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Willi Unsoeld often compared climbing Everest to the albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Once you’ve done it, it’s hung around your neck the rest of your career. Very difficult to shake.” In my case, it’s proved impossible. Upon returning from Nepal in 1963 part of me just wished to stuff Everest into a box with all my other climbs and get on with my life. But now, looking back from the perspective of half a century, I find that our climb and its aftermath have shaped my life in profound and mostly wondrous ways.

Among the things I’ve pondered over the past five decades is the role luck played in the events described in these pages. That I climbed the West Ridge and survived to tell this story owes more than a little to serendipity. Indeed, were it not for a fortuitous turn of events, I would not have been with my teammates when they left for Nepal in February 1963. When I was invited to become part of the team by expedition leader Norman Dyhrenfurth in 1961, I was in the U.S. Navy, stationed in San Diego. Twice I requested permission to be granted leave to join the American Mount Everest Expedition (AMEE), and on both occasions the Navy denied my request. By chance Willi and I happened to intersect in the fall of 1962 as he was heading to Nepal to take a job with the newly created Peace Corps. I mentioned my plight to him. On the following Monday, I was paged from the operating theater at the San Diego Naval Hospital to take a phone call from an admiral who informed me that I could be discharged early from the Navy to join the expedition. Before heading west across the Pacific, Willi had called his boss, Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver, about my predicament. Shriver contacted his brother-in-law, President Kennedy, who called his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who sent JFK’s instruction to discharge me down the chain of command to the admiral who called me.

Luck is a two-sided coin. Two days after we arrived at Everest Base Camp, we saw its flip side when a massive serac collapsed in the Khumbu Icefall as Jake Breitenbach was climbing beneath it, killing him instantly.

Eight weeks later, in the final days of the expedition, when a furious windstorm destroyed Camp 4W on the West Ridge and almost blew us off the mountain, we figured our chance to climb the route had vanished with the wind. But a stretch of perfect weather followed, and four days later, when we rallied for one last-ditch attempt, we discovered that the gale had blown a huge accumulation of unstable snow off the mountain, purging the avalanche hazard from the steep, narrow couloir my teammates dubbed “Hornbein’s avalanche trap,” providing us with near ideal conditions.

As far as wind is concerned, we were even luckier the night after we reached the summit. A stiff, icy breeze had been blowing all day. Soon after beginning our descent, we were forced to bivouac in the open above 28,000 feet without shelter, sleeping bags, food, drink, or functional flashlights, and our oxygen tanks were empty. We would have died if the wind had not.

Yes, we were lucky. Very lucky. When I said this to a Nepalese dignitary during a reception at the Royal Palace upon our return to Kathmandu, however, the dignitary replied, “Luck is what you make of it.”

As Willi and I stood on top of Everest at sunset on May 22, 1963, I puzzled about the meaning of it all. Half a century later, I’m beginning to figure it out. The climb itself was one of many rewarding mountain adventures in my life, but it’s the aftermath of the climb that has proven to be a life-changing experience. I can no longer deny—as I tried to do for many years—that Everest has altered my life in a myriad of unimagined ways.

One example: Early in 1970 I was providing anesthesia for an urgent operation on a baby girl. Beside me at the head of the operating table stood the patient’s pediatrician, there to find out why her charge had been unexpectedly whisked away to the O.R. At a point of relative calm during the surgery she asked, “Why did you climb Mount Everest?” In order to dodge a question too often asked, I parried with, “Why’s your arm in a sling?” She explained that she was being taught to rappel. While she was getting ready to descend the short cliff, an instuctor’s ill-timed tug on the rope from below pulled her off her perch. The speedy descent that followed resulted in a broken elbow and compressed vertebrae. I suggested that she drop the course and let me teach her to climb. Now, more than four decades later, to paraphrase Li Po’s poem above, we never grow tired of each other, my partner and I.

THE EXPEDITION DID NOT END, I found, when we returned to our homes in June 1963. To my surprise, both the climb and the book I wrote about it have touched the lives of others. To inspire and to be inspired are both priceless gifts.

For the more fortunate among us, the biggest part of our lives has unfolded since 1963, and our relationships with each other have continued to evolve. I didn’t fully appreciate the strength of the bond that had grown between us until we had a reunion in the fall of 1998, prompted by Lute Jerstad’s sudden death a few months before during a trek with family and friends near Everest. His death at sixty-two reminded the rest of us that we shared something precious, and prompted our decision to have our fortieth anniversary gathering five years early.

