Climbing

Monday

Harry Cluff

A mystery on Mount Everest

From our US edition

On June 8, 1924, veteran climber and geologist Noel Odell mounted the crest of a Himalayan crag and gazed up toward the tallest peak on Earth. Taking in the awe-inspiring sight, he noticed two tiny “objects” far ahead on a snowy slope “going strongly for the top.” To Odell, a trained and talented observer, the pair of ascending dots appeared to be a mere thousand feet or so below the summit. He later wrote that as he stood intently watching this dramatic appearance, the scene suddenly became enveloped in cloud and the “objects” vanished from his view. It was the last sighting of his fellow expeditionaries, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, alive.

Mallory

Thursday

A.S.H. Smyth

Climbing the walls

From our US edition

Colombo In January, I promised a visiting Army reservist friend that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when I came down with dengue fever. But I’d climbed Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck, probably saved my life) and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things change. Like everyone else in town, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID-19 nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors and some chap figuring out how many stairs it took to ‘top’ the mountains of the British Isles. Challenge accepted.

climbing
A.S.H. Smyth

How to scale a mountain without leaving home

In January a friend visited me at my home in Colombo, and I promised him that we would climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (twice, actually), and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things changed. When lockdown came to Sri Lanka, I found I was already bored and irritable in the first week. Then I saw a cheery Facebook post about some chap called David Sharp who used his time in isolation to calculate how many stairs he would have to climb in his home to ‘top’ the various mountains of the British Isles. Virtual mountaineering, if you will. Well, I thought, why don’t I do the same with Adam’s Peak?