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Friday, March 28, 2014

Book review: 'No Shortcuts to the Top'

“No Shortcuts to the Top” is not a book about a single expedition but an autobiography of climber Ed Viesturs (pub. 2006). He was, of course, the first American to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks in the world without using bottled oxygen.

You can accomplish something like that, he explains, by breaking such a large goal into small pieces. Sometimes it’s as small as trying to reach the rock 40 feet away. “It’s only by nibbling away at those immense distances that you can achieve the whole,” he wrote.

As with any mountain, a frequent question is “Why?”

He answers: “There’s an immense pleasure in getting all this business down to a science, in carrying out the climb of an 8,000er as efficiently and safely as humanly possible. And there is nothing else in life like getting to the summit. What’s more, I’ve always felt that the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.”

Viesturs also spends several pages going into detail about what a mountain climbers wears and carries, as well as the day-to-day drudgery of a long expedition – details I haven’t seen explained in other mountain books.

Viesturs also played a part in helping keep the 1996 Everest disaster from being worse than it was. (Unrelated but interesting, he got married shortly before that Everest trip.)

That particular venture was part of making an IMAX film with David Breashears, a laborious task with heavy equipment made even more difficult at altitude. There’s a nice little reference to having to re-shoot a short segment, referred to as “the highest take two in the world.”

At another point, Viesturs gives a good explanation of altitude’s effects on the body. In his case, besides a strong work ethic, testing determined that he was very high on the scale of being able to function in thin air with little oxygen, plus having a larger than normal lung capacity.

Stats time (I like stats): We hear about the famous mountains but Viesturs point out the ratio of climbers who reached a summit to the number of climbers who died, through 2003, was 7:1 on Everest, 3:1 on K2, and only 2:1 on Annapurna.

Annapurna was Viesturs’ last of the 14 big ones to successfully climb, and it took a couple attempts. Reaching that summit with partner Veikka Gustafsson, “We hugged each other hard. I couldn’t speak, I was so choked up. But I didn’t have the emotional flood I’d expected . . . (we) sat there for long moments, as I tried to comprehend that my dream of eighteen years had at last come true.”

He did it, in small pieces at a time. And then in true Viesturs fashion: “The climb of Annapurna was only half over. Never had getting down been more mandatory.”

One more interesting point from the book is a short discussion of how the Internet became a part of mountain climbing. Some 50 years earlier, it could be as much as two weeks before news of a climber reaching a summit made it back to the general population. Now, it’s possible to monitor expeditions with constant updates sent right from the mountain itself.

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