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Alumni News
Up In The Clouds: FP Recalls Conquering the Climb to Everest Base Camp Dr. Bill Macfarlane Smith left the High School of Dundee in 1960. A graduate of the Universities of Aberdeen and Reading, he maintained his links with the School over many years, having a major involvement with the Old Boys’ Club, the Patrons, the Trust Fund Appeal and the Parents’ Association. He was also a member of The School’s Board of Directors for many years, standing down as Vice-Chairman in 2009 to free up time for his position as District Governor of Rotary District 1010, which covers a large area of Scotland. In this article, Bill recalls his adventure of a lifetime – hiking the perilous paths to Everest Base Camp. Almost exactly twenty-five years ago, I sat one evening with the warm early summer sun streaming through the open door, concentrating on my equipment requirements for a trip to a far corner of the world later that year. However, this story has a much earlier beginning, back in 1950. For once, I had completed all the classwork required to the necessary standard. My reward was to be allowed to go to the school library to choose a book which I could read. I was fortunate that one of the first books I picked up, though dusty and clearly little read, contained an account of the early 1920s British expeditions to explore and hopefully scale Mount Everest, already recognised as the highest mountain in the world. One of very few photographs showed a huge mountain, its summit almost totally obscured by cloud and wind-driven plumes of snow. I was fascinated and totally hooked. I could hardly wait to finish the book and move onto the very few other existing books on the same subject. My fascination jumped up several additional notches on the news in 1953, that a British expedition led by John Hunt had put the climbers Ed Hillary and Tensing Norgay on the top. In the years which followed, I read every book I could find on the different ways in which Everest could be climbed. Some were less
successful as others and throughout the death toll was appallingly high. There the matter might have rested but for my attendance many years later at the Dundee Mountain Film Festival. The principle speaker was the world-renowned mountaineer, Sir Chris Bonnington. His talk that evening was about the various expeditions which he had led to Everest and always given up his own personal opportunity to get to the summit to be certain that at least one member of his team would do so. He had finally achieved his own ambition by joining an Austrian expedition. Always a very gregarious person, he spent a lot of time chatting to the audience after his talk. In my own conversation with him, I talked about my own interest in Everest but thought that I was too old to ever go there. He looked me up and down very searchingly, then said, ‘You still look very fit. If you really want to go there, what is stopping you?’ So, after some months of physical training and proving that I was fit enough to go, I found myself in the departure lounge at Edinburgh Airport, en route for Kathmandu via Gatwick, Frankfurt and Dubai. Kathmandu was a different world – the airport was a heady mix of sheer bedlam, noise and, already, evidence of extreme poverty, as individuals vied, often quite violently with
