Book review: 'The Mountain'

As a follow-up to Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air,” we go to the other side of the mountain in Ed Viesturs’s “The Mountain” (pub. 2013).

In the Mount Everest tragedy of 1996 in which five climbers died, Viesturs was with a nearby group on a film project and assisted in saving some of those who did survive. He briefly recounts that experience along with several other trips to the highest point on earth, plus a history of some of Everest’s other significant moments.

In all, Viesturs calculated he spent two and a half years on Mount Everest over 15 expeditions. Maybe he made it that many times because of a sincere concern for safety. He emphasizes: “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.”

True, because it is relatively common for climbers who reach a summit like Everest to die on the way down for a variety of reasons. Getting there really is only half the trip. It’s not uncommon either for climbers to come across the frozen bodies of those who have gone before them.

That said, the summit is still the prize. Viesturs: “Then, all at once, I realized there was nowhere higher up to go. I’d reached the summit of Mount Everest . . . At that moment, there was no one on earth who stood higher than I did.”

On the ‘96 trip after the tragedy, Viesturs recounts one of the hardest experiences of his life being passing the bodies of friends Rob Hall and Scott Fischer on the way to the summit: “On the way down, I stopped and sat beside each of them, as I struggled with my emotions. Sitting next to Scott’s frozen body at 27,300 feet, I couldn’t help speaking out loud to him. ‘Hey, Scott,’ I said, ‘how are you doing?’ Of course, there was no answer but the wind. ‘What happened, man?’”

On a brighter note, Viesturs tells about the American Mount Everest Expedition in 1963, a massive undertaking costing today’s equivalent of millions of dollars. But in those days, getting the first American ascent of Everest ranked not far below putting the first man on the moon.

Since then, of course, climbs to the top of the world have become a tourism boom with sometimes dozens of climbers reaching the summit on the same day as part of guided commercial trips. It’s actually an added danger to climbing that a popular mountain becomes so crowded that the slow-movers are an additional hazard for the faster ones.

Man keeps trying to up the ante, in finding new routes, climbing with less equipment, during a new season, or anything to distinguish the effort from what has been done before.

Viesturs tells of climber Erhard Loretan toying with the idea of trying a parapente in 1986 – a sort of wing/parachute device – to sail off a cliff to a valley below. Loretan reconsidered from jumping off Everest’s summit at the time, although the feat was accomplished a couple years later by Jean-Marc Bolvin.

Loretan did try the equipment in another setting and his description is priceless: “Between a flight and a fall, the only difference has to do with its duration. If you fall for a long time, it’s a flight. If you fly only briefly, it’s a fall.”