To the Greatest Heights: Facing Danger, Finding Humility, and Climbing a Mountain of Truth - Hardcover

O'Brien, Vanessa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1982123788 ISBN 13: 9781982123789

Verlag: Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

This riveting and uplifting memoir by Vanessa O’Brien, record-breaking American-British explorer, takes you on an unexpected journey to the top of the world’s highest mountains.

Long before she became the first American woman to summit K2 and the first British woman to return from its summit alive, Vanessa O’Brien was a feisty suburban Detroit teenager forced to reinvent her world in the wake of a devastating loss that destroyed her family.

Making her own way in the world, Vanessa strove to reach her lofty ambitions. Soon, armed with an MBA and a wry sense of humor, she climbed the corporate ladder to great success, but after the 2009 economic meltdown, her career went into a tailspin. She searched for a new purpose and settled on an unlikely goal: climbing Mount Everest. When her first attempt ended in disaster, she trudged home, humbled but wiser. Two years later, she made it to the top of the world. And then she kept going.

Grounded by a cadre of wise-cracking friends and an inimitable British spouse, Vanessa held her own in the intensely competitive world of mountaineering, summiting the highest peak on every continent, and skiing the last degree to the North and South Poles. She set new speed records for the Seven Summits, receiving a Guinness World Record and the Explorers Grand Slam, and finally made peace with her traumatic past. During her attempt on K2, she very nearly gave up. But on the “savage mountain,” which kills one out of every four climbers who summit, Vanessa evolved from an adventurer out to challenge herself to an explorer with a high-altitude perspective on a changing world—and a new call to share her knowledge and passion across the globe.

Told with heart and humor, Vanessa’s journey from suburban Detroit to Everest’s Death Zone to the summit of K2 and beyond, is a transformative story of resilience, higher purpose, and the courage to overcome any obstacle.

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Vanessa O’Brien is a British and American mountaineer, explorer, public speaker, and former business executive. As a result of her dual nationality, she became the first American and British woman to successfully summit K2 on July 28, 2017 when, on her third attempt, she successfully led a team of twelve members to the summit and back. In 2018, she received Explorer of the Year from the Scientific Exploration Society for her efforts. In 2022, Vanessa became the first woman to reach extremes on land, sea, and air, completing the Explorers’ Extreme Trifecta after passing the Kármán line on Blue Origin’s sixth human spaceflight, NS-22. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Scientific Exploration Society (SES).

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Prologue PROLOGUE
Mountain climbing is extended periods of intense boredom interrupted by occasional moments of sheer terror.

—ANONYMOUS

I scrambled over a rocky moraine onto the Godwin-Austen Glacier high in the Himalayas. K2 towered over me, marbled white and black against blue sky, an almost perfect triangle, like a mountain drawn by a child. I tried to focus on my feet, but the summit teased the corner of my eye and made me feel a bit off-kilter. It dodged in and out, playing hide-and-seek with the midsummer cirrus clouds and crystalline snow plumes that rode a relentless wind. I don’t recall the exact song I heard in my earbuds. It may have been the Rolling Stones singing about the difference between getting what you want and getting what you need, or maybe the Sex Pistols singing about the difference between what you want and what you get. Every expedition has its own soundtrack, and either one of those would be appropriate for my second attempt on K2.

Straddling the border between Pakistan and China, K2 is the highest point in the Karakoram Range, the second-highest mountain on the planet, at 28,251 feet and around 11,850 feet from Base Camp to summit. Its brutal cold, constant avalanches and falling rock, tricky technical climbs, and predictably dire weather conditions are legendary. It’s a grueling test of physical endurance and mental will. Nothing keeps you there but sheer determination, because going there puts you and everyone who loves you in an excruciatingly uncomfortable position, as my husband, Jonathan, can confirm without complaining.

In 2013, three years before my second attempt on K2, a father and son were swept away by an avalanche near Camp 3, around 24,275 feet. On a bluebird day, I could just about see where they would have been. I had made a promise to the surviving wife and mother and her daughter, Sequoia Schmidt, that I would keep an eye out for any signs of either of them, so ever since we’d arrived at Base Camp and begun seeing the evidence of what various avalanches had been pulling down the mountains, I’d been investigating shredded summit suits, pieces of torn clothing, and yes, even the odd fragments of human remains. When I heard through the grapevine that another team had spotted two different boots side by side sticking out of an ebbing glacier, I felt a surge of hope and went out for a closer look.

