The Will To Climb

Obsession And Commitment And The Quest To Climb Annapurna

The bestselling author of No Shortcuts to the Top and K2, and the first
American to ascend all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, chronicles
his three attempts to climb Annapurna in the Himalayas, the world’s tenth-
highest and statistically most deadly peak, and explores the dramatic and
tragic history of others who have made–or attempted–the ascent, and what
such ventures teach us about facing life’s greatest challenges. As a high
school student in the flatlands of Rockford, Illinois, where the highest
objects on the horizon were water towers, Ed Viesturs read about and was
captivated by the French climber Maurice Herzog’s famous and grisly account of
the first ascent of Annapurna in 1950. When Viesturs began his own campaign to
climb the world’s 14 highest peaks in the late 1980s, he looked forward with
trepidation to undertaking Annapurna himself. Two failures to summit made
Annapurna his nemesis. His successful 2005 summit was the triumphant capstone
of his climbing quest. In this book, Viesturs brings the extraordinary
challenges of Annapurna to vivid life through edge-of-your-seat accounts of
the greatest climbs in history, and details his own failed attempts and
eventual success. In the process he portrays what Annapurna reveals about some
of our most fundamental moral and spiritual questions–questions, he believes,
that we need to answer in order to lead our lives well.