THE HARDEST NIGHT

The first Australian ascent of Mt Everest in 1984 is one of the great feats of mountaineering. Climbed by a small team semi-alpine style, with no bottled oxygen, via the Great (Norton) Couloir, it remains unrepeated 40 years later.

- ROSS TAYLOR

FORTY YEARS AGO at 8pm on 3 October 1984, Tim Macartney-Snape breathlessly picked his way onto the summit of Mt Everest. Below him was an ocean of cloud broken by darkened peaks – only his peak, the highest of them all, was still catching the last light of the setting sun.

As he waited for Greg Mortimer, so the pair would become the first Australians to climb Everest, he recorded his thoughts between ragged breaths on a tape recorder: “This is the summit of Mt Everest, Qomolangma, Mother Goddess of the Earth, the world is staggeringly beautiful from up here. In fact, it’s beyond superlatives.” Greg soon arrived in a state of total exhaustion. In the photos Tim took, Greg, clad in his red down suit, is unfurling a Buddhist prayer flag, his face a black blur in the poor light. The mountaineering cliche that “reaching the summit is only halfway” looms menacingly over the tableau like the imminent darkness.

Fifty metres below, fellow climber Andi Henderson, his frostbitten hands turning to claws, had turned around and was slowly retreating. Unable to swap his glacier glasses for prescription glasses, he was increasingly blind in the gloaming.

The hardest night of their lives was ahead of them.

IN HIS BOOK, Everest: the Ultimate Book of the Ultimate Mountain, British climber and acclaimed outdoor writer Walt Unsworth later wrote in awe about the Aussie ascent, which was achieved without bottled oxygen and in semi-alpine style. “Australia is not a nation with any great tradition of mountaineering and yet the Everest Expedition of 1984 was a model of what an expedition should be,” he observed. “Not only that, their actual achievement was astonishing; one of the greatest climbs ever done on the mountain.”