Everest Pioneer Ed Webster Has Died at 66

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In the summer of 1988, alpinist Ed Webster visited me in Colorado Springs. He had just returned from Mount Everest, where with Steven Venables, Paul Teare, and Robert Anderson, he had established a new route on the forbidding 12,000-foot Kangshung Face—located on Everest’s rarely-visited east side. The unassisted quartet succeeded without the help of sherpas or supplemental oxygen, pulling off one of history’s most audacious Himalayan first ascents. Reinhold Messner, the first climber to solo the mountain, called the climb, “The best ascent of Everest in terms of style and pure adventure!”

The ascent came at a price for Webster. For two weeks he shuffled around my house with his feet and hands swaddled in bandages. We changed the dressings daily, cleaning bones sticking out of his fingertips. Ed regaled me with stories of the climb. Early in the morning on summit day he had removed his over-mittens in -40-degree temperatures, leaving his hands clad in thin liners, in order to shoot photographs of what he called “the most perfect sunrise I’ve ever seen.” He clicked ten perfect frames as alpenglow flooded across the South Col below and illuminated Lhotse’s rocky pyramid. But the photos cost Ed all the fingertips on his left hand and three tips on the right hand. Later that day he reached Everest’s South Summit, but after seeing purple-robed Tibetan monks chanting beneath colorful prayer flags, he blacked…