Everest the Hard Way: The first ascent of the South West Face

Everest – the highest peak in the world, the ultimate challenge to a mountaineer’s skill and endurance. It had been climbed before, but never like this. Chris Bonington and his team had ambitions to climb it – the hard way. Yet before Bonington and his team set out in August 1975, even their well-wishers gave them only a fifty–fifty chance of success. The South West Face of Everest had already defeated five expeditions, including one led by Bonington himself. Everest the Hard Way is an exhilarating story of courage, endurance and teamwork. Bonington’s narrative celebrates the big moments and recreates the excitement and danger of the climb with vivid immediacy. He shares the logistical problems involved in keeping a large expedition moving, and the very real psychological ones of balancing and pairing lead climbers and giving each a chance to make the route on the face. He describes the constant avalanche threat which made the Western Cwm more dangerous than the ever-treacherous Ice Fall, and explains how lowering the sites of camps 4 and 5 solved a supply problem and kept the upward momentum for the attack on the notorious thousand-foot-tall Rock Band at 27,000 feet which had barred the way to the summit for all previous attempts. How Bonington’s team climbed on Everest in 1975 bears no relation to how Everest is climbed fifty years on, with endless resources and helicopter support. It was much riskier in 1975. Weather forecasts were threadbare and, although equipment was improving, it was much more basic than today, so the risk of frostbite was much greater for mountaineers in the 1970s. These climbers, the best of their generation, were leading hard new ground in the only style which gave them a meaningful chance of success. Chris Bonington’s Everest the Hard Way is a beautiful, fascinating and tragic story of their legendary achievement.