North Face Everest Attempts
Wickwire made four (unsuccessful) attempts on the north side of Mount Everest: 1982, 1984, 1993, and 2003. During the 1982 expedition, Wickwire formed a relationship with female climber, Marty Hoey. While ascending Everest, one day Wickwire and Hoey were taking a brief rest on a slope within a steep and icy couloir at 26,000 ft/7,900 m. When the two climbers above needed more rope Hoey got up to allow Wickwire to move into position to ascend. As she did so, something went wrong. As Wickwire explains:
In the midst of lifting my pack I heard a sudden pinging sound and turned
my head to see Marty pitching backward, head-down the icy slope.
I yelled, "Grab the rope!" Though she rolled onto her side and reached out, she
missed the fixed rope, sliding past it just as it curved away toward the edge of the
Great Coulier. I watched in shock and disbelief as she slid at an ever increasing
speed, disappearing into a tunnel of mist, over a huge ice cliff, and onto the
glacier six thousand feet below. Not once did she cry out.
Wickwire looked back at the fixed rope and saw Hoey's open climbing waist harness still attached via a jumar. He couldn't compute at first what had happened, but later realized that her harness strap had not held because Hoey hadn't threaded "the end of her belt back through the buckle (the only way to assure it would not come loose)". Retracing the route down, Wickwire found one of her crampons, but her body was lost below in the mountain's bergschrund. After Hoey's death, the three remaining climbers of the first summit team of the expedition turned back.
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