Sacred Summits

Mountaintops have long been seen as sacred places, home to gods and dreams. In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very different sacred mountains.

He began in the New Year, on the South Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This shark's fin of steep limestone walls is the highest point between the Andes and the Himalaya, and one of the most inaccessible, rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone Age tribes.

During the spring Boardman was on more familiar, if hardly more reassuring, ground, making a four-man, oxygen-free attempt on the world?s third highest peak, Kangchenjunga. Hurricane-force winds beat back their first two bids on the unclimbed North Ridge, but they eventually stood within feet of the summit - leaving the final few yards untrodden in deference to the inhabiting deity.

In October, he was back in the Himalaya and climbing the mountain most sacred to the Sherpas: Gauri Sankar. Renowned for its technical difficulty and spectacular profile, it is aptly dubbed the Eiger of the Himalaya and Boardman's first ascent of the South Summit took a gruelling twenty-three days.

Three sacred mountains, three very different expeditions, all superbly captured by Boardman in Sacred Summits, his amusing