May
24, 2002
Storm
Ends Everest Bid Just Short of Summit
In the morning of
May 18, within two hours of their goal, three remaining members
of the all-female team attempting to climb Mount Everest were
going strong. But, rapidly deteriorating weather conditions, the
collapse of one team member below the South Col, and a guide suffering
from a frostbitten cornea finally added up to a single, unassailable
conclusion: the team must turn back, abandoning their attempt
to reach the summit. Marjorie "Midge" M. Cross '65 had
already yielded to the mountain the day before, about twenty minutes
after leaving Camp III. A diabetic and the oldest member of the
team at fifty-eight, Cross's concerns about monitoring and maintaining
her blood sugar level gave her reason to believe she might hold
back the rest of the team. By May 20, the entire team had arrived
safely back at Camp II where they planned to spend the night and
return to base camp by May 21. They will not make another summit
attempt.
While thin air, adverse
weather, and steep slogs are common to every high-altitude mountaineering
journey, Everest is uniquely brutal. Allan Durfee, professor of
mathematics and statistics, who recently returned from a ski mountaineering
trip from Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn, says of Everest, "You
have to do a lot of training and conditioning beforehand. You
have to take several months out of your life getting over there
and then walking up, and then you spend a lot of the time sitting
in your tent waiting for the weather to clear and going up and
down and up and down to get acclimatized. It's very slow going.
The up hills are very long and very painful. You're basically
just putting one foot in front of the other hour after hour and
trying to keep the pace up." An avid mountaineer himself,
Durfee clearly has no burning desire to climb Everest.
Commenting on the
ascent a few days before the women turned back, Durfee offered
his opinion on the team's chances of reaching the summit: "It
depends on the weather," he said presciently. "If you
get a perfect summit day, you can do it. If it's not good, then
that's it. With mountains you just can't predict."
The climb, which lasted
more than a month, pitted the members of the Everest team against
the most extreme conditions any of the women had ever faced. Yet,
each of the five woman broke her own altitude record. Kim Clark,
Lynn Prebble, and Jody Thompson reached 27,750; Alison Levine
made it to just shy of that; and Midge Cross reached 24,000 feet.
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