Download The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna - the World's Deadliest Peak AudioBook Free
The best-selling author of No Shortcuts to the Top and K2 chronicles his three efforts to climb the world's tenth-highest and statistically deadliest top, Annapurna in the Himalaya, while checking out the dramatic and tragic history of other people who have made - or attempted - the ascent, and what these exploits coach us about facing life's biggest challenges. As being a high-school university student in the flatlands of Rockford, Illinois, where in fact the highest objects on the horizon were drinking water towers, Ed Viesturs read and was captivated by the French climber Maurice Herzog's famous and grisly bill of the first ascent of Annapurna in 1950. When he started his own marketing campaign to climb the world's 14 highest peaks in the overdue 1980s, Viesturs seemed forward with trepidation to starting Annapurna himself. Two failures to summit in 2000 and 2002 made Annapurna his nemesis. His successful 2005 ascent was the triumphant capstone of his climbing goal. In The Will To Climb, Viesturs brings the incredible problems of Annapurna to vivid life through edge-of-your-seat accounts of the greatest climbs in the mountain's history, and of his own failed efforts and eventual success. Along the way, he ponders what Annapurna discloses about some of our most important moral and religious questions - questions, he believes, that we need to response to lead our lives well. "Of most fourteen of the world's highest mountains, that i climbed between 1989 and 2005," writes Viesturs, "the the one that arrived the closest to defeating my best attempts was Annapurna." Though it was the first 8,000-meter top to be climbed, Annapurna is not as well known as the world's highest pile, Everest, or second highest, K2. But as Viesturs argues, Annapurna, without technically the most difficult of the 8,000ers, is the most overwhelming because it does not have any route - no ridge or face on any aspect of the pile - that is relatively free of what climbers call "objective hazard": the threat of avalanches, above all, but also of collapsing seracs (huge ice blocks), falling stones, and crevasses. Since its first ascent in 1950, Annapurna has been climbed by more than 130 people, but 53 have perished hoping. This high fatality rate makes Annapurna the most dangerous of the 8,000-meter peaks. Viesturs and co-author David Roberts chronicle Ed's three efforts to climb Annapurna, as well as the efforts of others, from the two French climbers who made the landmark first ascent of Annapurna on June 3, 1950, through the daring and tragic campaigns of such world-class mountaineers as Reinhold Messner and Anatoli Boukreev. Viesturs' accounts and analyses of these extraordinary adventures serve as a spot of departure for his exploration of themes or templates vividly illustrated by Annapurna expeditions, including obsession and determination, dread and fulfillment, failing and triumph - issues that contain been neglected in the in any other case very rich books of mountaineering, and that can advise the lives and actions of everyone.
