Edmund Hillary's Big Adventure to climb the highest peak in the Metro (Part One)
The peers of the realm awaited the
moment of moving to Westminster Abbey to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but apparently paid more attention to a headline in The Times of London, that the pomp that surrounded them. What so captivated them, that June morning in 1953, was the sensational news that Everest, Mount inaccessible, had just been conquered, and by British climbers. This glorious enterprise, completed just the day before the coronation of the young sovereign, seemed a worthy harbinger of a second Elizabethan age. Everest, with its 8848 meters of altitude, is the highest mountain in the world. In the region, this peak in the Himalayas, which the English gave the name of Everest in honor of the surveyor of the nineteenth century India was first measured its height, is best known for Chomolungma, or "Goddess Mother of the World." Chomolungma stands between Tibet and Nepal, and other peaks immense fianqueado appears impregnable and inaccessible. "Firstly, it is necessary to find the mountain," said the English mountaineer George Mallory, before issuing its 1921 predecessor. Found Mallory on Everest, but in 1924 lost his life in his attempt to climb it. During the next three decades, no fewer than nine expeditions had declared defeated by the terrifying des presenting difficult: steep rock walls, thick layers of powder snow, raging blizzards, cold cruel and penetrating, and an altitude such that the lungs can not stand it. However, when the Rust> Geographical Society and the Alpine Club Johíi appointed Colonel Hunt, 42 years for Masters 1953 British expedition to Mount Everest, hundreds of niontañistas offered their services. Of these, ten were accepted: Charles Evans, brain surgeon, red-haired man of 33 years of age, Charles Wylie, 32, military silent, Alfred Gregory, 39, traveling salesman, dapper man of short stature; Noycc Wilfrid, 34, shy schoolteacher, Tom Bourdillon, 28, burly but agile physical; Michacl Westmacott, 27, a specialist in statistics and an unsurpassed master of technical climber, and George Band, 23, who was president of the Mountaineering Club Cambridge University Hunt, whom he considered "the most brilliant moiitañista England. Hunt, who needed men with experience in snow and ice, had to look for the last three expeditions outside the British Isles. Two New Zealanders met the requirements: George Lowe, 28 years old, lanky man and almost superhuman force, and Edmund Hillary, 33, single, beekeeper in Auckland, almost two meters tall, who wore big boots and, he said he practiced climbing "just for fun". Then they added a veteran of five previous expeditions to Everest: Tensing Norkay, thirty-nine, individual of the Himalayan Sherpa tribe, although he could not read or write, showing the unmistakable air of a man who knows what it's worth. While the rest of the team exercised in Wales and New Zealand, Tensing up and down the hills near his home in India, carrying a backpack full of stones. "This time I will achieve it," he vowed silently. "Either I do or I die." During the first week of March 1953, the Everest expedition met in Kathmandu, a city of temples and palaces situated in the wooded valley of Nepal. There were added Tensing and a doctor, a physiologist, a cameraman and a correspondent for the London Times newspaper that he had acquired exclusive rights to publish a chronicle of the ascent. Arriving on 10 March, the expedition had started the march of two hundred seventy miles to the east, toward the first base camp, established in Thyangboche monastery. And swelled its ranks a group of experienced Sherpas, made to work at high altitudes, and three hundred and fifty porters among whom were some women who were a boisterous complement. Hunt Mountaineers crossed the valley covered by the red flowers of the rhododendron. Then began the winding ascent of the mountain, turned northward and crossed Namcha Barwa, the small capital of the Sherpas. Farther up, at four thousand hundred yards away stood the Thyangboche Buddhist shrine. At this point, Hunt and his companions armed campaign twenty stores. The monastery, a vast building, topped by a gold knob, rose amid fields of blue springs and forests of juniper. Wandered around pheasants, partridges and musk. The monks spend their time at a liquor distilled from rice flavored with cloves, milk from the lama known as, and worship the gods who inhabit the Chomolungma.