Dark Shadows Falling - Softcover

Simpson, Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0898865905 ISBN 13: 9780898865905

Publisher: Mountaineers Books, 1999

Synopsis

* Concise, objective account of the 1996 Everest debacle
* One of Simpson's most controversial and challenging books
* Short listed for the 1997 Boardman Tasker Award

In 1992, an Indian climber was left to die alone high on the South Col of Mount Everest by other climbers who watched his feebly waving hand from the security of their tent thirty yards away. Some film footage of his corpse was later shown on television. Why did these onlookers not hold the dying man's hand and comfort him? The answer appalls Joe Simpson, who was himself left for dead in a crevasse at the foot of Siula Grande in Peru in 1985.

It is an uncomfortable ethical question that he is forced to confront as he attempts a difficult new route on Pumori, with a clear view of the whole South Col from close to the vantage point where Eric Shipton first spotted the way up the south side of Everest taken by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. Now that Everest has become the playground of the rich, where commercial operators offer guided tours to the top up fixed ropes, camping amidst the detritus and unburied corpses of previous less fortunate climbers, Simpson wonders if the noble, caring instincts that once characterized mountaineering have been irrevocably displaced as in other facets of today's society.

On investigation, he finds it a less black and white issue that at first it seemed. "I shall never forget the horror of dying alone, the awful empty loneliness of it," he says. Yet his empathy for the victims of storms, altitude sickness, or misjudgments, is tested time and again as he explores anecdotally and in conversations with his companions on Pumori, the moral climate of mountaineering in the 1990s.

About this title

Review:

The author of Touching the Void interweaves stories of his own mountaineering adventures with reflective consideration of recent tragedies on the world's loftiest peaks. As more people take to the mountains--many of them amateurs and dilettantes who can afford to hire guides of varying levels of expertise--the odds of disaster loom ever higher. Simpson weighs in on "summit fever", the treatment of local sherpas, and what he sees as unimaginative yak routes up the once-grand mountains.

Review:

"Simpson writes better on the darker side of mountaineering than any man alive" (Paul Johnson The Times)

"His concern is that the strong ethics and selfless instincts that have characterised mountaineering in the past are being eroded by modern-day ambition, selfishness and greed" (Audrey Salkeld Sunday Times)

"Simpson is an elegant stylist and as usual his prose is laced with humour" (Daily Telegraph)

"An astonishing first chapter describes thoughts and feeling of a mountaineer slowly dying on Everest, while other climbers relax in a tent a few feet away. They know he is dying but ignore his feeble wave. Simpson is horrified that such selfishness should gradually invade the mountaineering fantasy" (Brian Masters Mail on Sunday)

About this edition

• Publisher: Mountaineers Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0898865905
• ISBN 13: 9780898865905
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208