Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day

An exciting story to start with that is almost upstaged by the fascinating history of the area and the sherpa climbers. Not a dull chapter in the whole book. You'll come away with a real appreciation of the men who do the heavy work on these expeditions. The author did some impressive research but it wouldn't have been so effective without his writing style. Even the gruesome details of how death took some of the climbers was presented in a respectful way--but it still left me shaken. Great read.

Changed my mind about this book a few time. At first I was excited because yaay, it's about sherpas, the usually unsung heroes of mountaineering, but then one of the first things it says is that "going down the is the safest part of climbing K2" which WTF. Okay, in the context it meant is safer to go down the bottleneck because you're faster and that's the only way to be safe there, but as a blanket statement it doesn't really work and nowhere do they mention that most mountaineering accidents happen on the way down from the summit, which, um, is kinda important?

But then I really liked all the history on sherpas and about Chhiring and Pasang. You sort of understand why they do what they do, how they're treated by the climbers/tourists, show more a little bit about what goes on in the regions and so on. So that part was great.

I thought it was a bit weird that Chhiring's group wasn't really presented, like Fredrik Sträng is mentioned a few times because he has talked a lot about his experiences up there, but it's never really made clear that he is part of the same expedition as Chhiring, and Chris Klinke is barely mentioned at all. I don't know why this bugs me, it just does.

The way some things are presented as facts kinda bugged me as well, because I've read a lot about this disaster and the thing is of course that it's extremely unclear what happened. For a lot of reasons. Of course there's comments and footnotes at the end that clearly states every source for pretty much every claim in the book, so at least it's obvious that they did their research, so I guess I can forgive them for that.

But I still kinda liked it. Gonna read more about the Everest distaster of 1996 now, because I ordered three books on it last week. Ooops. show less

Top five non-fiction adventure books I've ever read and I read everything about polar exploration and mountain climbing that I can.
Unique that it gives so much backstory on the area, and its focus on the high altitude porters and their personal stories.
Can't recommend highly enough!

A well written history of the sherpas ..focusing their culture, religious beliefs etc. The climbing disaster in 2008 to the top of K2, with many deaths was detailed in the book Into Thin Air..This book is a follow up of the survivors. i can't understand the obsession, addiction some have to this extremely dangerous mountain climbing .. but the book is hard to put down. Overwhelming at times.

I could not stop reading this. The story is tragic and hearing it from the perspective of the often overlooked HAP team was intense and much more powerful.

I really applaud Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan for their efforts to tell the story of tragedy on K2 from the Sherpas' perspective in "Buried in the Sky: The extraordinary story of the Sherpa climbers on K2's deadliest day." It's definitely an angle in mountaineering stories that is often missing and it's great they put so much effort into recording the words of the Sherpas who put their lives in danger so others can scale high peaks.

The book centers around events in early August 2008, when 11 climbers lost their lives on one of the world's most challenging peaks.

There were some quirks to the book that bugged me a bit and led me to give it four stars instead of five. While the book is about K2, more than half of it really isn't show more about the climb itself, but background on the Sherpas and their lives. (I didn't like the way some of this was integrated into the story and I kept recalling Jamling Norgay's excellent book "Touching my Father's Soul" as a much more artful way of explaining how the climbing mixes with Buddhist beliefs. There was some odd wording too, that grated on me.... such as people "climbing" to base camp rather than descending... and several mentions of the Website that Padoan writes for regularly, while slamming of some others.

All of that said, the book is fairly successful because of the tact it takes relegating the climbers to minor characters (as Sherpas frequently are in books by Western climbers.) I did find the story itself compelling and it was told very thoroughly. show less

This is not a badly written book at all, and it's certainly high time someone told one of these high-altitude ascent stories from the viewpoint of the Sherpas and other native workers whose back-breaking labors (and frequent deaths) enable the moneyed to make their climbs.

The downside is that the narrative itself comprises only about half the book. The rest is references, acknowledgments, indexes and a few pictures.