Book overview
Legendary alpinist Barry Blanchard returns to the thin places where weather, will, and luck decide everything--and the consequences echo for years.
Vicariously thrilling for armchair--and actual--alpinists. - Kirkus Reviews
Blanchard, in his inimitable, heart-pounding, and brutally honest style, continues reminiscing about the life he introduced readers to in The Calling (Patagonia, 2017).
In these years, he travels from Alaska's Infinite Spur on Mt. Foraker--where an ascent becomes an improvised rescue by radio and ethics--through a bruising, style-driven push on Everest's unclimbed Northeast Flank with Mark Twight that ends in pulmonary and cerebral edema and a night in a Gamow bag. To Blanchard a mountain is a living force and a rope is a covenant. The book tracks the making--and unmaking--of a life in climbing: the punk rock years of pure alpinism; the solitude and severity of a new solo on Kusum Kanguru; the strange theater of Hollywood rigging on Cliffhanger; and the long arc toward humility after near misses, lost partners, and the realities of aging.
Threaded through the action are reckoning and repair--M
