Norman Dyhrenfurth, mountaineer who led first U.S. ascent of Everest, dies at 99
It was a mistake, the mountaineer and filmmaker Norman Dyhrenfurth wrote in 1960, to speak of “climbing” the Himalayas.
The Alps could be climbed — Dyhrenfurth had done so himself, ascending with his mountaineering parents when he was 8 — and so too could the Tetons in Wyoming, where he had summitted as a young man. Or, for that matter, the Chugach in Alaska, where he had brought a film camera and made his first documentary on climbing.
Among the string of 8,000-meter peaks along the border of Nepal and Tibet, however, mountains were taken by a team, and ascended only after a months-long siege that required tons of food, countless oxygen canisters and a succession of ever-higher encampments.
“There are no Lindberghs in the sport-science of mountain climbing,” Dyhrenfurth wrote in Sports Illustrated, describing an expedition he led that year to the top of Dhaulagiri, a mountain near Everest that had never before been scaled. “A lone climber would be swatted off the face of Dhaulagiri like a fly off the doorstep of God.”
Dyhrenfurth, who died Sept. 24 at 99, was a talented Swiss-American climber and an exceptional siege master, one whose talent at fundraising and alpine logistics enabled American climbers to reach the peak of Mount Everest for the first time in 1963.
The New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit of Everest a decade earlier, concluding a decades-long quest to surmount the world’s tallest mountain. But for climbers such as Dyhrenfurth, its appeal remained — in large part, as mountaineer George Mallory once put it, simply “because it’s there.”
Dyhrenfurth was at a camp high on the mountain, managing supplies and coordinating individual climbing teams, when the news rang out over the radio that “the Big One and the Small One,” Seattle climber Jim Whittaker and Sherpa Nawang Gombu, “made the top” on May 1.
Four more Americans would follow, and two of them — Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld — would pioneer a route up the mountain’s treacherous West Ridge, becoming the first to traverse Everest by going up one side and coming down another.
Dyhrenfurth never got a chance to reach the summit himself, but the expedition he led and filmed became a sensation in the United States. His “Americans on Everest” documentary aired on CBS with narration by Orson Welles, becoming National Geographic’s first television special, and he and his team visited the White House, appeared on the cover of Life magazine and were credited with elevating the popularity of climbing in the United States.
Their success, occurring amid the tumult of the Cold War and civil rights movement, “gave a collective psychological boost to America,” said writer Broughton Coburn, who chronicled their efforts in his 2013 book “The Vast Unknown.”
Still, the expedition nearly didn’t happen. “Americans, when I first raised it, they said, ‘Well, Everest, it’s been done. Why do it again?,’” Dyhrenfurth recalled in 2013, at a celebration of the climb organized by the American Alpine Club.
For 2 1/2 years, he scraped together funding from groups including the National Geographic Society, Air Force, NASA and the State Department, framing the mission as a scientific endeavor. At one point, he proposed the installation of a nuclear-powered weather station near the summit.
The idea was nixed, but Coburn reported that Dyhrenfurth and his team — 19 climbers and scientists, including glaciologists and psychologists — eventually helped to install a device used to monitor a Chinese nuclear test facility.
To reach the foothills of Everest from an airfield in Kathmandu, Nepal, the expedition enlisted more than 900 porters who carried 27 tons of food, clothing and equipment in a caravan that climbers christened “the millipede.”