The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest

(Paperback)

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Description

In May 1996 a number of expeditions attempted to climb Mount Everest on the Southeast Ridge route. Each group contained world class climbers and relative novices, some of whom had paid tens of thousands of pounds for the climb. As they neared the summit twenty-three men and women, including the expedition leaders, were caught in a ferocious blizzard. Disorientated, out of oxygen and depleted of supplied, the climbers struggled to find their way to safety. Experienced climber and guide Anatoli Boukreev led his exhausted and terrified group of six back to safety before going back out into the blizzard to help others stranded on the mountain. Rescuing a number of climbers from certain death he emerged a hero. The Climb is an honest and gripping account of true endurance and contains interviews with most of the surviving climbers, medical personnel, Sherpa guides, and families of the dead who experienced the tragedy. This edition also includes the transcript of the Mountain Madness debriefing, recorded five days after the tragedy, as well as G. Weston de Walt's response to Jon Krakauer.

Reviews

Powerful . . . a breath of brisk, sometimes bitter clarity . . . Boukreev did the one thing that denies the void. He took action. He chose danger, and he saved lives. * New York Times *
The Climb has a story that will grip and haunt you. -- Alex Garland, author of The Beach and The Tesseract
This is essential reading for anyone who has read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air . . . Krakauer painted Boukreev as an irresponsible Russian villain; but that night, Boukreev effected on of mountaineering history's most remarkable rescues. * Guardian *
One of the most amazing rescues in mountaineering history, performed single-handedly a few hours after climbing Everest without oxygen by a man some describe as the Tiger Woods of Himalayan climbing. * Wall Street Journal *
Boukreev acted with extraordinary heroism . . . [In The Climb] first-person anecdotes, plus excerpts from taped base-camp interviews, are skillfully fleshed out by co-author G. Weston DeWalt * Rock & Ice Magazine *

Author Bio

Anatoli Boukreev was a Russian Kazakhstani professional mountaineer. He was an experienced climber of eight-thousander peaks, and was the lead climbing guide in the Mountain Madness team during the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster. He rescued three clients left stranded after the blizzard struck. He tells his account of these dramatic events in The Climb. He died when an avalanche hit Annapurna I on Christmas Day 1997.