New York, St Martins, 2021, 1st edition. 409 pp, 35 color photos on glossy stock, b/2 frontispiece, color photos and avalanche route diagrams on the endpapers. Hardcover, New with Dust Jacket. 

On April 25, 2015, Jim Davidson was climbing Mount Everest when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake released avalanches all around him and his team, destroying their only escape route and trapping them at nearly 20,000 feet. It was the largest earthquake in Nepal in eighty-one years and killed about 8,900 people. That day also became the deadliest in the history of Everest, with eighteen people losing their lives on the mountain.

After spending two unsettling days stranded on Everest, Davidson's team was rescued by helicopter. The experience left him shaken, and despite his thirty-three years of climbing and serving as an expedition leader, he wasn’t sure that he would ever go back. But in the face of risk and uncertainty, he returned in 2017 and finally achieved his dream of reaching the summit.

Suspenseful and engrossing, The Next Everest portrays the experience of living through the biggest disaster to ever hit the mountain. Davidson's background in geology and environmental science makes him uniquely qualified to explain how this natural disaster unfolded and why the seismic threats lurking beneath Nepal are even greater today. But this story is not about “conquering” the world’s highest peak. Instead, it reveals how embracing change, challenge, and uncertainty prepares anyone to face their “next Everest” in life.

Jim Davidson is no stranger to danger on high mountains. On June 21, 1992 he and a partner were trapped in an 80 foot deep crevasse on Mount Rainier, caught by a cave-in. His friend was fatally injured, and Jim somehow found the will to find a route out of an impossible situation, alone. It is virtually unheard of in mountaineering to be the victim of two natural disasters on well known, popular mountains. Davidson has shown he has the right stuff to emerge unscathed from two events, 23 years apart. He described his 1992 accident in a best selling 2011 book called The Ledge.