''Today, at the top, I had the same feeling as when I saw the pictures of the Breithorn for the first time — I was overwhelmed,'' a breathless Uchida said after his return to a base station on the Klein Matterhorn.
Uchida told The Associated Press through a translator that he was grateful
he ''had the chance to realize my dreams of climbing it, thanks to the suit.''
Uchida and his friend, Takeshi Matsumoto, took a cable car up the Klein Matterhorn,
before a three-hour hike toward the Breithorn. They said they covered about
two miles before having to turn back with an hour of the steepest stretch
remaining because they otherwise would have been too late for the cable car
back down the mountain.
''Now my dream is to take on other challenges, other mountains,'' Uchida said.
Matsumoto carried Uchida with the help of a kind of wearable robot known as
HAL, or ''Hybrid Assistive Limb,'' which gave him extra strength.
Uchida's attempts on Saturday and Sunday were called off because of bad weather.
HAL was developed by Tsukuba University engineering professor Yoshiyuki Sankai,
who created it to help an operator perform tasks a normal human would not
be strong enough for, according to the Web page of Sankai's venture company
Cyberdyne.
Using HAL, someone who could normally lift 220 pounds at a leg-press machine
could lift 396 pounds, according to Cyberdyne.
Sankai called the adventure a great result for the robot, which took 14 years
to develop.
''We have shown that such a robot can be used in the snow,'' he said. ''The
most important thing is that we try to support handicapped persons' dreams.
We got some great data, and now we're going to build a better version.''
The Breithorn is located close to the Italian border. The mountain is considered
one of the easiest Alpine peaks to climb.

Seiji Uchida, who has been paralyzed from the neck down since a traffic accident
more than two decades ago, failed to reach the summit of the 13,741-foot Breithorn
mountain. Riding piggyback on a friend who was aided by a motorized exoskeleton,
the 43-year-old said, however, that simply getting to within 500 yards of
the mountaintop was a triumph.