mountaineering

The Mountaineering Handbook: Modern Tools and Techniques That Will Take You to the Top
$18.95
I have a little climbing experience (once up Mt. Rainier), but wanted to learn more before I go on to any bigger mountains. This book is exactly what I was looking for. It is a very basic guide, with lots of straightforward descriptions of what to do in dangerous situations, what gear to buy (without advocating a particular brand), and other basic things like tying knots, etc. If you already know what you're doing, this is almost certainly too basic - I'd recommend looking elsewhere. However, if you're new to climbing, I'd highly recommend this book.

Forever on the Mountain: The Truth Behind One of Mountaineering's Most Controversial and Mysterious Disasters
$15.95
First, for anyone who has summited Denali (or even survived an attempt), this book is a must-read as an ego stroke. As James Tabor writes it, it is practically a miracle when anyone survives an attempt to climb this mountain. (The statistics show this portrayal to be untrue -- the vast majority of climbers go safely up and down Denali every year.) If you reject this premise, then this story becomes much simpler.

A simple exposition shows what happened during July of 1967. There were four climbing parties on Denali, including two that the National Park Service required to team up together. The two were the Colorado expedition (three climbers) and the Joe Wilcox Expedition (nine climbers). A bad storm hit the mountain. Three of the parties survived the storm intact, and one lost seven out of nine members. Not too complicated.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the arrogantly-titled "Joe Wilcox Expedition" was responsible for its own disaster. The "leader" of this group chose to summit ahead of his own team (tagging along with the better-run, better-prepared Colorado team), and then abandoned his team to go down to safety. From his safe camp Joe Wilcox expected other people to rescue the teammates he had left behind, yet he also postponed his call for a rescue, apparently because he didn't want to incur the costs involved.

Joe Wilcox wrote a book defending his actions on the mountain by pointing fingers at the Colorado expedition. (My favorite whine: 'they went too fast!' As if being in better shape wasn't an ASSET of the Colorado team.) If I had reached a mountain's summit at the expense of my teammates' DEATHS, the only thing I would ever write would be MEA CULPA!

Notably, the high camp established by the Joe Wilcox team was not adequately prepared for bad weather. They placed the camp in a wind tunnel instead of near sheltering rocks, and just placed bare tents on the surface of the glacier. Even if sawing snow blocks to build walls around tents had not yet come into practice, building igloos and digging snow caves were well-known techniques to ensure survival in extreme weather. It was a reckless decision to gamble that the weather would stay good.

Another outrageous mistake made by the Joe Wilcox team involved bamboo wands -- three-foot high markers that serve as breadcrumbs, allowing climbers to retrace their steps during whiteout weather. They left nearly all of their wands at the lower camp -- d'oh!

And even with all these missteps, if Mr. Wilcox had led his entire team to retreat to lower camp when he himself did, they would all have survived.

To me the most interesting difference between the Colorado group and the Joe Wilcox group was their diametrically-opposed models of high-altitude mountaineering. Joe Wilcox represents what I consider the imperialistic, self-aggrandizing expedition, where one man assembles a team to support his own egotistical ambitions, where the team members do not really know each other and where some members of the team are more equal than others. The Colorado team represents a more evolved approach to mountaineering, in which well-prepared equals cooperate to put every team member on the summit and descend safely.

When I climbed Denali, it was with one mountaineering partner with whom I shared every decision and for whom I would have laid down my life. The intense mutual reliance fostered by external danger, to me, is one of the great appeals of mountaineering. And if you're going to spend three or four weeks never out of eyeshot of your partner, you'd better know in advance that you're going to get along. It takes a long-established relationship, forged through hundreds of hours of shared experience, to reach that kind of knowledge. The Colorado team had that mutual experience; the Joe Wilcox team did not.

From this perspective, much of this book's analysis is somewhat beside the point. Yes, the Park Service was wrong to force the two expeditions together, but in the end all the problems lay with the Joe Wilcox group. Yes, the Park Service might have organized a rescue effort sooner, but no rescue was needed for three-quarters of the parties on the mountain. There is no substitute for self-reliance in a high-altitude storm, and there is no telling whether a rescue effort would have been successful under the circumstances. Yes, Bradford Washburn's feud with Joe Wilcox was juvenile and may have affected rescue efforts, but Mr. Washburn did turn out to be right -- in retrospect the Park Service would have saved lives by denying Joe Wilcox's party permission to climb. Yes, the weather reporting was slim-to-none, but in that case a responsible climber would simply prepare for the worst at all times. Sudden and vicious changes of weather on Denali are the norm, not freak occurrences.

The Joe Wilcox expedition set up a poorly-located, inadequately-built and under-provisioned high camp without sufficient wands to ensure a safe return from the summit. When bad weather struck, most of them died, after their leader had fled down the mountain. We can learn from their mistakes, but no purpose is served by trying to spread the blame for this expedition's home-grown failures.

Cooperative Game of Mountain Climbing, Mountaineering
$19.99
My son plays this in a special program in school; we got it and love it; it teaches to work with others for a common goal (to make it to the top of the mountain); younger children may get frustrated unless there is an adult there to help provide occasional direction when first learning to play.

Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
$39.95
Excellent book. Poor maps. Pedantic note: "Himalayan" mountaineering should be understood in a generic sense of climbing (very) high mountains -- K2 (arguably the most difficult technical climb of the over 8000 meter peaks) is in the Karakoram range, to the west of and quite separate from the Himalayas.

Do read this book, and I hope the publishers are thinking of a second edition with more and better maps. It sometimes becomes a little difficult to follow the story without them.