author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
This is a poignantly belated book review, if ever there was one. Ed Webster died of a heart attack last month at the age of 66. His book Snow on the Kingdom had been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for more than seven years.
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I don’t often accept books for review – not because I’m not interested, but because life is short and there are too many books I want to read. Sometimes, however, I make an exception, like when Robert Anderson offered me a copy of his latest book Nine Lives.
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Today is the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. I expect there will be quite a few editorial pieces published today reflecting on how the mountain has changed in the intervening years. I expect most of them will lament the changes as a bad thing, but I’m going to adopt a slightly different stance in this post.
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There’s nothing like a negative Everest story to trigger a flurry of publishing absurdity. For example, some people say Everest has now become so crowded with commercial expeditions there is no longer any room for real climbers, an argument that can be easily refuted with a single photograph.
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Some of you have been asking for an insightful analysis of the punch up on the Lhotse Face over the weekend. As usual people have been falling over themselves to report the story without waiting for the facts to emerge, and in the Footsteps on the Mountain team we’re not averse to joining the stampede.
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In 1988 a ragtag quartet of mountaineers from the USA, Canada and the UK made one of Everest’s most intrepid ascents, and last Thursday I had the good fortune of attending a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London celebrating the 25th anniversary of their climb.
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