South Col: One Man’s Adventure on the Ascent of Everest 1953.

NOYCE, Wilfrid; Foreword by Sir John Hunt.

$1,250.00

Item Number: 114308

London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1954.

First edition of Noyce’s firsthand account of the ascent of South Col. Octavo, original cloth, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with photogravures and maps including frontispiece. Foreword by Sir John Hunt. Association copy, signed by Noyce on the title page and inscribed by him on the front free endpaper to Susan Hunt, “Susan Hunt, Specially – We hope it may while some hours away & that you are not tired with the subject. Rosemary & Wilf Jan 1955.” The recipient, Susan Hunt, was the daughter of Sir John Hunt, the leader of the first expedition to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. Susan Hunt married New Zealand-born mountaineer George Lowe, a member of the 1953 expedition, in 1962. During the expedition, Lowe prepared the route from the head of the Western Cwm up the Lhotse Face towards the South Col. He was a member of the support party for Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay’s summit attempt and the day before the successful summit, with Alfred Gregory and Sherpa Ang Nyima, descended to the South Col to await Hillary and Norgay’s descent. Upon their meeting, Hillary delivered his infamous greeting: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.” With Lowe’s bookplate to the pastedown. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. An exceptional association copy.

On May 21, 1953 Noyce and the Sherpa Annullu (the younger brother of Da Tensing) were the first members of the expedition to reach Everest's South Col, after what Noyce said was "one of the most enjoyable days' mountaineering I've ever had". They left Camp VII at 9.30 am, both using oxygen; according to Noyce, "I had told Anullu that we would not start too early, for fear of frostbite." Several hours later they reached the highest point attained by the British expedition to date: "an aluminium piton with a great coil of thick rope" left by George Lowe and party. The climbers in the camps below, according to Hunt, were watching their progress on this vital part of the climb; by early afternoon "their speed had noticeably increased and our excitement soon grew to amazement when it dawned on us that Noyce and Annullu were heading for the South Col itself". Not long after Hunt made that observation, they reached the Col. It was 2.40 p.m. Wilfrid Noyce and his companion Annullu stood at that moment above the South Col of Everest, at about 26,000 feet. They were gazing down on the scene of the Swiss drama, and they were also looking upwards to the final pyramid of Everest itself. It was a great moment for them both, and it was shared by all of us who watched it. Their presence there was symbolic of our success in overcoming the most crucial problem of the whole climb; they had reached an objective which we had been striving to attain for twelve anxious days. In a passage in South Col, Noyce's book of the expedition published the following year, he gives an account of the scene that greeted him at the Col: "We were on a summit, overlooked in this whole scene only by Lhotse and Everest. And this was the scene long dreamed, long hoped for. To the right and above, the crenellations of Lhotse cut a blue sky fringed with snow cloudlets. To the left, snow mist still held Everest mysteriously. But the eye wandered hungry and fascinated over the plateau between; a space of boulders and bare ice perhaps four hundred yards square, absurdly solid and comforting at first glance in contrast with the sweeping ridges around, or the blank mist that masked the Tibetan hills beyond. But across it a noisy little wind moaned its warning that the South Col, goal of so many days' ambition, was not comfortable at all. And in among the glinting ice and dirty grey boulders there lay some yellow tatters – all that remained of the Swiss expedition of last year."