experiments in the Eureka Draw-Tite tents on the Himalayan mountains. These four-man and two-man Eureka Draw-Tite tents, proven before the expedition during the U.S. Navy's Operation Deep Freeze to endure temperatures of up to -102˚ Fahrenheit, withstood the expedition and remained in "excellent" and entirely usable condition even two years later. James W. Whittaker and the First All-American Everest Expedition Hillary's experience with the Eureka Draw-Tite tents influenced Jim Whittaker aka James W. Whittaker and Barry C. Bishop, two of nineteen American explorers headed for the first all-American Everest Expedition in 1963, to turn to Eureka to design custom Draw-Tite tents. Working closely with Bishop's and Whittaker's instructions, such as installing heavy-duty brass hooks for attaching the tent to the frame and utilizing "zipper-type vents" to prevent condensation, Eureka improved on the Draw-Tite design to create a total of over 60 lightweight "Mt. Everest Assault Tents" for the expedition, many of which were tested at at Mount Rainier the year before. The tents were used in temperatures reaching -20˚ Fahrenheit and from 60 mph+ winds during the three-month trek to the summit. Norman G. Dyhrenfurth, the expedition's leader, stated that much of the expedition's success was due to "our fine new equipment... [such as our] vastly improved tents, with outside frames, that can be set up in a high wind." Eric Simonson and the Mallory and Irvine Research Expeditions When Eric Simonson led a team of nine explorers near the summit of Mount Everest in 1999 to uncover the truth about the 1924 expedition of British explorers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine, the team used Eureka! tents to shelter themselves at the base camp. Simonson's team found Mallory's preserved body but was unable to determine whether he had died before or after reaching the Everest summit. After the first expedition, Simonson told Kurt Heisler, then-senior tent designer for Eureka!, that the Eureka! tents had been "great" and that he and his team of explorers "could have used these tents much higher on the mountain." Heisler offered to design tents for Simonson's next exhibition in 2001, the goal of which was to find Irvine's body and to determine whether Mallory had been the first man to reach the Everest summit, nearly three decades prior to Sir Edmund Hillary's historic expedition. Eureka! donated sixty tents to the expedition, from their largest style of military tents to their lightest and smallest backpacking