Tom Hornbein

Tom Hornbein has been interviewed countless times about May 22, 1963, when he and partner Willi Unsoeld summited Mount Everest via the unclimbed West Ridge, spent the night shivering high on the mountain, then successfully descended via the South Col. Their bold traverse remains one of the legendary feats in mountaineering. Hornbein’s book, Everest: The West Ridge , is usually included among the best adventure books of all time. The driven but gentlemanly Hornbein, now 88, has only just begun to slow down. No Arizona retirement for him. In his mid-70s, he and his wife moved from soggy but mild Seattle to Estes Park, Colorado — altitude 7,500 feet with real winters. There, with his backyard overlooking Rocky Mountain National Park, he has hiked the trails and climbed the local crags with his many friends. He still gets out but sometimes worries that his slower pace imposes on the patience of his partners. In the early 1960s, there were no professional climbers. A few were guides, but many had unrelated professions. Hornbein and several of his climbing friends, such as Charles Houston, were physicians. Hornbein specialized in anesthesiology. He has also written many papers on the effects of high altitude on the body and still takes part in a hypoxia conference every two years. The next one is in February in Lake Louise, Canada. The in-depth interview below was done by Edward Gilbert-Kawai and is reprinted from the journal, Extreme Physiology & Medicine . It focuses refreshingly on other aspects of his life, beside that day in 1963, yet gives a rounded portrait of both the climber and the man. My mom was a classical housewife, raising kids. My dad was head of advertising at the major department store in St Louis. I remember as a kid visiting the 11th floor of this big store where there was a large network of offices. All these young people were doing drawings of women modelling clothes and such things for the newspaper ads. It was kind of magical, and Dad was obviously very caring and beloved by his staff. Were your parents influential on your later life and choice of career? A lot of your life has been spent in the mountains, but were you a very outdoor-oriented child? Both my geology major and medical school times were great. When I advise young people now, I look on college as a time of discovering yourself. It’s the first time you’re away from your parents and family, and all the book-learning is a piece of it, but only a part. For me, those were very formative years, going out and climbing on the rocks, doing dumb stuff, teaching myself, and fortunately surviving! It laid the groundwork for precepts of commitment, problem-solving, and risk-taking—all of which are core ingredients of my life. When you were at medical school, you had dreams of being a general practitioner out in Colorado. What prompted the change of heart? In 1960, I was invited to come along as the climbing doctor for the America–Pakistan Karakoram Expedition to Masherbrum. This was somewhere between my anaesthesia residency and my fellowship years. There we planned to use the masks the Swiss had used on their successful ascent of Everest in ‘56. However, when we got up high and put them on, we found ourselves ripping the mask off and gasping for air. It got me thinking about the problems with the mask, one of which was obviously a pretty high resistance to breathing through the inspiratory and expiratory valves. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe one can come up with a better mask.’ And I came up with what I still think is a pretty damned creative idea for a mask. Yes, after my residency and fellowship were done, I started my military service and I got assigned to the US Navy. By this time, I had already gotten an invitation from Norman Dyhrenfurth to go to Everest, so I asked the admiral at the Naval Hospital in San Diego where I was stationed for permission to join this expedition. Well, he was OK with the idea; however, the Bureau of Medicine and Surger