SACRED SUMMITS

by Peter Boardman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 1982

A personal chronicle of three very different 1978-79 expeditions, by a British mountaineer who died this May on Everest: an informal two-person ascent of New Guinea's remote Carstensz Pyramid; a long siege of Kangchenjunga's North ridge; and the lightweight first ascent of the south summit of Gauri Sankar. For Boardman and wife-to-be Hilary Collins, simply getting to Carstensz--in the face of Indonesian bureaucracy, creepy jungle, stone-age tribesmen--was nine-tenths of the battle, after which their first ascent of the mountain's south face (a ""tottering heap"" of loose rock) seemed almost an anticlimax. New Guinea was a tourist holiday compared to Kangchenjunga: the first oxygen-less ascent of the world's third highest mountain, in the company of three Himalayan veterans (Doug Scott, the late Joe Tasker, and Georges Bettembourg) experienced in the game-playing of expedition climbing. (""The main aims. . . are personal survival, self-image survival, personal success and personal comfort"" and the first rule of the game is not to be seen playing it.) Boardman broke an ankle on the approach march to ""Kanch"" but, in a virtuoso hard-man performance, pressed on to the summit with Scott and Tasker after a storm-battered, two month ordeal. (Tasker's Savage Arena, p. 1185, offers a less complete account of the climb, in part because illness forced Tasker down to a lower camp during one furious storm on the ridge.) Kangchenjunga was part walls, part long slogs in between. By contrast, reaching the south summit of Gauri Sankar (one of the last unclimbed 7000-meter summits) was a four-kilometer highwire act on a knife-edge ridge, by a small team whose members (other than Boardman) had virtually no Himalayan experience--all the prerequisites for an epic, which it turned out to be. Particular pluses: clear route illustrations, and several dramatic photos of Gauri Sankar's west ridge; elegant prose uncommon in mountaineering writing (""the sunlight moved on to the mountain like the hand of a giant clock""); and Boardman's moving account of his father's death shortly after he returned from Gauri Sankar. Very readable, and less a special-audience item than many climbers' books.

Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1982

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: The Mountaineers

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982

Categories: NONFICTION