How Mount Everest killed George Mallory
thespectator.com
thespectator.com
- "Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest" by Wade Davis. I've read a lot of books on this period, and this one is the best at providing context to why they were there, how Mallory got picked, the team dynamics, and other key folks like Norton.
- "Everest - The First Ascent" by Harriet Tuckey. This one is very biased, and really about the 1952 expedition, but I like it because it really gets into what was different in the 50s vs the 20s (especially little things, like keeping healthy and properly hydrated, and cultural things like feeling like it's OK and not ungentlemanly to practice and train).
There's this idea that the '24 expedition went with the goal of getting Mallory up the mountain, but that's not really what happened at all. Mallory and Sandy Irvine (a distant relative of mine) ended up on their attempt as the result of a lot of game-time decisions made by them and the leaders of the expedition. The same decisions lead to Edward F. Norton holding the world altitude record for 30+ years, despite being far from the best mountaineer in the world, or on the expedition.
These aren't Everest specific recs, but if any of you are looking for mountaineering reading:
_The White Spider_ by Heinrich Harrer
_The Beckoning Silence_ and _Into the Void_ by Joe Simpson
_Eiger Obsession_ by John Harlin. Part of my enjoyment came from my familiarity with the geography of the book.
_Solo Faces_ by James Salter, fiction, loosely based on Gary Hemmings and Royal Robbins.
- The Shining Mountain by Pete Boardman (one of my favorite of all books, two pretty normal guys doing something absolutely epic)
- Everest: The Cruel Way by Joe Tasker (maybe history's single greatest suffer-fest, incredible).
- Touching The Void by Joe Simpson (I avoided reading this for such a long time, because it's something of a cliche, but it's actually great).
- Seven Years in Tibet in Heinrich Harrer (It's hard to know how reliable this is, and it's a bit of a tall tale, but it's absolutely not the book I expected it to be going in).
- Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer (Bite-sized bits of great outdoor writing). "Into Thin Air" is a good read too.
The "classic" I disliked was Herzog's Annapurna. It just seemed so mechanical, and so missing the joy of exploration that makes the best of these books so fun to read.
I adored Into Thin Air, but cannot get through Eiger Dreams. Frustrating because the stories are indeed great!
I dunno. Joe seems to be an okay guy.
"K2: Triumph and Tragedy" by Jim Curran is an excellent book about the 1986 disaster.
I can also highly recommend the recent film "Broad Peak" directed by Leszek Dawid about the Polish mountaineer Maciej Berbeka.
My guess is that they were using Tricouni [1] nails in their boots, by all accounts they work well over a different range of conditions to a rubber sole and crampon combination.
I did not care for Roberts personal memoir On the ridge between life and death.
One really wonders about the competence of the committee which was selecting climbers for the fatal attempt.
We have send people to space in space-suits, which when under pressure would extend there arms and were no longer able to fold them back in. We know better now, but back then we didn't know. So the art to prepare for such "adventures" is very different to what we imagine. No endless information gathering, instead you select a person that can improvise on the spot with the spotty information you have. You give them tools to improvise: Knifes to cut the spacesuit open, duct-tape and rubber-tourniquets to keep the helmet pressurized. Not great, not terrible. Oh, and in hindsight, do the first spacewalk unmanned?
That is one of the incomprehensible things for me about the early pioneers of parachute technology. Why did people throw themselves off from the Eifel tower when they could have tested and perfected the jump with a sack of potatoes or sand?
Tangential, but I think there was just one incident, and the guy was considered a crackpot even when he was alive. They thought he was going to throw a dummy off, but against all advice he insisted on doing it himself.
Huh. Did we really do this without testing it in a vacuum chamber on the ground first?
That's not really what happened. There wasn't some committee deciding that Mallory and Irvine should go up that day - it was the result of health, weather, conditions, injuries, and politics inside the group. They were months of travel away from anything resembling a committee!
one wonders ...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J3wemDGtsy5gzD3xa/toni-kurz-...
what a depressing sentence lol