The author relates his experience of climbing Mount Everest during its deadliest season and examines what it is about the mountain that makes people willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense.

Anatoli Boukreev's first-hand account of the worst human disaster in the history of Mt. Everest will hold listeners spellbound. A top-rated guide and high altitude climber, Boukreev dictated the raw and powerful details of this ill-fated trek from memories and notes recorded just five days after the catastrophe. In May of 1996, 33 people went up the mountain, but only 28 returned. As two commercial expeditions climbed the world's highest peak, poor...

Having had no chance to save his friend, Davidson had to save himself by climbing out of the crevasse, and the odds against him were long. Davidson was injured, exhausted, and probably in shock. He lacked both the requisite technical aid-climbing experience and most of the proper gear. But he drew strength from recollections of Joe Simpson's against-all-odds self-rescue in Touching the Void. After many hours of struggle, Davidson finally climbed back...

David Breashears, the first American to scale Everest twice, was a veteran of nine previous Himalayan filmmaking expeditions when he agreed to lead what became his most challenging filmmaking experience. The expedition was organized by large-format motion picture producer MacGillivray Freeman Films and comprised an international team of climbers. Their goal was to carry a specially modified forty-eight-pound IMAX motion picture camera to the summit...

The powerfully uplifting true story of one man's struggle to survive against mountainous odds. Aron Ralston has a passion for all things outdoors. But when a falling boulder traps him in a remote Utah canyon, a thrill-seeker's adventure becomes the challenge of a lifetime. Over the next five days, Ralston embarks on a remarkable personal journey in which he relies on the memories of family and friends as well as his own courage and ingenuity to turn...