The West Ridge of Everest: The Yugoslav Expedition of 1979
1979 · event
On 13 May 1979 Andrej Stremfelj and Nejc Zaplotnik stood on the summit of Mount Everest, having climbed the West Ridge in its full and direct line, one of the hardest routes on the mountain and one that had defeated several earlier attempts. Two days later Stane Belak, Stipe Bozic and the Sherpa Ang Phu reached the top by the same way. The expedition was Yugoslav and largely Slovenian, led by Tone Skarja, and it had spent weeks fixing rope up a ridge of steep rock at extreme altitude.
The route mattered as much as the summit. Everest had been climbed for twenty six years by then, and the question in serious mountaineering had moved from whether it could be reached to how. The West Ridge Direct meant technical climbing at eight thousand metres, in a place where a rope length can take hours.
The descent brought the expedition's loss. Ang Phu, who had already been to the summit once before, fell on the way down and died. His companions reached the high camp in darkness. The success and the loss have always been told together in Slovenia, without separating them.
The expedition gave a small mountaineering community a place at the front of world alpinism, and the generation that followed made Slovenian climbers a constant presence on the hardest walls of the Himalaya. Nejc Zaplotnik wrote a book about the mountains and about why people go to them, called Pot, which became a classic read far beyond climbing circles. He died in 1983 in an avalanche on Manaslu, and the book is still in print.