Everest Anniversary Part 4: Fearful days of frustration

May 17 was a rare day of optimism in the grimmest fortnight the 1953 expedition spent on Mt Everest.

New Zealander George Lowe had been working to prepare a route up the imposing Lhotse Face to the South Col for over a week - and a week above 22,000ft (6706m) without oxygen is seriously depleting.

The team was a man down from the start because of George Band's illness, but the work of Lowe and Sherpa Ang Nyima on the Lhotse Glacier had been encouraging.

On May 11 they established Camp VI (7010m) and on May 14 Camp VII (7315m). But on May 15, Sir Edmund Hillary wrote in his expedition memoir, High Adventure, "there now commenced the most frustrating period that the expedition was to experience - a period during which it appeared at times as if the whole attack was breaking down."

Hillary himself had spent May 15 making what expedition leader Sir John Hunt admiringly called "the double journey" from Camp IV (6460m) to Camp VII (7315m) and back in one day without oxygen, carrying stores.

That night Lowe took a sleeping pill - common practice - but was unprepared for the effect of altitude. The next day when he and Wilfrid Noyce, who had replaced Ang Nyima, hoped to push for the top of the glacier, he kept falling into a stupor, forcing them to return to camp.

"A vital day lost!" Hillary wrote.

On this day 50 years ago, the pair made it from Camp VI to Camp VII, and fought on another 600ft.

"Splendid progress," Hunt thought. "We waited full of hope for a triumphal advance on the next day."

But those hopes were dashed as the pair, with Sherpa Da Tensing, turned back little higher than the point reached the day before.

Tension was building and Hillary argued with Hunt that Lowe, for all his good work, was too tired. He should go up and finish the path to the Col. Hunt refused to waste his summiters' energy on route-finding, but was courageous enough to adapt his plan, Hillary wrote. Noyce was to lead a party of Sherpas to the South Col on May 21, finding the last part of the route as they went.

Lowe has since described his efforts on the glacier as "a failure", but Hunt disagreed. "If they had a sense of failure it was a failure where no other human being could have succeeded."

Hindered by weather and illness and without oxygen, "Lowe, supported at intervals by others, had put up a performance during those 11 days which will go down in the annals of mountaineering as an epic achievement of tenacity and skill."

What's more, Lowe's determination was not drained yet. His most critical contribution was to come.

On May 21, the team at advance base Camp IV scanned the glacier eagerly. Then, at 10am, they saw figures set out from from Camp VII across the Traverse - but only two. Most of the Sherpas had refused to go on and so Noyce and Sherpa Annullu bravely set out alone for the Col.

With Charles Wylie and a second group of Sherpas already on their way up to Camp VII, however, the limited supplies there would soon be exhausted. Someone had to go up and urge the Sherpas on. Yet all those left were involved in summit attacks.

Hillary and Tenzing, after ferrying stores at low levels for days, were champing at the bit. Hillary begged Hunt to let them go - Tenzing's mana would spur on the Sherpas.

Hunt had reached the same conclusion, so the pair hurriedly prepared to leave. They reached Camp VII at 4.30pm and Noyce and Annallu returned an hour later. They had reached the Col.

"Their presence there was symbolic of our success in overcoming the most crucial problem of the whole climb," Hunt wrote. "They had reached an objective which we had been striving to attain for 12 anxious days."

Hillary was mightily relieved. "I felt they'd broken the spell which seemed to be holding us back."

The next day a huge caravan of 17 men carried stores to the Col. With little sleep or food, it was a day that asked for extreme endurance, from Hillary and Tenzing most of all. Not only did they climb to Camp VII on the 21st and then lead the way to the Col on the 22nd, they returned to Camp IV that night - from 6460m to 7925m and back in under 30 hours.

"As Tenzing and I climbed wearily down off the Lhotse Glacier towards advance base," Hillary wrote, "we met a heavily laden party on the way up. It was the 'closed-circuit [oxygen set] team', Evans and Bourdillon, and Hunt himself. In two days they'd be camping on the South Col. The attack was on!"

* Sir Edmund leaves this weekend and is due in Nepal on May 23 with every living mountaineer who has climbed Everest for a celebration on May 29 in the capital.