These boots took the first American to Everest’s summit
But they couldn’t save the wearer’s toes from frostbite.
Barry Bishop returned from a historic Mount Everest expedition with his reindeer-hide boots, Vibram-soled hiking boots, knee-high overboots with crampons—and no toes.
A polar researcher turned National Geographic photographer, Bishop was on the first U.S. expedition to summit Everest. (See the story from the October 1963 issue of National Geographic.) At 3:30 p.m. on May 22, 1963, he and his climbing partner reached the top, dropped to the ground, and wept. On the descent they couldn’t find their camp. Bishop stamped his feet to warm them but soon felt sharp pain, then numbness. “Knowing it is hopeless, I abandon the effort,” he later wrote.
After Bishop spent a night without shelter, his toes turned “dead white, hard, and icy to the touch.” Crippled by frostbite, he was carried partway down the mountain by Nepalese Sherpas and evacuated by helicopter to a hospital in Kathmandu. An American doctor flew in to administer an experimental drug to revive the damaged tissue in his feet, but it failed.
Along with all of his toes, Bishop lost the tips of two fingers. Still, he continued to climb—and his son, Brent, conquered Everest in 1994, making it a father-and-son feat. “There are no true victors,” Barry Bishop wrote of the mountain. “Only survivors.”
