I think a lot of the readers that have e-mailed me have said that they found it one of the most readable mountain books. So I'm glad about that, because I'm not a climber . I knew I couldn't fake the climbing part.I could do as much research as I could do, but I had to fill in my experiential gap with good writing. So I hope I did that.
Temperatures can go down to minus 40. Climbers build snow walls to protect their tents against a fierce wind.You start with supplies for three weeks.
And it was this moment that was so intense that I had never really let myself go back there, I think. Climbers tend to focus very intensely on the things that will help them get their jobs done-- or really, people that really excel in any world do this,I suppose. And for me, writing was very different than that.
"K2 lacks the mass of Everest, but it's sleeker and meaner. Climbers call it the savage mountain.Its peak has all the obstacles of Everest and more.
K2's glaciers are riddled with fissures concealed by layers of snow. Climbers step on these crevasses, punch through, and if unroped-- disappear.Blocks of ice cleave off overhanging glaciers.
Although the Himalayan database crunches these numbers for Everest, no accurate statistics exist for K2. Climbers of the savage mountain can't reliably approximate their chances of survival and don't want to.In 2008, the fatality rate of those leaving base camp for a summit bid was 30.5%, higher than the casualty rate at
And I think that that has to do with the people who work there, because most people were a sort of band of climbers and surfers, who spent as much free time as they could in the wilderness.The wilderness, for a surfer, starts about 10 yards from the beach.
And then, you get into the boots, and you know that that's not good. Climbers don't leave boots on mountains. And then, you get into ropes, and then, bones and parts. Because the topography of K2 -- unlike Everestwhen people die -- K2 is so much steeper. And it's also in a really active, earthquake
The swamp cypress is hard to miss, standing head and shoulders above its neighboring trees, straight-backed as a palace guard. The climber is rarely conspicuous, but to avoid an audience, I carefully time my approach. The lowest branch is within easy reach.
So I guess one of the ways to put it is I'm first and foremost a father, but I'm also an obsessed/addicted explorer-climber but specializing in first ascent. So the expeditions and climbs that I do are to places that no one's ever been to before, that are completely unknown, untouched,
And he encounters another climber who others have passed. This climber , Pasang Lama, has lost his axe, his ice axe, which is a crucial piece of equipment. It's basically impossible to climb down a wall of ice with no rope and no ice axe.
It had been climbed back in 1890, very easy, and on it was Bruce Carson, who was at that time America's leading young rock climber . He had pioneered climbing the hardest faces in Yosemite without pitons. People used to drive pitons into the rock, now Bruce pioneered putting chalk stones in that don't scar the rock, and he had led people like Yvon Chouinard and Royal
off, you know, that's a shot every few seconds as the strobe recycles. the climbers at all. But I get introduced through other climbers who say, oh, you should go talk to this guy, he's a great climber .
And when I interviewed many of the other survivors of that deadly storm, I heard a very different story. I was told that Sandy Hill was strong and experienced climber . David Breashears called her, "fearless." And if any of you know David or know of him, you know that's high praise indeed. In fact, Sandy had every right to be on the mountain that day.
Maybe it's literally you've fallen. Your climbers here, your cyclists-- these types of things. And maybe you've had injuries or setbacks.
But then, in 2014, or the end of 2014, beginning of 2015, as it seemed like it might actually happen, the climbers got super stoked. And then that energy started to bleed outside of the climbing world.
So, the nose root of El Cap is the Everest of rock climbing. Most climbers will aspire to do it once. Most mountaineers would aspire to do Everest once.
-- when they themselves accepted the risks. Most of us will not choose where we die. But climbers who enter their deadly arena know they are dancing on that razor's edge with every movement they make. They don't mind the risk. In fact, they embrace the risk as part of the price of such unbridled joy.
To see why, look at rock climbers . If a rock climber was just hanging, all we would care about was if the rope could support their weight. That's strength. But climbers don't just hang, they fall.
But then there are a few peaks where, at a certain point of level, you do get signals. as an individual climber , I have a sponsor from New Zealand.
their weight a little bit, and finding that next handhold. There's a rock climber I've been following a bit more recently, Alex Honnold. If you have seen it, he has a new movie out right now.
And my wife-- So casual, not a big deal. --is not a climber . And she's from Manhattan and she's like, oh, yeah, that sounds great.
directly proportionate to the climber 's ability to say nothing and offend no one in the most elegant way
One person made the summit that year from another team, a Russian guy. A Russian climber fell to his death on the north side.
Reasonably? Yeah. Near Jailhouse-- Gold Wall-- anybody climb there? Is everybody here a climber ? Most-- more-- more-- pretty much?
I was a good climber .
But you can pull this trigger and this thing collapses, small goes into a crack, and then you can hang a VW bus off it, which is the climber 's car of choice. And then pull the trigger and it's out.
This book is for amateurs. It says "The Tree Climber 's Guide," but I am in no way a professional climber , alpinist, mountaineer. You don't need any special skill or strength to climb trees.
I'm a climber . In fact, I climbed this peak right here.
And so he's coming down the Bottleneck of K2, you know, this wall of ice. And he encounters another climber who others have passed. This climber , Pasang Lama, has lost his axe, his ice axe, which is a crucial piece of equipment.
It's like a big wave of snow, and so Bruce got to the top with his friends. He was very careful climber , always roped, but he unroped. He thought that point that you see there was a higher summit, and where his footprints are on the left, he went out on
And as a professional climber , it's all about pushing yourself and having an inspiring project to look forward to and to work on and progress toward.
This is a climber named Timmy Fairfield.
He's an amazing climber .
And being a climber , that's why I went up top, because I thought I could rappel off the top of the cliff and kind of
for you guys before we start talking about specifics on the images and how I made them. This is a climber named Chris Sharma, who is probably the strongest climber in the world these days. Super great guy. This is a kind of a relatively new sport called deep water soloing. And it started here in Majorca, Spain -- well,
But then there are a few peaks where, at a certain point of level, you do get signals. And different climbers have their own way of paying their expenses.
Do we have any climbers here?
The technical layer obviously being that we had to move very quickly all the time. They were professional climbers meaning that not only were they very fast, but we've all spent time on both sides of the camera, so we're very sensitive of what it feels like when someone else is filming you, how that works, and what we hate about bad, slow camera teams.
Both of us were climbers , ski racers.
in the US. At that time, I didn't know much about the geography of this country. But other climbers had told me that there were some good rocks to climb in Yosemite. So of all the great US research universities, I picked Berkeley because it was the closest to Yosemite.
There were dozens of climbers who tried and failed before those two made it to the summit.
Let's go up there and get the record, right? And actual professional climbers , Alex and Thomas Huber, got rumored a million dollar filming budget to come and do a documentary on getting
to Google climbers , and there's more people here, more people doing great things, more people sharing their passion for knowledge and science
It's a lot more fun. We're all instinctive climbers , really. I mean, as we know, we share DNA with the apes and a common ancestor.
We had 10 climbers , a couple filmmakers, a base camp manager.
Dogs are not great climbers , most of them.
What had gone wrong? Why had the climbers continued up when they knew they'd never make it down before nightfall? How had they made so many simple mistakes such as failing to bring enough rope?
Omaha Beach on D-day. Among high altitude climbers , if not statisticians, there's no comparison. K2 is more lethal than Everest." Here is a photo of the two main characters.
exclamation points. Everything about him was accelerated, his eating, his thinking, his climbing, his praying. The client climbers -- one of the problems of this disaster is there was one person who sort of could translate from the high