Climbing Patriarch Recalls Peak Moments

In the world of mountaineering, first ascents are special--a leap into the unknown, the challenge of going where no one has gone before and facing unpredictable dangers.

Andrew J. Kauffman took that leap in 1958 on Hidden Peak, one of only 14 mountains in the world that soar above 8,000 meters. When he and his partner, Peter Schoening, reached the summit of the massive 26,470-foot mountain in Pakistan, they became the only Americans to successfully make a first ascent of an 8,000-meter peak.

Moreover, the expedition itself was “small, informally organized, almost entirely self-supported and comparatively unknown,” said leader Nicholas Clinch--a far cry from the usual expedition of the day. In 1953, a British expedition put Sir Edmund Hillary atop Mount Everest with the aid of hundreds of porters and Sherpas. The 1958 American expedition had only seven climbers and about 15 people total in its base camp.

“We were a very happy team,” recalls Kauffman, 79, a retired Foreign Service officer who now lives in Washington and has Parkinson’s disease. “Everybody worked hard. . . . We never sat in our tents when we could push higher.”

“Andrew’s strength as an alpinist is, once you get him going, he is like the Energizer bunny--he goes on forever,” says William Putnam, a friend since the two attended Harvard together in the early 1940s. “He could carry very heavy loads. Sometimes we would have to pick them up and put them on his back, but then he could just keep going. The joy for his companions was that he would take interminable abuse of this nature.”

Last weekend, Kauffman sat with his wife, Daphne Burchell, at an American Alpine Club reception in suburban Arlington, Va., while some of the great figures of American mountaineering greeted him. Among them was Bradford Washburn, 89, the cartographer and climber who announced last week that precise new measurements show that Everest is 29,035 feet, seven feet higher than previously thought.

Kauffman became seriously interested in climbing as a member and president of the Harvard Mountaineering Club. He did early and dangerous ascents of ice routes, such as Pinnacle Gully, on Mount Washington in New Hampshire--climbs that involved chopping hundreds of steps in steep ice because neither the ice axes nor the crampons used in those days allowed direct ascents of steeply angled ice.

“The protection was very poor. The ice pitons didn’t work very well, and looking back, we did it in the most dangerous fashion,” he says. “For the time, of course, it was a big deal.”

Just after World War II, Kauffman, Putnam and others made the second ascent of Mount St. Elias, an 18,000-foot peak on Alaska’s coast, following a new route suggested by Washburn. Other climbs followed, including at least one first ascent of a peak in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca.

The idea for the Hidden Peak climb was hatched during a lengthy 1954 stay in the vicinity of Mount Waddington in British Columbia’s Coast Range. The weather was so bad that far more days were spent in the tents than climbing. Clinch, Kauffman and others decided to attack one of the remaining seven unclimbed 8,000-meter peaks. The next year, Clinch chose Hidden Peak. It took another three years to gather a team, get official backing from the American Alpine Club and permission from the Pakistani government, and raise $25,000.

Even taking inflation into account, it seems a pittance. Converted into today’s dollars, that would just about cover the cost of two clients paying $65,000 each to a commercial guide service for an Everest ascent.