Why They Climb

I like to hike up mountains as much as -- more than -- the next guy, but something about actual mountaineering scares and awes me. Mainly the consequences. I don't like looking down between my feet and seeing, say, a village, a couple thousand feet down. Or a glacier where nobody will ever find my corpse. I'm not a huge fan of heights. Yet the people who climb mountains fascinate me; there was one guy, about my age, who worked with my father a long time ago. He was a cool dude, and a climber, always disappearing to scale peaks in the Andes or Wyoming, which is how he died, at age 37, leaving a beautiful opera-singer wife and a two-year-old son. Anyway, I thought of him as I read The Boys of Everest, Clint Willis' intriguing new book about British climbing pioneer and certifiable badass Chris Bonington and the climbers who followed him, often to their deaths. Read my Washington Post review here.