Mountaintops have long been seen as sacred places, home to gods and dreams. In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very different sacred mountains.
He began in the New Year, on the South Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This sharks fin of steep limestone walls and sweeping glaciers is the highest point between the Andes and the Himalaya, and one of the most inaccessible, rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone Age tribes.
During the spring Boardman was on more familiar, if hardly more reassuring, ground, making a four-man, oxygen-free attempt on the worlds third highest peak, Kangchenjunga. Hurricane-force winds beat back their first two bids on the unclimbed North Ridge, but they eventually stood within feet of the summit leaving the final few yards untrodden in deference to the inhabiting deity.
In October, he was back in the Himalaya and climbing the mountain most sacred to the Sherpas: the twin-summited Gauri Sankar. Renowned for its technical difficulty and spectacular profile, it is aptly dubbed the Eiger of the Himalaya and Boardmans first ascent of the South Summit took a committing and gruelling twenty-three days.
Three sacred mountains, three very different expeditions, all superbly captured by Boardman in Sacred Summits, his second book, first published shortly after his death in 1982. Combining the excitement of extreme climbing with acute observation of life in the mountains, this is an amusing, dramatic, poignant and thought-provoking book, amply fulfilling the promise of Boardmans first title, The Shining Mountain, for which he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1979.
Recenzijas
'A poignant record of [ Boardman's] great skill and determination as a mountaineer.' - J.H. Emlyn Jones, Alpine Journal
Foreword by Chris Bonington A Great PartnershipPart One Snow Mountains
Of New GuineaChapter One Sacred SummitsChapter Two Troubled ParadiseChapter
Three AmakaneChapter Four CarstenszChapter Five DugunduguChapter Six An
Impossible DreamChapter Seven Back From The Stone AgePart Two
KangchenjungaChapter Eight SpringChapter Nine SéracsChapter Ten The
WallChapter Eleven Ordeal By StormChapter Twelve Before DawnChapter Thirteen
Softly To The Untrodden SummitChapter Fourteen Down WindChapter Fifteen
SummerPart Three Gauri SankarChapter Sixteen First TimeChapter Seventeen
Knight MovesChapter Eighteen BorderlineChapter Nineteen Cliffs Of FallChapter
Twenty Final ChoiceChapter Twenty One TseringmaChapter Twenty Two Autumn To
Earth With LoveChapter Twenty Three WinterAcknowledgements
Peter Boardman was born on Christmas Day in 1950 and became one of Britains most-respected high altitude mountaineers. He was a mountaineering instructor at Glenmore Lodge in the Cairngorms, and National Officer of the British Mountaineering Council before being appointed Director of the International School of Mountaineering in Leysin, Switzerland. He was part of Chris Boningtons 1975 Everest expedition, made an almost impossibly difficult ascent of Changabang with Joe Tasker in 1976 and went on to climb Kangchenjunga and to attempt to summit K2, being beaten back by poor weather and exhaustion. Mount Kongur followed in 1981 and, in March 1982, in a small expedition with Chris Bonington, Joe Tasker and Dick Renshaw, he attempted the previously unclimbed and highly difficult North East Ridge of Everest, where he and Joe Tasker tragically lost their lives. Peter and Joe left two legacies. One was their great endeavour, their climbs on high peaks with bold, lightweight innovative methods, the second and more lasting achievement is the books they wrote and left behind. Peter's talent for writing emerged through his climbing career. The success of his first book The Shining Mountain was immediate in the climbing world and won him wider acclaim with the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for literature in 1979. Sacred Summits, published shortly after his death, described the climbing year of 1979, the trips to New Guinea, Kangchenjunga and Gaurisankar. The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature was established in Pete and Joes honour, and is presented annually to the author or co-authors of an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature. For more information about the Boardman Tasker Prize, visit: www.boardmantasker.com
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