The Ultimate Challenge: The Hardest Way up the Highest Mountain in the World, by Christian Bonington. New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1973. 352 pages, 24 color plates, 31 black-and-white plates, 6 line drawings, 1 pull-out map. $12.50.

Some climbers take Mount Everest very seriously and rightly so. The British pioneered, climbed, measured, lavished a treasure, and knighted men for reaching the summit. Most of all they wrote and read about it.

Chris Bonington has written an expeditionary book that may enrage the young turks of the climbing world, and at the same time engage the older generation in the possibilities of smaller expeditions to Everest. This last was illegally demonstrated by an American, Woodrow Wilson Sayre, with a four-man climbing party in 1963. Bonington sounds a bit wistful about Sayre’s attempt when he comments, “But I wonder. There are quite a few mountaineers to-day who are beginning to feel that this type of expedition is true mountaineering … there is a certain appeal in the thought of man, unaided, reaching the summit of Everest.” Here lies the dichotomy of Bonington’s philosophy, “idealism and materialism.”

Bonington uses all the standard multi-media devices to write his story. He gives short but tantalizing glimpses of the Japanese expedition (whose leader was seventy years of age) which failed in 1969-70. His account of Dyhrenfurth’s International Expedition of 1971, gives little-known (to the less voracious reader) information about the actual conception of this expedition by John Amatt and Leif Patterson. His summary of the European Everest Expedition in the spring of 1972, gives scary insights into the notorious Dr. Herrligkoffer. This section tries to give both sides of the story by using the writings of Doug Scott and Felix Kuen. Scott’s prose shines like a beacon, as indeed it does throughout the entire book, including his writing in the appendix.

Bonington freely admits “The first I had heard the Southwest Face of Everest mentioned as a possible objective was in the summer of 1965. I was climbing with John Harlin, the American climber … (who) also talked of the Southwest Face of Everest, dreaming of an International Expedition.”

Bonington displays his idealism by giving credit, not only to John Harlin (a man much misunderstood, especially in his own country), but to all concerned with this expedition.

Bonington devotes about 87 pages to background material. I would have welcomed more historical background, especially his shortened accounts of solo attempts on Mt. Everest.

Approximately 14 pages are used, telling the reader of the change in plans from a small expedition via the South Col route, to the “all-out assault on the Southwest Face of Everest”, and the hurried preparations which enabled him to “fling the expedition together in approximately eight weeks.” He waits until page 113 to tell us that if he had completed his computer programming, “we should have discovered, back in England, that we didn’t have the logistic power to establish a seventh camp.”

The section that describes the approach march is enlivened by a line drawing by Dave Bathgate. Bonington’s observations concerning the changes in the countryside and people are perceptive. However, the inclusion of 100 Yale locks in the

expeditionary equipment tells us much more about some of the changes that have taken place. It is here also that we meet the unfortunate Tony Tighe, a member of Advance Base, who lost his life at the end of the expedition in the icefall. John Hunt writes in the forward, “this sad episode falls outside the context of the Expedition itself.”

The bulk of the book (approximately 140 pages) uses diaries, personal letters, tape-recorded monologues, and radio conversations, to tell the story of the broken tents, impossible winds, unbearable cold, oxygen problems, and the attitudes of the climbers. An extract from one of Doug Scott’s letters is indicative of the climbers’ feelings at one point on the climb, “We all want to get up and off—Hamish, Dougal, Mick, and me—all prepared to rush it out of the way.” Despite this statement written on the 6th of October, the final word was written early in November, by the man who often in the past has had the final word. Dougal Haston writes of the final push, “The wind—always the wind, was viciously asserting its authority … I had experienced many bad storms, many high winds, but this was a new dimension of wind speed … I reached the position where the equipment was dumped and at just above that point the wind stopped gusting and moved into continuous movement … two things were blatantly self-evident. There was no way we could attempt to climb on the rock band and no way a tent could be pitched… There was nothing to do but turn around…"

This reviewer will leave Bonington’s five-and-one-half page conclusion to those who wish to read the book. Photographs are adequate, and some of them are more like character portraits. The appendices are eminently readable, particularly Jimmy Robert’s notes on Sherpa performance from 1924-1972.

This is Bonington’s fourth book, and the wonder is how he can maintain his hectic schedule. The book shows hurried mistakes that could have been remedied by an alert editor. Bonington may have missed the implacable gentleness of Dougal Haston, and he may have dismissed the outstanding humor and thoughtfulness of Mick Burke. He may have written too lightly of the importance of a professional nurse, Beth Burke, in residence at Base Camp. He may have failed to communicate the essential personality of many of the people on the expedition, but like the climb itself the book is a gallant attempt.

Charles H. Knapp