Mounting Our Own Everest

K A T M A N D U, Nepal, May 31 -- As a general rule, journalists loathe "anniversary" stories. There's never much to report when it comes to commemorating the 25th, 50th, 75th or 100th year since some momentous, or in many cases, non-momentous, event happened. News, by its nature, is topical, and anniversaries, by their nature, fall years, or decades, too late to qualify as news.

There are exceptions to most rules, however, and the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's first ascent of Mount Everest is one celebration we didn't want to miss.

The lure of Everest remains so powerful, climbers and trekkers and tourists just can't stay away, turning the slopes of the great mountain into something Hillary would barely recognize.

We decided to follow the well-worn path of a generation of Everest mountaineers — a path that immediately takes its toll in twisted ankles and painful blisters.

We are actually a pretty small group by Everest standards: a five-man team with just a half-ton of equipment. We arrived in the Nepali capital of Katmandu nearly a month ago, with a rough outline for our own assault on Everest, although our final destination was only Base Camp, a mere 17,550 feet high.

True, at that elevation, your body only receives half the amount of oxygen it does at sea level, some 3½ miles below. But the summit still stood more than 12,000 feet higher, and we prepared for our own adventure with the knowledge that, in actuality, we were only planning to travel to the bottom of the mountain.

Although there are any number of tour operators that will gladly guide you to Base Camp and back again, for a price, most of the groups or individuals setting out for Base Camp put in several months of planning and conditioning for their trips.

Given the nature of the news business, we had about 10 days. That meant 10 days to sort out our gear, plan our trek, set up our stories editorially, start a last-minute fitness program, and get ourselves to Katmandu. Easy.

Upon arriving in Nepal, our team tried to get our collective head around this Plimptonian adventure, as we struggled to figure out exactly how we were going to complete a fairly rigorous trek and still find a way to do our jobs as we went. Every plan included at least two worst-case scenarios, which involved everything from getting stuck in a storm, to having a member of our team go down with Acute Mountain Sickness, to having our equipment freeze up or fall into a crevasse. Luckily, we managed to avoid any of these situations, although we ran into several other tricky ones before we were finished.