Sir Chris Bonington - The Everest Years : the challenge of the worlds highest mountain

Theyd reached the summit, barely a hundred metres away and a metre or so higher than me. I had to squeeze out my last bit of willpower to join them. Push one foot in front of the other, pant hard to capture what little air and oxygen there was flowing into my mask. But had I enough left to get there? And then another careful, deliberate step along the corniced snow ridge to the top of the world.

A break in the cornice and, framed down to my right was the North-East Ridge, the route we had tried in 1982. Crazy ice towers, fierce snow flutings, a knife-edged ridge that went on and on. Friends of mine on the current British Everest Expedition were somewhere down there. Perhaps also were the bodies of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker.

Another step, and the North-East Ridge was hidden by a curl of snow. This was where Pete Boardman had last seen Mick Burke in 1975. He and Pertemba were on their way down, Mick was going for the summit on his own. He never came back. My head was filled with thoughts of lost friends, of Nick Estcourt who forced the Everest Rock Band and died on K2, of Dougal Haston who went to the summit of Everest with Doug Scott, and died skiing near his home in Switzerland.

And then suddenly I was there. Odd, Bjrn and Pertemba were beckoning to me, shouting, their voices muffled by their oxygen masks. I crouched in a foetal position and just cried and cried in great gasping sobs - tears of exhaustion, tears of sorrow for so many friends, and yet tears of fulfilment for something I had so much needed to do and had done with people who had come to mean a great deal to me. I had at last reached the summit of Everest.

It was 21 April 1985 and in the next ten days the Norwegian Everest Expedition was to place seventeen climbers on the summit - the highest number on a single expedition. We had also completed our ascents earlier in the season than any previous expedition. Judged solely as records these would be fairly empty achievements. Youve got to look deeper to under-stand their significance. I suspect that every climber in the world dreams of standing on the highest point on earth; certainly every climber who joins an expedition to Everest does and that includes quite a few of the Sherpa high-altitude porters as well. If you judge success, therefore, in terms of the sum of individual satisfaction and fulfilment, there is a very real point in getting as many to the summit as possible. Getting there quickly both increases the chance of success and reduces the time that the team is exposed to danger.

There were five expeditions attempting Everest by different routes in the spring of 1985 and the speed with which we were able to run out the route undoubtedly contributed to the fact that we were the only successful expedition. The others were overtaken by the bad weather that occurred later in the season. We were fast because we had a superb and very strong Sherpa force and because the climbers and Sherpas became welded into a closely knit team who worked happily, and therefore effectively, together.

It was this that made the expedition such a success, not just in terms of making records, but also in terms of personal satisfaction for every member of the team. I have been on expeditions that have reached their summit and yet there has been little sense of success because the group had failed to work together and there was acrimony rather than friendship at the end of the experience.

Unless you always go alone, the essence of climbing is teamwork. You are entrusting your life to others, on a rock climb to your partner holding the other end of the rope, but on a higher mountain it becomes more complex. There you need to trust the judgement of others in choosing a route, or perhaps their ability to give support from a lower camp. There is a constant interplay of decision-making, be it between two climbers on a crag in the Lake District or amongst thirty distributed between a series of camps on Everest.

Two or possibly four people climbing together, even on a major Himalayan peak, can reach a decision through discussion. There is no need of a hierarchy or official leader, though almost always a leader does emerge one person who has a stronger personality or who is particularly equipped to deal with a specific problem encountered. In this last respect the lead can pass around the group during the course of a climb. Mountaineering, like every other activity, is a development and learning process about the mountains, ones personal ability and, perhaps most important of all, ones relationship with others.

This book covers the last fifteen years, which for me, have been dominated by expedition climbing. Everest has been a recurrent theme, a magnet that has drawn me again and again, not just because I wanted to reach its summit personally, but because of the scale of its challenge, the strength of its aura.

I had my first glimpse of Everest in 1961, on my way to climb Nuptse. In those days you had to walk all the way from Kathmandu; there was no airstrip at Luglha and the road ended just outside the city. On the way in we saw just one other European, Peter Aufschnaiter, who had been with Heinrich Harrer in Tibet after they had escaped from a British internment camp in northern India. These were the days before trekkers and tourists. There were a few little teashops on the path side for the porters carrying loads and trade goods, but all you could buy were cups of tea and perhaps a few dry biscuits.

The first glimpse of the worlds highest mountain comes as you climb the winding track that leads up to Namche Bazaar from the bottom of the Dudh Kosi valley. You come to a bend in the path on a small spur and suddenly, through the shrubs and small birch trees, you can see Everest framed by the precipitous sides of the Dudh Kosis gorge, part hidden by the great wall of Nuptse that acts as its outer rampart.