The World - News from Aug. 16, 1988

Two men have conquered the last unclimbed area of Mt. Everest--the treacherous northeast ridge--but they failed to make it the last 1,000 feet to the 29,028-foot summit. In an interview in Katmandu, Nepal, after returning from Tibet, Russell Brice, 36, of New Zealand said he and Harry Taylor, 29, of Oxford, England, abandoned their climb the weekend of Aug. 5-7 due to bad weather. It has been 35 years since Everest was first scaled, yet this was the first team to succeed in reaching the rocky pinnacle atop the knife-shaped northeast ridge, Brice said. It was the fifth British Everest expedition to tackle the ridge. Taylor previously reached the 26,000-foot level in 1986.