I'm amused that I'm following exactly the same thematic path this summer in stress-relief reading that I did last fall: urban fantasy to vampire fiction to extreme survival stories. No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks
I first made note of Ed Viesturs in Jon Krakauer's magnificent Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, where he appeared among the climbers on Everest as part of an IMAX filming team that assisted the survivors of the devastated expeditions. No Shortcuts to the Top is Viesturs' autobiography and the story of his eighteen-year project, Endeavor 8000, completed in 2005, of not only climbing all of the world's fourteen 8,000-meter peaks but doing it without bottled oxygen. As such, it's broken into a series of miniature tales of high-altitude derring-do and survival on each peak, as well as a discussion of Viesturs early climbing work as a guide on Mount Rainier and how he chucked a perfectly good career as a veterinarian to pursue his climbing dreams. It's not nearly as intense or suspenseful as a disaster tale like Krakauer's, but I enjoyed reading each individual adventure, sharing Viesturs' frustration as he showed substantially more caution than quite a few other mountaineers (professional and otherwise) in avoiding summit fever and repeatedly turning back if conditions were bad, sometimes within sight of the summit. That's no doubt one reason he's still alive to write a book which also chronicles the adventures and deaths of quite a few other skilled alpinists who took one chance too many or just got unlucky, including a brief discussion of the 1996 Everest disaster.
But this is more than a one-man story. Viesturs includes many wonderful tales of the history of Himalayan mountaineering and early expeditions to the various peaks. I also learned quite a bit of high-altitude geography and technical terminology, though for the latter I'd have been just as happy if I'd realized there was a glossary at the end before figuring out most of the terms from context. But I now understand the danger of snow bridges, the difference between jumaring and rappelling, and the specific challenges of the east ridge and north face of Annapurna, a peak which has a substantially higher death rate than Everest.
Along with enjoying the vicarious thrills of armchair mountaineering, I also gained a lot of respect for Viestur's common sense and climbing policies like "Safety is first; fun is second; success is third." (inherited from colleagues at Rainier Mountaineering) and Viesturs' own "Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory." Viesturs is refreshingly free of swagger, always showing a healthy respect for the dangers of his vocation, though I was amused by his and other climbers' nonchalant reference to one peak or another as "the hill," as in "I'm heading up the hill."
This is a great book for anyone interested in extreme mountaineering, survival, or the Himalayas, as well as an all-around good adventure book. Read for yourself:
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