Lute was the eighth member of our AMEE team to die. Jake Breitenbach, Dan Doody, and Willi died climbing, Barry Bishop and Barry Prather in automobile accidents, Jim Ullman and Dick Emerson of illnesses. Now, fifteen years further down the road, six more are gone—Gil Roberts, Will Siri, Jimmy Roberts, Barry Corbet, Jim Lester, and Nawang Gombu—from various illnesses. Seven of the original twenty-one are still living: Norman Dyhrenfurth, Maynard Miller, Dick Pownall, Al Auten, Jim Whittaker, Dave Dingman, and I. The oldest, Norman, our expedition leader, is ninety-four, the youngest seventy-six. Of the quartet who spent an unplanned bivouac huddled together above 28,000 feet on May 22, 1963—Jerstad, Bishop, Unsoeld, and Hornbein—I alone remain.

All this looking back and reflecting—perhaps it’s because there’s so much more behind than ahead. In my ninth decade, there is no denying the proximity of that finish line. As Gil Roberts said in his farewell letter to friends shortly before he died of cancer in 2000, “Nobody gets out of life alive.” So obvious, yet so profound; those six words have had a huge effect on my own thinking about the end of life. I have shared intimately in the dying of two others of our team: Barry Corbet and Jim Lester, both of whom came to occupy special places in my life after Dick and Willi were no longer around to “keep Hornbein under control,” as Willi was wont to say. (I still at times feel Willi’s hand resting on my shoulder.)

Faced with incurable conditions, Gil Roberts, Barry Corbet, and Jim Lester willfully chose their times to exit. I suspect that climbers (not uniquely) cherish the illusion of being in control and carry that need to their last act of living, which is to die.

Barry had been an indispensable member of our West Ridge effort. Three years later he, Pete Schoening, John Evans, and Bill Long made the first ascent of Mount Vinson, the highest point on the Antarctica continent, and a few days later Barry and John Evans climbed Mount Tyree, which Barry described as his finest climb. Then in 1968 a helicopter from which Barry was shooting a ski film crashed. Barry never walked again, living the next thirty-six years in a wheelchair. He became the editor of New Mobility, a magazine for those with spinal cord injury or similar conditions. He was an eloquent and courageous writer, a compelling advocate for those living with disabilities. I sometimes wonder what other path he could have followed to have had such a profound impact on the lives of others had he not become paralyzed.

Barry and I loved to explore a kaleidoscope of topics of greater and lesser moment, among them physician-assisted dying. Many in the disabled community, Barry told me, feared legalized assisted death as the beginning of a slippery slope to get the burden of the disabled off the backs of society. Part of Barry shared that view, but another part needed to be calling his own shots. When he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer, he decided, as had Gil, to forgo treatment that promised but modest gain in the duration of life at an unacceptable cost to its quality. The prospect of having to leave his aerie on Lookout Mountain in the Colorado Front Range to spend his remaining days in a nursing home was unthinkable.

In early December 2004, Barry’s daughter, Jen, called to say that Barry had begun his final fast and wondered if I might wish to be there with him and his family during those last days. That time with Barry and his children and their spouses and four grandkids and another dear friend from Wyoming turned out to be a higher-than-Everest moment in my own life. We laughed and cried and cared for Barry (and each other) and tried to keep the smells from the kitchen from tempting his fast. In the evenings we watched one of the film classics he had created, read poetry and Winnie-the-Pooh, or just were there. He was our guide, taking the sharp end of the rope for this one last climb. Once more, as on Everest when the time came for deciding the summit team and he volunteered that Willi and I should climb together, he bestowed a gift of empowerment along with a responsibility. On December 18, 2004, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the day when he climbed Mount Vinson, Barry closed his eyes, his breathing stopped, and our vigil ended.

For me, Barry was friend and also hero. He didn’t much care for the “hero” bit. I pointed out that that was his problem, not mine. Barry saw death as something that came after life, but dying as still very much part of life, its final chapter. He approached it with the same style and virtuosity with which he had confronted so much else during his sixty-eight-year journey.

