Beyond the Edge Page #4

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which basically

you can't do much about,

There's also a risk

of falling into a crevasse,

We had these light

aluminium ladders about six feet long

which we could bolt together

across the crevasses,

And there were so many crevasses

that we soon ran out

of all the ladders we had,

So we had to send down

to where the nearest trees grew,

which would be about

three days' walk away,

to cut small tree trunks

to make little log bridges,

And you balanced

as well as you could,

For us, it was clearly going to be

the only way to climb Everest,

Ed Hillary wanted to please,

He wanted to be on the summit team,

He would've known

that only a few people

would get a chance

to go for the summit

so from very early on

he wanted to impress John Hunt

and he felt there

was time pressure on him

to recce the icefall

to get it prepared,

My father

was never afraid of hard work,

but part of that was to cover

I think what Dad felt

were a lot of psychological

or emotional inadequacies,

He had been raised

with high expectations

and they sent him off

to Auckland Grammar School

two years too young,

I was only 11 years old

and I was rather terrified, really,

When lunchtime came,

I would go out

the back of the school

and there were a whole lot

of ants living there,

When I first went

to Auckland Grammar,

the only friends I really had

were the ants,

I was a dreamer

until I started climbing,

The icefall was really chaotic

and yet they forced a way

and Ed's job of route finding

was a particularly good show,

The New Zealanders

had a lot more snow

and ice climbing experience

than the average European climber

because their mountains are

very like the Himalayas in miniature,

The Southern Alps -

the great mountain tangle

which sprawls northwards

in an almost unbroken chain

of rock and ice.

Well, Ed,

how do the Southern Alps

compare with the Swiss Alps?

That's where the English climbers

get their training.

Here in New

Zealand, with our terrific glaciation,

a greater amount of our climbing

is done on snow and ice -

in many ways very similar

to the Himalay a.

They're rather different

from the Swiss Alps

where the predominant feature

for climbing is rock.

Mount

Aspiring, New Zealand's Matterhorn -

a shark's tooth of a mountain

whose dangerous slopes

demand skill and careful climbing.

Our New Zealand mountains

are really a wonderful

training ground for the Himalay a.

Kiwis

have that tough resilience

so I think that

the younger British climbers

were somewhat in awe

of these formidable Kiwis

brought in to reinforce the team,

Now, the next big doubt

was regarding the lip

of the coomb itself

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