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Problem here: getting stove started and keeping it upright. Also, obeying nature’s calls. We urinate in peanut can, and toss it out entrance; defecation requires more guts.

So far, almost everything on the expedition had gone well. The weather had been consistently good, as camps were established and supplies moved steadily up the mountain. Up to Camp III, the Hunzas had performed yeoman work. Houston was tempted to use them higher, but decided against that tactic, on the grounds that the men were simply not experienced enough on difficult terrain. On July 12, as they started back to base camp, the Hunzas parted company for good with the Americans. Wrote Houston later, “Their early cockiness, bred of ignorance, had been succeeded by overcautiousness…. After their initial demoralization at Camp I (and what mountain porters have not gone through this?), they had performed splendidly.” As the Hunzas receded into the distance below Camp III, they shouted out, “America zindabad!” (“Long live America!”) and “Pakistan zindabad!”

Pete Schoening, the engineer, had designed an aluminum A-frame tripod to which he now attached a pulley. With this device, pulling on ropes fed through the pulley, the men hauled many hundreds of pounds of gear up House’s Chimney. “This was hard work, and time-consuming,” wrote Houston. “But it was nowhere near as hard as carrying loads up the narrow chimney.” In his diary, Dee crowed, “A-frame big success!”

Now, however, the weather changed. Beginning on July 14, it stormed on seven of the next eleven days. Houston figured the inevitable delays put the team about a week behind schedule. But the men’s spirits plunged with the weather. “Gone were most of the jokes; the banter had become more serious,” remembered Houston. “We were more determined now than ever, but the picnic was over; the true struggle had begun.”

It’s always true on expeditions that when you’re stuck in a tent with nothing to do, your thoughts turn to food. Houston wittily recaptured those stormbound vigils:

We read, we slept. Dinners had become real occasions, because our appetites were still good (they were to fail higher up) and considerable ingenuity was usually exercised by the cook. Sometimes he added Triscuits to the boiled meat bars, or fried raisins to the chicken. Sometimes we had oyster stew (minus the oysters) by mixing Klim, butter, salt, and tuna fish…. Bates and I had noticed recently that our companions, heartily sick of our everlasting reminiscences [of 1938], were now again showing interest in these memories, particularly when they involved some of the epicurean dishes then conceived.

I was amused to discover in Dee’s diary that everybody’s favorite dessert was Jell-O. I haven’t taken Jell-O on an expedition since my attempt on the east face of Everest in 1988. There, instead of following the directions on the package, to get a quick gut-bomb of energy, we would mix Jell-O or pudding powder with water in a quart bottle and slug the liquid down before it set. Jell-O may be a great treat for kids, but it’s insipidly bland at 20,000 feet, and waiting for it to firm up seems to take an eternity.

On July 20, between storms, Bates and Schoening reconnoitered higher and reached Camp VI. There they discovered the most poignant of all the vestiges of the 1939 expedition. Houston described the scene: “Two tents had been torn to shreds. A stove, gasoline, and sleeping bags, rolled and ready to be strapped to the carrying frames, lay nearby. A small bundle of tea wrapped in a handkerchief lay inside an empty stove box beneath the snow.”

On July 31, 1939, Pasang Kikuli, Phinsoo, and Kitar had set out from Camp VI on their second attempt to rescue Dudley Wolfe, leaving Tsering to brew up tea. The sleeping bags had evidently been rolled up in anticipation of five men descending the Abruzzi Ridge. Instead, only Tsering returned.

Pasang Kikuli and Phinsoo had become Houston’s dear friends on the 1938 expedition. Fifteen years later, he saluted them and Kitar movingly: “Whatever their fate, the history of climbing