Famed mountaineer Lowe dies
LONDON — Explorer and mountaineer George Lowe, who has died at age 89, was both a key member and the last survivor of the 1953 British expedition that conquered Everest.
Lowe played a crucial part in the party’s success, displaying phenomenal strength and stamina to ferry gear up to the South Col, just shy of the peak, from where his fellow New Zealander and friend Edmund Hillary, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, pushed on to the summit itself.
Spending day after day at altitudes of more than 7,000 metres, Lowe often had to wade through waist-high snow to ensure everything was where it needed to be.
According to John Hunt, the expedition’s leader, Lowe “put up a performance which will go down in the annals of mountaineering as an epic achievement of tenacity and skill.” It was nothing less, Hunt added in his memoir The Ascent of Everest (1953), than an “astonishing feat of endurance.”
Such was the effort that at one point Lowe himself felt “hollow and weak.”
When Hillary and Norgay were descending from the summit of Everest, it was Lowe, coming up from the South Col camp, who was the first to meet them. He handed Hillary a mug of warm lemonade and heard Hillary’s famous exclamation, “Well we knocked the bastard off !”
Hillary also passed Lowe a fragment of marine limestone. Millions of years previously the rock had formed part of the sea-floor; by 1953, however, it was a souvenir from the highest point on the planet.
Lowe had displayed superb ice-craft over 10 days in spearheading a route up the Lhotse face, immediately below the South Col. But he was not just a climber. He also carried with him a Kodak Retina II camera, capturing many images that effectively made him deputy to the official expedition cameraman, Tom Stobart. And when the party reached altitudes that Stobart, weakened by a dose of pneumonia, was unable to endure, Lowe provided the photographic record.
With his ready wit, mobile face and gift for mimicry, George Lowe was an entertaining and amusing companion. Few of his companions will forget his imitation of Cheyne-Stokes breathing patterns, a condition suffered by some people at high altitude.
In his book Because It Is There (1962) Lowe recounted his experiences on his two major expeditions. He contrasted Hunt’s open style of leadership with that of Fuchs, who appeared to him to reach all decisions in camera.
Lowe left no doubt as to which style he preferred. With other members of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Lowe received in 1958 the Polar Medal (with Antarctic clasp). He was also commemorated in Mount Lowe, a 915-metre peak in the Shackleton Range.
He was appointed OBE for services to mountaineering and exploration.
He counted himself Edmund Hillary’s oldest friend.
George Lowe, born Jan. 15, 1924, died Wednesday.