The topography here is the legacy of a colossal slow-motion fender bender that’s been going on for more than fifty million years. The Indian Plate smashed into and under the Eurasian Plate, forcing peaks five miles into the air to create the Himalayas, which include the Karakoram Mountains. As you observe when someone gets rear-ended in traffic, the wreckage juts up, folding into itself like an accordion. Fossils that formed in the primordial depths are now embedded in rock thousands of meters above sea level. Avalanches deposit snow into underground streams that gradually cut into the mountain, leaving deep crevasses and brittle ledges.

Mountains are never static, but the elderly ones that date back billions of years tend to be worn down and docile. In geological terms, the Himalayas are petulant adolescents. They talk back and misbehave, casting off rubble and debris without warning. Between the sharp peaks, frozen rivers and mountain waterfalls are constantly on the move, shifting three to six feet in a single day. A climber can easily slip into a deep crevasse and disappear into the icy abyss. They can get crushed by a tumbling serac or make some fatal mistake. They can succumb to sickness, edema, exhaustion, or hypoxia. They can fall, freeze, or simply fail to wake up.

At this writing, only 377 people have summited K2, and 84 climbers have died there, making it the second-deadliest mountain in the world, after Annapurna. For every twenty summits of Everest, there’s only one summit of K2, and for every four summits of K2, one person dies, and the unpleasant reality is, very few dead bodies come off the mountain intact. Disembodied limbs, ghost gear, and frozen corpses appear and disappear in the shifting ice. The force of an avalanche tumbles the body like a stone in the ocean—bones breaking, joints separating, tendons snapping, cartilage crumbling. The body tends to come apart at its weakest junctures, starting with the neck. The pieces are likely to be found by birds before another human being comes along to shift a disembodied head into a crevasse or shuffle scree over a torso. At high altitude, expending energy to pile rocks on a corpse or attempt to retrieve it would endanger the life of the well-intentioned climber, so my goal was not to recover the father and son, only to identify them with DNA samples.

The Sherpa are spooked by death. Many of them won’t visit the memorial cairn near K2 Base Camp. Some fear that even taking a picture of a dead body might interrupt the soul’s journey. There was certainly no point in asking them to handle a dead man’s ankle, so I’d invited my Ecuadorian teammate Benigno to hike up the glacier with me. He was still below the moraine when I saw a stretch of crystal blue ice and snow the color of whipped cream up ahead. The pale backdrop made it easy to spot the bold blue and neon orange boots. Different colors, same European brand. Maybe two climbers who’d shopped together for gear. Using my Garmin inReach, a satellite device that tracks movement and allows texting, I messaged Sequoia: “Were they wearing Koflach boots?”

While I waited for an answer, I made my way up the glacier to look for other signs of clothing, equipment, or remains. Climbing gear is as colorful as a circus act, specifically because we want to be easy to see against ice and rock. When I first started climbing, I hated this. I wanted to look like a ninja warrior, not a matching set of ketchup and mustard bottles on a grill, but La Sportiva Olympus Mons Evo boots were always going to be yellow. So it’s like Henry Ford’s Model T: you go with what gets you there. I hiked upward for a while, scanning the shadowed snowbanks. Nothing. It was overcast now, and I was pushing against a persistent wind that pushed back hard enough to engage a core of resistance between my ribs and breastbone. I went back to the boots.

I peered into the blue boot first and found that it contained a foot, an ankle, and a broken tibia with a good amount of flesh still on the bone. The quality of the tissue reminded me of the pickled pig’s feet my mother used to love—whitish flesh marbled with jellied fat. I shuddered at the sight of her eating them when I was a kid. After this, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look at them at the neighborhood deli. On the positive, there was plenty of opportunity to obtain DNA. I’m no expert, but I understand the fundamentals and thought I could be fairly stoic about the sample collection, because I’ve been stoic about things like that since I was a kid.

I remember going to my first funeral when I was eight. My mother took me and my little brother, Ben, up to the casket to pay our respects. Ben was too small to see over the edge, but I stood on tiptoes and asked, “Can I touch it?” Mom nodded, so I reached in and stroked the tweedy sleeve of a starched bark-gray suit. I didn’t know this person. He was an empty rack of clothes. His soul had gone to Heaven, everyone said, and I believed that with the unquestioning faith of a child. I still do. But when I pulled my sample collection kit from my pocket—surgical gloves, scissors, mask, sample container, and Swiss...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982123788
• ISBN 13: 9781982123789
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar