In the Shadow of Denali [antikvár]

Foreword On my one trip to ALASKA, in 1982, i WAS flattened on a glacier landing strip by a skiplane. My hip smashed off a piece of the plane's tail, and the tail nearly removed a piece of my hip. Though plane and climber flew and walked again, this imbroglio served as a fitting end to a disastrous climbing trip on which, despite high ambitions, I ascended nothing. Also on that trip, snow fell incessantly, bitter cold gnawed at me, and my partner and his girlfriend stressfully terminated their affair while we were tentbound in a two-week whiteout. All this transpired on the Shadows Glacier in the Kichama Spires (one of many Denali settings for this book). While we were flying out, Denali was a massive presence on the horizon. I was torn between a desire to return and climb it, and a feeling that I should avoid Alaska and its beautiful, cold mountains. While nursing my hip, I had the conviction—call it a premonition—that in Alaska only epics of discomfort and danger awaited me, so I stuck to Himalayan climbing and contented myself with being an armchair mountaineer on peaks Alaskan. From this vantage, I found that the literature of Alaskan climbing comprises some of America's finest mountain writing. This is only fitting, for Alaska's mountains demand much from those who climb them. Of all these books, Jonathan Waterman's In the Shadow of Denali is stratospherically the finest of the genre. With this book, Waterman has earned a place alongside such great modern American mountain writers as David Roberts and Jon Krakauer, for Waterman writes