Art Davidson

“Altitude was heckling my mind.”

Not nice. But the author and his companions, on an expedition to accomplish the first wintertime ascent of Mt. McKinley, managed to keep their wits when failing would have killed them. Minus 148° is that story.

For the first two-thirds of the book, the author’s account of the great difficulties experienced by the expedition is absorbing but also ordinary for this genre. Then, beginning with the chapter titled “March 1: –148°,” on that page and show more after, the manner of telling and what is told become superb. I would not ask that Art Davidson had done it better. show less

It's bad enough to want to get really cold in the summer, but to do it in the winter buggars rational thought. These idiots decided to climb Mt. McKinley in the dead of winter.

Art Davidson was disappointed as a child when he learned that all the continents had been discovered. It's no wonder then that he just had to climb McKinley in winter. Many thought it was impossible. Temperatures hovered around -60 and winds often reached 160 mph. Indeed, in December there is only about 4 hours of show more sunlight; in February around 7 hours.

They had trouble getting a team together, and the climb began badly when one of the members fell to his death in a crevasse. And this was in the first couple of days on the glacier. He was not roped to anyone else, a basic failure in elementary safety rules when walking on glacier ice.

Three of them finally made it to the summit, only to be caught in a blinding wind blizzard on the way back down. Huddled in a snow cave, sharing body heat for barely minimum warmth against rock and snow. Ugh. The only thing that saved them was the discovery of food left in a cache from three years before and some gas one of the climbers remembered he had left behind from a previous climb.

Read this during the summer when it's really hot. I couldn't help but think they might have done better had they prepared more thoroughly. Hard to determine the cause of some of the whining: altitude sickness or personality. Still, a ripping good read. show less

Great tale about a challenging climb that could be defined as somewhere between a comedy of errors and an heroic great. More so than other similar such tales of exploration adventure, this is so focused on the individuals' own personal feelings and thoughts, so introspective, so honest, that it really seems it apart from the rest.

Good, but only average for the genre. The climbers themselves seem a bit lukewarm about the whole thing—not surprising given the grim difficulties and disasters they face. They reach the summit in the dark, where they can't see anything except detritus from other climbers. What's the point?

> Sheldon's own on-the-spot description of the storm ran something like: "Yea, I was hucklebuck'n on up there to take a look at ma boys, when I look out the window … Whoa … I seen this ridge just show more standin' still. I look down at my speedometer and it says 140 miles per hour. Yowza, I had to fly 140 just to keep even with that ol' wind!" show less