In 2009, Jim Lester was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and he too chose to end his life by fasting. I visited him shortly before he died, and was once again struck by how much living goes on in the act of dying. Like Barry, Jim was someone I met for the first time on the expedition. He was a psychologist, a non-mountaineer who was forced to become a mountaineer when Norman lured him onto the expedition to add more breadth to the expedition’s scientific goals. He returned from Everest untainted by the need to climb mountains, but his curiosity about how climbers related to themselves and to each other while attempting to ascend a big, sometimes hostile hill was the substance of lifelong research. Immediately after the expedition, Jim volunteered to guide Nawang Gombu and five of our Sherpas on a tour across America. For six weeks he drove them from coast to coast, seeing the sights and visiting team members along the way. Four decades later, Jim journeyed back to Nepal to find out how our Sherpas had fared in the intervening years. Some were there to greet him enthusiastically; in other cases it was their widows or children who welcomed him into their homes and their lives.

Jim’s passions transcended his life as a psychologist. One such was the young Pan Am stewardess he encountered on his flight home from Everest. It did not take long for Jim and Val to translate that initial magic into a rich lifetime together. Jim was a consummate jazz musician, playing piano and trombone. His curiosity about the origins of jazz led to learning more about the life of seminal jazz pianist Art Tatum and to writing a biography of Tatum, Too Marvelous for Words. As is apparent from the photos in this book, his and Dick Emerson’s cameras were an extension of their souls.

In 2006 Kathy and I left my home of four decades in the Pacific Northwest and moved to this alpine valley where I first met mountains when I was thirteen. My life has come full circle. For me this is a fairy-tale place. I walk out our door and scramble among the granite slabs and gullies of Lumpy Ridge. I pause on some high knoll to catch my breath and look out at the dance of light on windblown plumes of snow blurring the silhouette of Longs Peak and the other high peaks along the Continental Divide. I am back on the slate rooftop of my childhood home, in spades.

Adventures, though mellower, continue—on these solitary jaunts behind our home, on hikes and climbs and skis. I am blessed with nurturing and patient young companions who slow to my pace and bring me back alive, glowing. There’s Jim Detterline, once a Longs Peak ranger, who in 1995 introduced me to the spirituality of the vertical on Longs Peak’s Diamond. The following year we returned to fulfill a promise to Clerin “Zumie” Zumwalt, an effervescent guide on Longs in the early 1930s, to leave a bit of his ashes atop the tiny spire that bears his name. For me it was a return forty-five years after three of us made the first ascent of Zumie’s Thumb and also a lesson in how modern rock-climbing shoes counter the process of aging.

On the forty-eighth anniversary of Willi’s and my Everest summit day, I experienced the mystical grandeur of Wyoming’s Devils Tower, struggling up one of its columns while Jon Krakauer bombarded me from above with encouragement. The following year, as part of a protracted eightieth birthday celebration, Harry Kent, Chris Reveley, and Mark Donahue were my companions on a climb up the Keyhole Ridge on Longs, a scenic and joyful route that had somehow escaped my notice in younger years.

The other seasonings to this ninth decade are no less precious: struggling to learn to play the piano; baking bread; meddling in the affairs of the Altitude Research Center at the University of Colorado in Denver; and helping a dear friend, Cynthia Hunt, with her effort to make a difference in the lives of those dwelling in remote villages high in the mountains of Ladakh, India.

I ended Everest: The West Ridge on a somewhat downbeat note: “It is strange how when a dream is fulfilled there is little left but doubt.” Now, a half century later, maybe it makes some sense: dreams are the beginning, and doubt simply a catalyst to creativity, and not just in climbing a mountain. And so the dreams continue.

My life is still rich with adventure and its attendant uncertainties. Precious are those people with whom I share it: that lady with her arm in a sling, my children, and a priceless community of caring friends, both here and in my former haunts in the Pacific Northwest. What wonderful alchemy is it that has turned doubt to gold?

Tom Hornbein Estes Park, Colorado January 2013

Zinc-oxided Tom Hornbein at Camp 2 (Photo by Willi Unsoeld)

One of the misfortunes of advancing age is that you get out of touch with the sunrise. You take it for granted, and it is over and done before you settle yourself for the daily routine. That is one reason, I think, why, when we grow older, the days seem shorter. We miss the high moments of their beginning.

—JOHN BUCHAN

Curious children along the trek (Photo by Lute Jerstad)