecuted, would remain closed for another thirty years. Closed, that is, to all but the Chinese themselves—and to their on-again off-again allies, the Soviets.

Herein lies perhaps the strangest of all Everest mysteries. Persistent rumors over the decades have surfaced to the effect that a Soviet team composed of thirty-five climbers and five scientists attacked Everest from the north in 1952—the year before Hillary and Tenzing made the mountain’s first ascent. Those rumors, which were substantive enough to appear in the pages of the London Times, had the team leaving Moscow on October 16, which seems absurdly late in the autumn. (If you’re going to make a postmonsoon attempt on Everest, you need to start the hike in in August, as we did in 1988, in hopes of getting high on the peak by late September or early October.)

According to the reports, six climbers established a high camp at 26,800 feet on the northeast ridge. Then disaster struck. None of the six was ever seen again, despite exhaustive searches by their teammates. The whole party supposedly regained base camp on December 27, with winter in full force.

What makes this fugitive expedition all the more suspect is that later Soviet authorities denied that it had ever taken place. Of course, the eternally secretive Soviet Union might have covered up what could only be regarded by mountaineers the world over as a fiasco of the highest magnitude. Yet from those rumors leaked to Western newspapers and magazines, even the names of some of the lost climbers emerged—Datschnolian (the leader), Lanitsov, Alexandrovich, and Kazhinsky.

I don’t know what to think about the whole business, and I’ve never felt any compulsion to look into it deeply. For that matter, I can’t imagine how one would research such an event or nonevent, since Soviet sources from the early 1950s are not exactly open books even today. In his definitive history of Everest, Walt Unsworth grants the fugitive expedition a kind of plausibility:

The motive was certainly strong enough: had the Soviets been successful in snatching Everest it would have been an outstanding propaganda coup, comparable with Sputnik I.

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