High Exposure An Enduring Passion for Everest and Unforgiving Places image
High Exposure An Enduring Passion for Everest and Unforgiving Places Breashears, David Edition: 2000 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Number of Pages: 320 ISBN10: 0684865459 ISBN13: 9780684865454 Dimensions: 6.00" w x 9.25" l x 1.00" h Weight: 0.95 lbs. Binding: Trade Paper Language: English List Price: 16.00

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Prologue: Everest 1996 As a mountain climber, I've always felt more drawn to the top than driven from the bottom. I was twelve years old when I came upon the famous picture of Tenzing Norgay standing atop Mount Everest. From that moment on, I equated climbing Everest with man's capacity for hope. Indeed, there's nothing so exhilarating, so purifying, as standing on its summit more than 29,000 fee...Prologue: Everest 1996 As a mountain climber, I've always felt more drawn to the top than driven from the bottom. I was twelve years old when I came upon the famous picture of Tenzing Norgay standing atop Mount Everest. From that moment on, I equated climbing Everest with man's capacity for hope. Indeed, there's nothing so exhilarating, so purifying, as standing on its summit more than 29,000 feet above the sea, surveying the planet below. Before May 1996, I had climbed Everest twice, and each time I had experienced the singular sense of rebirth that the mountain has to offer. But Everest also offers the finality of death. On the morning of May 10 my Everest IMAX® Filming Expedition resolved to go up the mountain and help bring down survivors of an icy calamity that had left eight people dead. Over the next several days our expedition climbed up Everest, struggling with bitter cold and bitter truths and a deeply felt grief for our friends who would lie frozen in death forever. There's no place to bury the dead on an ice-bound mountaintop. In the week following Everest's cruelest disaster, other expeditions broke their siege and went home. Why did we stay on and ascend the mountain once more? On reflection, I think it was because I felt a strong kinship not only with the dead but with the mountain itself. I hated seeing it stand in disarray, under scrutiny from the world's media; I wanted redemption from the tragedy. I couldn't accept leaving, not after all my years on the mountain, not with reasonable weather and our enormous stock of equipment and human skill, not without trying one more time. Call it a specialist's pride: I felt it was up to us to finish -- safely -- this unholy episode. I wanted to prove that Everest was -- in its grandeur -- an affirmation of life, not a sentence of death. So, with the aid of a London-based weather service, we watched and waited for a break in the weather at the top. The jet stream, which sweeps across Everest in the spring, was howling around the summit, and no man-made instrument can accurately forecast when it will blow off the mountaintop and move north over the Tibetan plateau. For days, there was little change. I was dismayed but not astonished; I've seen the jet stream pound Everest for fifty uninterrupted days. Still, I searched reports for the tiniest shard of hope, anything to signal a positive turn. Nothing. Eventually we decided it was time to move out from our Base Camp at 17,600 feet: better to face the mountain in our boots than sit around in our tents brooding about it. On the slopes, we'd see for ourselves what the mountain held for us, and we'd let the mountain tell us when to climb -- or not to climb. So we struggled into our gear and headed up -- the entire IMAX filming team -- camp by camp. We climbed back to the upper camps with the threat of the wind roaring ominously above at eighty to ninety miles per hour. In mountain climbing, it's not the wind around you that frightens you, but the wind that awaits you. Much of our trepidation was, to be sure, psychological. After all, skilled Everest veterans had died up there just weeks before. At dusk on May 22, the day we reoccupied the high camp, Camp IV at 26,000 feet on the South Col, the winds died out. It was a rare and welcome moment as we pitched our tents; we could actually stand upright, and we could continue that night toward the summit minus a goodly portion of our fear. The sun descended and the tent walls darkened. Though we were utterly exhausted, none of us could rest. Throughout the evening we readied our climbing gear and the film equipment and melted ice to drink. There's no malingering at the South Col camp. It's too high, too barren, and the air is too thin. There's no earthly reason to be there except to gain Everest's summit. We'd spent two years preparing for this summit attempt, training our bodies and minds, making checklists, customizFor generations of resolute adventurers, from George Mallory to Sir Edmund Hillary to Jon Krakauer, Mount Everest and the world's other greatest peaks have provided the ultimate testing ground. But the question remains: Why climb? In High Exposure, elite mountaineer and acclaimed Everest filmmaker David Breashears answers with an intimate and captivating look at his life. For Breashears, climbing has never been a question of risk taking: Rather, it is the pursuit of excellence and a quest for self-knowledge. Danger comes, he argues, when ambition blinds reason. The stories this world-class climber and great adventurer tells will surprise you -- from discussions of competitiveness on the heights to a frank description of the 1996 Everest tragedy.Bruce Barcot The New York Times Book Review The greatest pleasures in High Exposure come when [Breashears] invites his readers in to the clannish subculture [of climbing].Claire Martin The Denver Post Very few of us will ever set foot on Everest....But this thoughtful, philosophical narrative may be the next best thing to being there.Stephen Ambrose author of Undaunted Courage I've spent a lifetime reading books by or about the famous adventurers....David Breashears's book is the first I've read by an end-of-the-twentieth-century mountain climber that surpasses many of them and is equal to all.Contents FOREWORD BY JON KRAKAUER PROLOGUE 1. THE KID 2. PERILOUS JOURNEY 3. WORM 4. CAMERA OBSCURA 5. HIMALAYAS 6. EVEREST 7. THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROPE 8. STRANGE WINDS 9. CLIFFHANGER 10. IMAX® 11. THE CRUCIBLE 12. REDEMPTION EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PHOTO CREDITS INDEXIn an absorbing memoir that goes beyond the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, world-renowned adventurer and mountain climber Breashears details his career climbing and filming the world's most beautiful and dangerous peaks. of full-color photos. (more) (less)

Table of Contents

Foreword
Prologue
The Kid
Perilous Journey
Worm
Camera Obscura
Himalayas
Everest
The Brotherhood of the Rope
Strange Winds
Cliffhanger
Imax
The Crucible
Redemption
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
Index

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