ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 3, 1997 TAG: 9703030134
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: The New York Times
RAYMOND LAMBERT never stood at its peak. But Lambert, who died last Monday, is credited with opening the way to the mountain's conquest.
Raymond Lambert became famous in 1952 for what he almost did.
The Swiss mountaineer, who died last Monday at 82, came within 800 vertical feet of immortality but had to console himself ever after with the knowledge that he had paved the way for Sir Edmund Hillary's conquest of Mount Everest a year later.
Scaling Mount Everest has become so commonplace, with dozens of high-tech climbers making it to the 29,028-foot summit each year, that it is easy to forget how formidable the challenge seemed in 1952, when Lambert and his Sherpa companion, Tenzing Norgay, came as close as anyone before them who lived to tell the tale.
For a century, the Himalayan mountain on the Nepal-Tibet border had been recognized as the world's highest; but beginning in 1921, repeated efforts to scale it had failed in the thin air and vicious storms around the peak.
The Swiss expedition that made the 1952 attempt was the first to approach the peak from the southern, Nepalese side, which had long been sealed to foreigners.
In the end, their rudimentary oxygen equipment, which could be used only at rest and not on the move, proved insufficient for the task. After spending the night without sleeping bags close to the summit, the two men made a laboriously slow dash toward the peak May 28, 1952, but were too exhausted to complete it.
The next year, Tenzing latched on to Hillary's expedition. A year and a day after Lambert's attempt ended, Tenzing and Hillary, following much the same route, became the first men to stand on top of the world.
As Col. John Hunt, the leader of the 1953 British expedition, made clear, the knowledge generated by the Swiss expedition a year earlier had been indispensable in planning and carrying out the successful ascent.
In a telegram to Lambert and the half-dozen other Swiss climbers who had mounted the 1952 expedition, he wrote: ``To you, a good half of the glory.''
By the time of the 1952 attempt, Lambert, a native of Geneva who began rock climbing when he was 15, was one of the best known mountain climbers in Switzerland. He lost his toes and some fingers to frostbite on Mount Blanc in 1937 but went on to accompany so many people to the peak that he became the first Alpine guide to operate his business from Geneva rather than from a remote mountain outpost.
After the failure in May 1952, Lambert joined another Swiss expedition that made an attempt at Everest that fall. Once again it was Lambert and Tenzing who made the final dash, but this time the weather was so bad they did not get as far as they had in the spring.
Although Lambert continued to climb in the Himalayas and made several climbing trips to South America and elsewhere, he never tried Everest again.
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