Annapurna 1950 — The first 8,000-metre summit, paid for in fingers and toes

On 3 June 1950, at about two in the afternoon, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal stood on the summit of Annapurna I in the Nepalese Himalaya — the first human beings to climb an 8,000-metre peak. No one died on the mountain, but both summiteers descended into a near-fatal ordeal of storm, frostbite and gangrene that cost Herzog all his fingers and toes and Lachenal all his toes, amputated piecemeal and largely without anaesthetic during the retreat. The triumph and its mutilation were inseparable; this is a case in which the party reached its objective and was nearly destroyed by it.

The expedition was organised by the French Alpine Club and led by Maurice Herzog, who departed Paris on 30 March 1950 with an exceptionally strong team: the guides Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat, the climbers Jean Couzy and Marcel Schatz, the doctor Jacques Oudot, and a corps of Sherpa porters under the sirdar Ang Tharkay. They held permits for two peaks, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna, but knew the location of neither with certainty; much of the brief pre-monsoon season was spent simply finding a mountain they could climb.

Having judged Dhaulagiri too hard for the time available, the team turned to Annapurna’s North Face, forced a route through its glaciers and ice cliffs, and pushed Camp 5 to roughly 7,400 metres. From there Herzog and Lachenal made an oxygen-free dash for the top into a closing weather window. They succeeded — and then the descent unravelled. Herzog had dropped his gloves and went on bare-handed; the four men of the upper party, snow-blind and lost, survived a night crammed in a crevasse; and only the Sherpas and teammates who carried, dragged and nursed the casualties down the mountain brought them out alive. The labour and judgment of Ang Tharkay and the other Sherpas, routinely minimised in the triumphalist telling, were central to that survival.