An international team of 14 men and women will attempt to climb 29,009-foot Mount Everest using the
classic mountain climbers' South Col route this coming spring.The 1989 American Everest Expedition will be led by Karen Fellerhoff, 29, of Bozeman, Mont., and Peter Athans, 31, of Mount Kisco, N.Y.
Dick Bass, owner of the Snowbird Ski Resort, who at 55 became the oldest man to reach the summit of Everest in 1985, will lead a trekking team to the expedition's base camp in May 1989.
Joining the team in the assault on the world's highest peak will be Peter Hillary, 33, of Auckland, New Zealand, the son of Sir Edmund Hillary, who became the first man to climb Mount Everest, on May 29, 1953.
This spring's assault will mark the younger Hillary's third Everest expedition.
Also joining the expedition will be identical twins Alan and Adrian Burgess, 40, of Yorkshire, England; Glen Porzak, 40, of Boulder, Colo., president of the American Alpine Club; Tom Whittaker, 40, of Pocatello, Idaho, director of Idaho State University's handicapped outdoor program; Kellie Erwin Rhoads, 32, and Jeffrey Rhoads, 34, of Inkom, Idaho - both instructors for the Colorado Outward Bound School and accomplished climbers.
Other team members include Andy Lapkass, 31, of Estes Park, Colo., an Everest veteran; Steve Fossett, 43, of Chicago, a member of the 1987 Snowbird expedition; Martyn Williams, 42, of Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, recognized as one of the lead guides in Antarctica; and Michael Reutersward and Carl Johan Lagne, both 25 and from Stockholm, Sweden. Reutersward and Lagne have experience as professional mountaineering guides and are veterans of a Mount McKinley expedition.
The South Col route the team will use was first climbed by the elder Hillary, along with his Sherpa guide, Tensing Norgay.
The route is unique in mountaineering as the only place that requires use of aluminum ladders to span dozens of crevasses in the shifting and precarious Khumba icefall - a 3,000-foot frozen cataract of ice that has claimed the lives of 35 climbers.