Fowler's climbs in On Thin Ice include
Aksu in Kyrgistan,
Taweche in Nepal,
Changabang in India,
Arwa Tower in India,
Mount Kennedy in Alaska and
Siguniang in China - the latter received international acclaim and was awarded the American 'Golden Piton' and the French 'Piolet d'Or'.
FROM THE LONDON TIMES BOOK REVIEW:
You would think, reading Mick Fowler’s second volume of climbing memoirs, that he was the ultimate bumbling incompetent. He works as a bespectacled pen-pusher for the Inland Revenue (the UK's IRS). He tells us in On Thin Ice that he is painfully unfit. He can’t carry heavy loads. He struggles to acclimatize at altitude and he is hopeless in the heat. If something can go wrong, it invariably does.
He has managed, nonetheless, to pack more mountaineering success, always involving first ascents, into his annual holidays than almost any full-time mountaineer in the history of the sport.
Fowler’s specialty is the lightweight Himalayan ascent done Alpine style (When you go up you stay up, as long as it takes.) A couple of decades back, the expedition was the norm. A large team of climbers assisted by an army of Sherpas would engineer the route to the summit. Ropes would be fixed and camps organized at stages up the mountain. Fowler typically climbs in a team of two. He sets off into the unknown and finds, if he is lucky, a crevasse to crawl into for the night. So far he has survived the inevitable avalanches and storms, and days later makes it to the top.
The margin for error is minimal; the commitment required total. This is mountaineering at its purest and most demanding. Descending from a mountain called Changabang, Fowler’s companion, Steve Sustad, slips and pulls him down a snow slope towards a 1,000m drop. Miraculously, Fowler survives with only minor injuries. Sustad breaks four ribs in several places. They meet up with two other climbers and struggle on.
One of these climbers is swept to his death in an avalanche. The nightmare descent continues. “At one point,” writes Fowler, “we all ended up hanging free from a peg and a wire in the middle of a blank 100-metre wall.” On day 13 of the climb he catches himself falling asleep draped over his ice axes as, in a state of terminal exhaustion, he fights his way up the col which leads to safety.
Was it worth it? “In bald terms,” Mick Fowler comments, “the answer has to be no; nothing is worth the life of a friend.” But, he continues, his friend died doing what he loved. He admits that the risks he took on this climb were too high for a family man with two children, but “his love of the mountains is such that giving up was never an option.”
Mick Fowler is not the sort of man to analyze that love of mountains. He refers to it several times as an “urge” that simply cannot be ignored, and in terms of introspective insight, that is that.
[Love of mountains is not are rare emotion around here. All the books we sell are written by people with that feeling, as do all the readers of those books. Our customers, probably you, do as well.]
What matters is “maximum holiday pleasure”, which means “new places, adventure, challenges, uncertainty, interest, ethnic action and wild, preferably mountainous, terrain”. Readers with a taste for self-deprecating irony who share Fowler’s enthusiasms should buy On Thin Ice tomorrow. It is the funniest and most gripping mountaineering book to be published for years.
If you want to know more about the 68 year old phenom named Mick Fowler, he has been profiled in the climbing magazines. However, the only place that has the room to list all his important climbs is Wikipedia. They have the space and the talent to create detailed profiles. Check him out: (Check out as well most climbers today and in the past who interest you. Most climbers who are and were worth writing about have their page on Wiki. Just like Movie, TV and Internet stars.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Fowler
