2003. 496 pp, color photos. Bonington has been on 19 Himalayan expeditions, many to Everest. This is a newly edited collection of his greatest Everest books, EVEREST THE HARD EVEREST THE HARD WAY [1976], EVEREST SOUTH WEST FACE [1973] AND EVEREST THE UNCLIMBED RIDGE[1983]. DJ, New. SIGNED by Chris Bonington. Here in one massive volume are Bonington’s three great Everest books – Everest: South West Face, Everest: The Hard Way, and Everest: The Unclimbed Ridge.
Chris has spent a long time on Everest and here are the accounts of his three primary expeditions. Everest: South West Face is the official account of the 1972 British Everest South West Face attempt. This expedition forged further than any previous one on this route but still came up short of the summit. (This is probably Chris’ scarcest book.) Much was learned for the successful return trip in 1975, recounted in Everest: The Hard Way. This successful expedition completed the route up the South West Face with Boardman and Scott making the first ascent. In Everest: The Unclimbed Ridge, Chris recounts the 1982 British attempt on the unclimbed Northeast Ridge on which Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker disappeared. This book makes a nice companion to the single-volume collections of Boardman/Tasker, Diemberger, Shipton, Smythe, and Tilman.
In three books, Everest the Hard Way (1976), Everest South-West Face (1973) and Everest the Unclimbed Ridge (written with Charles Clarke in1983), Chris Bonington demonstrated how, in the years after John Hunt's expedition made the first ascent of Everest, climbers chose different routes to reach the same pinnacle. Bonington himself has taken part in nineteen Himalayan expeditions.
Here, for the first time, these classic, first-hand accounts are brought together in one omnibus volume, with photographs drawn from his own archive of photographs and those of other climbers.
From the Inside Flap
Chris Bonington's three classic accounts of his expeditions to scale the summit of Everest are republished fifty years after the first ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay coincided with the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Everest: South West Face tells of Bonington's first, unsuccessful attempt in 1972 to lead an expedition to the top of the world's highest mountain by its precipitous south west face.
They were defeated by the savage wind and bitter cold of the Himalayan autumn. 'One of the great stories of our time,' wrote John Hunt, who had led the triumphant 1953 expedition, which had taken the easier South Col route.
Everest the Hard Way is Bonington's account of what happened three years later, the 'second chance' as he called it by the south west face, and how four men reached the summit through a combination of meticulous planning, superb teamwork and sheer climbing skill and endurance.
Everest: the Unclimbed Ridge is about a tragedy: Chris Bonington's 1982 expedition to scale Everest by the last unclimbed ridge from Tibet without oxygen. On the evening of 17 May 1982 Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker were last seen climbing towards the summit. Like Mallory and Irvine who vanished sixty years before also on a final push for the summit they were never seen again. The story of the expedition is told by Bonington and the expedition's doctor, Charles Clarke.
Chris Bonington first encountered mountains in Snowdonia as a sixteen-year-old and has since climbed widely from Greenland to Antarctica. His first ascents include the Central Pillar of Freney in the Alps, Annapurna II and Nuptse in the Himalaya, The Ogre in the Karakoram, Kongur in Sinkiang and the Central Tower of Paine in Patagonia. He has undertaken twenty-six expeditions to the peaks of Central Asia, including twelve first ascents of peaks of over 6000 metres, but when he is at home he still loves nothing better than to go out on his local Cumbrian hills with friends.
Around his climbing life he has built a highly successful career in writing, lecturing and broadcasting, which has made him the best-known face in British mountaineering. The author of fifteen books, he was knighted for services to mountaineering in 1996.
