Dawn's Reading Blog

OK, the guy’s dead and the whole 1996 Everest thing got blown way out of proportion, so there’s no need to harp on the subject, but Above the Clouds isn’t doing Anatoli Boukreev any favors. In his own words, he comes across as exactly what others have accused him of being: aloof, anti-social, selfish, and self-righteous. He was apparently one of those guys who always knows better than everyone else, at least in retrospect. It seems each of his tales involves him telling the expedition leaders what they’re doing wrong. And then, if a tragedy ensues, he reviews with us, the readers, how everything would have been fine if only they’d done it his way. I hope he wasn’t pushing that into the faces of the people he was climbing with.

It’s clear that people don’t mean much to him. He seems able to shrug off a death or two per outing as long as he summits. He’s quite the braggart too. He fakes a certain modesty but he makes sure to get all his accomplishments in there.

I still don’t blame him for the 1996 tragedy – never have. But I can see now why people who were there did. I imagine they just plain didn’t like him.

I read Accidents in North American Mountaineering every year because it comes free (because I’m a member) and in hopes of learning something that will help me avoid an accident myself. At this point in my career there are few surprises left and I understand the vanity of believing it will never happen to you. Now I suppose I just read in a rubber-necking way.

Last Climb: The Legendary Everest Expeditions of George Mallory is yet another History of Everest/Did Mallory Make It To the Top book. It adds nothing new in that respect. If you’ve read ten, you’ve read them all. (You may wonder why I’ve read so many and the answer is that, being a climber, people give them to me and then I generally go ahead and read them.) What this version does have is a lot of photos: intimate, interesting, different photos. And quotes from letters and diaries. Obviously the authors had better access to the source materials than most get. As such, if you’re only going to read one History of Everest/Did Mallory Make It To the Top book, I’d go ahead and read this one. And the answer is no, he didn’t make it to the top. No one wants to say it out loud but it’s obvious.

I couldn’t finish Ascent. I finished Sir Edmund’s half. Some of the early chapters were interesting and he had a lot of different experiences (not just Everest) but it wasn’t terribly interesting. The one thing I took away from it is that Everest was apparently a fluke – a matter of being the guy up for a summit attempt on the right day. He never did another memorable thing mountaineering-wise and was often sick or the weak link on other expeditions.

I’d never heard about the tragedy in his life. His wife and one of his daughters died in a small plne crash. He doesn’t have such great things to say about his son and surviving daughter at various times, describing them as difficult during their teenage years (like who isn’t). He should have reconsidered some of what he wrote.

His son’s half was less interesting and less well written. I eventually gave up due to a complete lack of interest.

Below Another Sky: A Mountain Adventure in Search of a Lost Father is nominally the story of Asia Wright’s trek to her father’s grave in Tibet. But really it’s all about Rick Ridgeway. He’s kind of a pompous eogtist. He passes a lot of judgement on Asia’s occasional moments of fear or foolishness. Well, guess what? She’s a twenty year old completely out of her element on an emotional journey with a mere acquaintance. I’d never have held up as well as she did and if she felt the condenscension coming off of him as strongly as I did, I feel bad for her, that she couldn’t have done this with someone more sympathetic and less all-knowing and superior.

That said, Rick Ridgeway has certainly led an interesting life and done a lot of adventurous things that are way beyond my capabilities. The book is interesting for those stories, not so much for Asia’s trek which is pretty low drama and, because we’re hearing from him not her, low emotion as well. I’d love to read her take on all this.

Despite being a climber, I’m by no means an Everest junkie. I’m not a mountaineer (I climb rocks, not snow, as I try to explain to non-climbers) and I’m most certainly not a high altitude mountaineer. But rock climbing doesn’t seem to have a literature base and Lost on Everest came my way free of charge, so I read it.

It starts with a Mallory overview – his life and times up to and during his three Everest attempts – along with some basic Everest history. So if you know your Everest, the first three quarters of the book will be redundant. Eventually the author gets to the expedition that discovered Mallory’s body but there’s not much to tell. Lastly, he analyzes what was discovered and tries to answer the age old question: did Mallory get to the top.

I’m not sure why this is even a question because climbers are pretty agreed that it doesn’t count as an ascent unless you make it back down alive. So that even if we had irrefutable proof that Mallory was the first to the top of Everest, it wouldn’t change the first ascent listing in the history books. It would be a footnote.

Putting that aside, it seems like the question has been answered. It’s highly unlikely that he made it. Highly, highly, highly unlikely. So unlikely that only people who believe in God and Santa Claus could think so. Which is the real answer. Those who want to believe he made it, because it’s more romantic that way, are always going to believe it and the rest of us don’t care because, even if he did, it wouldn’t change anything. So books like this are published for wanna-believers, not truth-seekers. The author does his best to give them hope.

Geoff Tabin has done a lot of cool things and in Blind Corners he tells us about them. I get the feeling that this is a collection of essays he wrote for other purposes through the years. Some material is repeated and some subjets are worthy of more detail than he provides. But the adventures were real adventures and he seems like a good guy. Probably of less interest to non-climbers, the book tries to avoid dumbing the language down so far that those-in-the-know can’t bear it while still making sense to those-not-in-the-know.

This Game of Ghosts is marketed as the follow-up to Simpson’s successful and fascinating Touching the Void but it’s really the story of his life as a whole, both before and after the events of Touching the Void. Much of the before stuff is pretty uninteresting. He meanders through it too quickly for the reader to care but not quickly enough. The most interesting information is how many near fatal accidents he was involved in prior to Touching the Void. This is a man who shouldn’t be climbing.

In the after section, he doesn’t climb for a while, then does. Unbelievably, he has more near fatal accidents including one in which he has to be lowered down a mountain with a broken leg again. Again, this is a man who shouldn’t be climbing.

I get my copy of Accidents in North American Mountaineering free every year from being a member of the AAC but I would probably go out and buy it anyway. Although the nature of the accidents doesn’t change much from year to year, that’s the whole purpose of reading about them. It’s the common mistakes we need to avoid, because we can.