Charles Houston; OBITUARY.IT IS one of the most famous moments in mountaineering history, and seems to be quintessentially English. The Wallasey-born climber Bill Tilman Major Harold William "Bill" Tilman, CBE, DSO, MC and Bar (14 February 1898–1977) was an English mountaineer and explorer, renowned for his Himalayan climbs and sailing voyages. and his colleague, Noel Odell, stood on the summit on Nanda Devi in 1936, then the highest mountain ever to have been climbed. The notoriously laconic la·con·ic adj. Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise. See Synonyms at silent. [Latin Lac Tilman later wrote: "I believe we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands to perform the customary act of civility by clasping and moving hands, as an expression of greeting, farewell, good will, agreement, etc. See also: Shake on it." Yet it is often forgotten that this was, in fact, an Anglo-American expedition, and by rights there should have been a third man standing on the top of Nanda Devi. Charles Houston was a powerful young doctor and climber who, hours before the push for the summit, had been laid out by food poisoning food poisoning, acute illness following the eating of foods contaminated by bacteria, bacterial toxins, natural poisons, or harmful chemical substances. It was once customary to classify all such illnesses as "ptomaine poisoning," but it was later discovered that . A tin of meat had been punctured at the bottom. Houston, ever the gentleman, had fed his colleagues first from the top of the tin, taking the bottom and contaminated layer for himself. Houston was born to a prosperous and professional New England family, with his lawyer father initially funding his sons's climbing while he studied medicine at Harvard. In the Alps, he had met the veteran British climber T Graham Brown, who in turn introduced Houston to Tilman and Odell, themselves veterans of the 1924 British Everest expedition. His expedition to Nanda Devi whetted his appetite for the high summits of Asia, and two years later he was back leading an expedition to take on the formidable K2 in the Karakoram, arguably the most technically difficult of all the big peaks. It was essentially a reconnaissance but the arrival of war meant that Houston was unable to return until 1953, fifteen years later. That expedition failed, but the story of the neardisaster high up that led to the death of the geologist Art Gilkey has become the stuff of legend. After that, and the Italian conquest of K2 the next year, Houston retired from serious climbing, becoming a respected expert on highaltitude medicine and a leading member of the Peace Corps. Charles Houston, doctor and mountaineer; born, August 24, 1918, died, September 27, 2009 |
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