The Will To Climb

The bestselling author of No Shortcuts to the Top and K2, and the first American to ascend all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks, chronicles his three attempts to climb Annapurna in the Himalayas, the world's tenth-highest and statistically most deadly peak, and explores the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made--or attempted--the ascent, and what such ventures teach us about facing life's greatest challenges. As a high school student in the flatlands of Rockford, Illinois, where the highest objects on the horizon were water towers, Ed Viesturs read about and was captivated by the French climber Maurice Herzog's famous and grisly account of the first ascent of Annapurna in 1950. When Viesturs began his own campaign to climb the world's 14 highest peaks in the late 1980s, he looked forward with trepidation to undertaking Annapurna himself. Two failures to summit made Annapurna his nemesis. His successful 2005 summit was the triumphant capstone of his climbing quest. In this book, Viesturs brings the extraordinary challenges of Annapurna to vivid life through edge-of-your-seat accounts of the greatest climbs in history, and details his own failed attempts and eventual success. In the process he portrays what Annapurna reveals about some of our most fundamental moral and spiritual questions--questions, he believes, that we need to answer in order to lead our lives well.