Stephen Venables in The Quarterly

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The ascent of man Sixty years after Hillary and Norgay became the first men to set foot on the summit of Everest, Stephen Venables, who has summited without oxygen, describes what it’s like to stand on the roof of the world…

This page, left: Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay approach the summit in 1953 Above: A long line of porters carrying supplies makes its way up towards the expedition’s base camp

I first knew categorically that I was going to reach the top of Everest when I gasped my way to the top of the Hillary Step, a steep rock face a few hundred feet from the summit. I was on my own and it was getting late in the afternoon. I’d been on the go for about 15 hours non-stop and was utterly exhausted.

But I knew that nothing could stop me.

That was three months to the day after I’d set off from London, back in 1988.

At the beginning of ‘summit day’, I was managing 20 steps between rests. As I neared the top, I was taking at least three deep breaths per step, and it’s fair to say that I was at my absolute limit.

Ideally, you reach the summit early in the morning, enjoy the view and then go home. But I reached it at 3.40 in the afternoon, shortly before dark. The sky was clouding over, it had started to snow and there was a wind getting up. People ask me if I had deep poetic feelings or experienced a connection with the Earth as I stood there. Of course, it was utterly thrilling, but on that day, Everest was the most dangerous place in the world, and my only concern was to get down alive.

Despite its wonderful mountaineering myths and legends, the reason the public gets so excited about Everest is the simple fact that its summit happens to be higher than any other.

But from a climber’s point of view, it is attractive mostly because it is right on the

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This page, top to bottom: Mount Everest as seen from the northeast at a height of 22,740ft; John Morris, a member of the 1936 expedition, crossing a small crevasse in the East Rongbuk Glacier, using his ice axe for balance

and reasonably adapted to altitude, there’s a very good chance of getting to the top.

For this reason, to my mind, Everest has ceased to have anything to do with real mountaineering. Climbing is about heading into the unknown, being responsible for your own decisions and seeking the unpredictable; while to me, Everest is now a managed commodity with a commercial infrastructure.

Having said that, you can have as many fixed ropes and as much Sherpa support as you like, but in the end, life at 29,000 feet is risky and things can go wrong very easily and quickly. One of the advantages of today’s way of doing things is that, compared with the Seventies, the rate of accidents is very low. If you look at the number of people on the mountain today, it’s actually quite surprising how few people get killed.

Today, I prefer more peace and quiet in the mountains, so I tend to lead expeditions in places like Antarctica and South Georgia, where there are still unclimbed peaks waiting to be explored. Now, that’s much more exciting. Q The featured photographs come from Everest (Ammonite Press, £40) – a stunning new book produced by The Royal Geographical Society, which chronicles the expeditions leading up to the crowning achievement on 29 May 1953 seems strange that it took so many attempts, and that so many years passed before Everest was finally climbed, only to find that now it’s all a matter of routine. What’s happened is that the mountain has evolved into a very slickly operated adventure. Today, there’s

a handrail of modern nylon ropes from Base Camp virtually all the way to the summit. You clip onto these and are escorted to the top by very efficient, hard-working, competent Sherpas who pick the route and organise everything. What this means is, that if you’re fit, determined

In 1988, Stephen Venables became the first British mountaineer to climb Everest without using bottled oxygen.

His pioneering expeditions have given him a reputation as being the ‘mountaineer’s mountaineer.’ Higher than the Eagle Soars (Arrow Books, £8.99) is out now

AMMONITE PRESS/AE PUBLICATIONS LTD/ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

limits of what we can endure physiologically.

We tend to think of the 1953 ascent as Hillary’s glorious achievement, but it was really a team effort.

He was actually rather lucky in that he was selected for the successful summit bid from a team including plenty of other climbers equally capable of reaching the top.

There had been an earlier failed attempt on the same expedition made by Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans. They got within a whisker of the summit using an experimental oxygen system that ultimately let them down. As a result, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were given a much better shot at the summit, starting from a higher camp, which gave them the advantage.

But Hillary’s success was also a result of his supreme confidence, ambition and determination. He was meticulous – and that’s critical, because you have to be good at attending to every detail of what needs to be done. He did mental arithmetic all the way to the summit and back to ensure they had enough oxygen.

As the Swiss climber André Roch said: ‘The problem with Everest is not that it’s a hard mountain, it’s just a little bit too high.’ This means there’s not much air up there and so it’s very difficult to breathe. And that’s the main reason most ascents are made using supplementary bottled oxygen systems. What this does is to effectively bring the altitude down to something more manageable for the climber. Don’t get me wrong: Everest is a big, glaciated mountain with some dangerous terrain. It’s just that if the summit were at 20,000ft (rather than 29,028ft), it wouldn’t be particularly difficult.

The mountain itself hasn’t changed much since Hillary’s day, but climbing it has. It