Download No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks AudioBook Free
This gripping and triumphant memoir follows a full time income legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at the same time.
For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without aid from bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is really as much about the man who would end up being the first American for doing that goal as it is approximately his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a guy torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go.
A preternaturally cautious climber who once turned back 300 feet from the top of Everest but who not shrink from a peak (Annapurna) known to claim the life span of 1 climber for each two who reached its summit, Viesturs lives by an unyielding motto, “Achieving the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” It really is with this philosophy that he vividly describes fatal errors in judgment made by his fellow climbers as well as a few of his own close calls and gallant rescues. And, for the very first time, he details his own pivotal and heroic role in the 1996 Everest disaster made famous in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air.
In addition to the raw excitement of Viesturs’s odyssey, No Shortcuts to the Top is leavened with many funny occasions revealing the camaraderie between climbers. It really is more than the first full account of 1 of the staggering accomplishments of our own time; it is just a portrait of an brave and devoted family man and his beliefs that shaped this most perilous and magnificent pursuit.
