Editorial Reviews :

From Booklist :

The year 2006 recorded Mount Everest’s deadliest season on record since 1996 (the killer season that spawned Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air).

To tell the story of the 2006 season, which made global headlines due to the troubling circumstances surrounding the death of a climber, journalist Heil, a climber himself, gives us extensive background (more than half the book is a prologue to the 2006 season, and while the backstory will be pertinent to aficionados, it may prove frustrating to those waiting for the real story). There is plenty of fascinating material here, especially the excellent profiles of the key players (including flamboyant Russell Brice, Everest’s most successful commercial operator, a larger-than-life figure who seems to belong on a movie screen), but as a chronicle of the mountain’s “most controversial season,” the book feels padded, as though the author felt he had only enough material for a long article. Recommend this one to mountaineering devotees only, but don’t expect it to attract the kind of general audience that found Krakauer.
- David Pitt.

Review :

“In this authoritative, colorful look at the grimmest Everest season in years, Dark Summit carries forward Outside magazine’s formidable tradition of high alpine literature. Nick Heil is alive to Everest’s majesty but fiercely skeptical of those hubristic souls who attempt to ‘conquer’ her. Through rock-solid reporting and vital prose, Heil leads us up into this rarefied world, step by hypoxic step.”— Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder.

“Here is humanity itself, personified in exemplary fashion by Nick Heil, addressing the Everest culture’s lack of compassion and coming up with the right answers. Dark Summit is an extraordinary tale, ribboned with wisdom and profound insight, delivered by a first-rate storyteller. I consider the book not a sequel to Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, but an equal.”— Bob Shacochis, author of The Immaculate Invasion.

“Dark Summit illuminates the nuanced personalities of Everest’s modern commercial age accurately, with neither heroic romanticism nor guile. Nick Heil takes a critical yet objective look at Everest and the community of Everest climbers, and then leaves you to pass judgment. If you couldn’t put down Into Thin Air, you must read Dark Summit to understand what it means to climb Everest today and why anyone might accept the risk.”— Peter Athans, seven-time Everest summiter and The North Face athlete.

Product Description :
The inside story of the deadly 2006 climbing season on Everest.

On May 15, 2006, a young British climber named David Sharp lay dying near the top of Mount Everest while forty other climbers walked past him on their way to the summit. A week later, Lincoln Hall, a seasoned Australian climber, was left for dead near the same spot. Hall’s death was reported around the world, but the next day he was found alive after spending the night on the upper mountain with no food and no shelter.

If David Sharp’s death was shocking, it was hardly singular: despite unusually good weather, ten others died attempting to reach the summit that year. In this meticulous inquiry into what went wrong, Nick Heil tells the full story of the deadliest year on Everest since the infamous season of 1996. He introduces Russell Brice, the commercial operator who has done more than anyone to provide access to the summit via the mountain’s north side—and who some believe was partly accountable for Sharp’s death. As more climbers attempt the summit each year, Heil shows how increasingly risky expeditions and unscrupulous outfitters threaten to turn Everest into a deadly circus.

Written by an experienced climber and outdoor writer, Dark Summit is both a riveting account of a notorious climbing season and a troubling investigation into whether the pursuit of the ultimate mountaineering prize has spiraled out of control.

About the Author

Nick Heil first wrote about the 2006 climbing season for Men’s Journal. Now a freelance journalist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was a senior editor at Outside from 1999 to 2006. He has also worked as a climbing and skiing instructor, and has traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, and North America.

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MY Favorite book ....

Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine.
by Jochen Hemmleb, Larry A Johnson, Eric R Simonson

This is the dramatic inside story of the 1999 expedition to find the bodies and solve the enigma of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who tragically and mysteriously died on Everest on 8th June 1924, in an attempt to reach the peak. What happened to Mallory and Irving the day they set out on their summit bid only to disappear without any evidence of their fate or possible achievement? Were these two brave pioneers the first to reach the summit 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? How did they perish and where? What part of the mystery remains to be solved? Set against the backdrop of the 1924 expedition and historical clues from subsequent expeditions, "Ghosts of Everest" weaves a story from early preparations to the day-to-day, blow-by-blow events of both expeditions to create an adventure narrative that captures the voices and the action as it unfolds on the mountain.

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MY Favorite book .....

My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks.
By Jerzy Kukuczka, translated by Andrew Wielochowski
August 1992 edition, Mountaineers Books. Hardcover, 189 p.

My Vertical World is Jerzy Kukuczka's autobiography, translated from his native Polish into English. Even translated, the book reads like some heroic Norse saga with Jerzy striding through it like a doomed Odin.

In the beginning of the book, Reinhold Messner says of Jerzy, "you are not second, you are great". Great praise indeed for the second person, after Messner, to wear the 'Crown of the Himalaya', a title for those who have climbed to the top of all the fourteen 8000 meter peaks in the world, all in the Himalaya. Jerzy did them all and that too by either blazing new routes or in the winter, and always without supplemental oxygen.

The book is divided into chapters, the first, typical of Jerzy, it seems, describing his early days in Poland in a very brief manner. Then the next fourteen chapters describe his successful summit ascents to each of the 8000 meter peaks, from Lhotse, his first to Shish Pangma, his last.

The press played up the artificial race between him and Messner to be the first to do the 8000 m peaks. Jerzy is always humble and regards Messner as his superior. He is no jock mountaineer in search of glory, nor does he go into complex reasons that make him want to climb. He just seems to love to climb the high peaks, the Himalayas more than another.

Jerzy talks about being a young man desiring to travel to the far away Himalaya to climb. He describes the incredible privation and hardship that he had to undergo to scrounge money and food in the days of the Solidarity movement in Poland where he was in danger of being considered a food hoarder. However, all he was doing was salting away food for his next Himalayan trip. He talks about how he and his climbing friends would raise the precious zoltys by offering to paint rusting chimneys of factories and saving on the cost of scaffolding by using climbing ropes instead.

To me, the most incredible climbing done by Jerzy is his winter climb of Dhaulagiri. Here he describes his solo descent into a village in an unknown valley with feet rotting away from infection and frostbite. The villagers simply would not believe his story because no one had ever been in that valley before. Then without much rest, he met up with the Cho Oyu expedition and blazed a first winter ascent of Cho Oyu via the unclimbed South East Pillar.

A summary, in his own words, 'There is no answer in this book to the endless questions about the point of expeditions to the Himalayan giants.
I never found a need to explain this. I went to the mountains and climbed them. That is all.

*Reviewed by Arun Mahajan - http://peakclimbing.org/

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1. Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer. /Version polish and english/

2. My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks - By Jerzy Kukuczka.

3. Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine.

4. No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World’s 14 Highest Peaks by Ed Viesturs.

5. K2 : Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs.

6. Dark Summit – The True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Season by Nick Heil.

7. The Elizabeth Hawley Story - I’LL CALL YOU IN KATHMANDU.

8. Die Trying by Bo Parfet and Richard Buskin.