The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna--the World's Deadliest Peak

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The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna--the World's Deadliest Peak

3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 · rating details · 147 ratings · 31 reviews

The bestselling author of No Shortcuts to the Top and K2 chronicles his three attempts to climb the world's tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak, Annapurna in the Himalaya, while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made -- or attempted – the ascent, and what these exploits teach us about facing life's greatest challenges.
As a high school...more The bestselling author of No Shortcuts to the Top and K2 chronicles his three attempts to climb the world's tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak, Annapurna in the Himalaya, while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made -- or attempted – the ascent, and what these exploits teach us about facing life's greatest challenges.
As a high school student in the flatlands of Rockford, Illinois, where the highest objects on the horizon were water towers, Ed Viesturs read and was captivated by the French climber Maurice Herzog's famous and grisly account of the first ascent of Annapurna in 1950. When he began his own campaign to climb the world's 14 highest peaks in the late 1980s, Viesturs looked forward with trepidation to undertaking Annapurna himself. Two failures to summit in 2000 and 2002 made Annapurna his nemesis. His successful 2005 ascent was the triumphant capstone of his climbing quest. In The Will To Climb Viesturs brings the extraordinary challenges of Annapurna to vivid life through edge-of-your-seat accounts of the greatest climbs in the mountain’s history, and of his own failed attempts and eventual success. In the process he ponders what Annapurna reveals about some of our most fundamental moral and spiritual questions--questions, he believe, that we need to answer to lead our lives well.

"Of all fourteen of the world's highest mountains, which I climbed between 1989 and 2005," writes Viesturs, "the one that came the closest to defeating my best efforts was Annapurna.” Although it was the first 8,000-meter peak to be climbed, Annapurna is not as well known as the world's highest mountain, Everest, or second highest, K2. But as Viesturs argues, Annapurna, while not technically the most difficult of the 8,000ers, is the most daunting because it has no route--no ridge or face on any side of the mountain--that is relatively free of what climbers call "objective danger"—the threat of avalanches, above all, but also of collapsing seracs (huge ice blocks), falling rocks, and crevasses. Since its first ascent in 1950, Annapurna has been climbed by more than 130 people, but 53 have died trying. This high fatality rate makes Annapurna the most dangerous of the 8,000-meter peaks.
Viesturs and co-author David Roberts chronicle Ed's three attempts to climb Annapurna, as well as the attempts of others, from the two French climbers who made the landmark first ascent of Annapurna on June 3, 1950, through the daring and tragic campaigns of such world-class mountaineers as Reinhold Messner and Anatoli Boukreev. Viesturs's accounts and analyses of these extraordinary adventures serve as a point of departure for his exploration of themes vividly illustrated by Annapurna expeditions, including obsession and commitment, fear and fulfillment, failure and triumph--issues that have been neglected in the otherwise very rich literature of mountaineering, and that can inform the lives and actions of everyone.(less)

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published October 4th 2011 by Crown Publishers

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Aug 20, 2012 Erika rated it 4 of 5 stars

I liked No Shortcuts better. I will always read Viesteurs, and his stories inspire me to get back out there and go up a glacier, but this was less a story about his own climb. No Shortcuts tells Ed's Annapurna climb stories more succinctly and clearly than this does. This is a rambling, wonderfully told set of vignettes about the history of climbing Annapurna. It reads as a Who’s Who in the climbing industry along with a resume clip of each from the vantage of Annapurna. A wonderful read, but no...more

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Feb 02, 2012 Heidi rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another mountaineering book--I'm fascinated by what drives these people, although I have no desire to climb any mountains myself. Ed Viesturs relives his own journey up Annapurna (the mountain with the highest death rate of all the mountains above 8000 meters) and describes other noteworthy expeditions. His passion and his heart shine through the words he's written.

But as interesting as it was, this wasn't Viesturs' best book. The repetition got annoying--it felt like Viesturs wasn't expecting u...more

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Sep 24, 2011 John E. Branch Jr. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sports-mountaineering

Like “Tour de France” and “Campagnolo,” two names I encountered in a cycling shop during my teen years, which connected only tenuously with the $100 Schwinn 10-speed I rode ever day, I met the name “Annapurna” somewhere in the past. The particular poetry of its sound and rhythm stuck in my head, but I knew little of the mountain itself until the recent day when I read the full title of this book. It was on the cover of a review copy at work, which I grabbed, eager to learn at last what in the wo...more Like “Tour de France” and “Campagnolo,” two names I encountered in a cycling shop during my teen years, which connected only tenuously with the $100 Schwinn 10-speed I rode ever day, I met the name “Annapurna” somewhere in the past. The particular poetry of its sound and rhythm stuck in my head, but I knew little of the mountain itself until the recent day when I read the full title of this book. It was on the cover of a review copy at work, which I grabbed, eager to learn at last what in the world those four syllables pointed to.

Ed Viesturs knew very well what Annapurna meant before he left adolescence. By the age of 20, he had read a French account of the first expedition to reach its top, as well as many other mountaineering books, and had decided to become a climber. How to describe Viesturs? He’s accomplished enough that he has summited five times on Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain (and the only giant most people seem to hear about). He made one of those climbs with a team hauling an IMAX camera that, at 40-something pounds, most of us wouldn’t eagerly carry up the street. And Annapurna? It’s not a mere mountain; to climbers, it’s one of the mountains. Fourteen peaks in the world are more than 8,000 meters high, Annapurna among them. As Viesturs explains late in this book, by way of justifying his title, “It’s become a standard gauge of danger on the highest peaks to calculate the ratio of fatalities to summiteers. Thus the Annapurna ratio [about 183 reaching the top versus 61 deaths] is exactly 33 percent.… K2 comes close…, with a balance hovering around 25 percent. No other mountain in the world is in this ballpark.”

Those numbers are chilling, but, as with names, what matters are what they mean. Those 8,000-plus meters (more than 4.97 miles) are ticked off vertically, dragging your body and your gear across snow, ice, and rock, evading or bridging crevasses, hoping an avalanche doesn’t catch you, struggling to enter—more important, then to get out of—a high zone in which essentially nothing lives. What’s that like? Viesturs, the only American to have reached the top of all 14 “8,000-ers” (the term he and others use) without supplemental oxygen, wants to give us some idea in this book.

His prose, crafted with climber-writer David Roberts, is conversational. You get the impression that if he sat down with you to talk about mountains, he’d tell his stories pretty much as he does here. His plain style doesn’t get in the way of the subject, but it’s not the most flavorful. Not a problem, because Viesturs quotes liberally from other writings—some of it out of print, never translated to English, or never published at all—in the course of recounting other expeditions. (While admitting that this book returns to some ground he has covered in previous books, he says a rethink has brought him new perspectives.)

My personal favorite among those quoted is French climber Erhard Loretan, whose writing can be sly—the almost childlike simplicity of a tortoise-and-hare comparison—or disarmingly comic, as when he and a partner stagger into a base camp like “starving zombies.” Loretan sometimes approaches the poetic. During the nearly unendurable ordeal of descending Annapurna, the two men find an abandoned camp and the body of a Sherpa: “Without any coffin except a sarcophagus of ice, without any roof except the sky.” And it’s Loretan who describes his traverse of Annapurna as venturing “so far from the living and so close to the dead.”

Though its focus is on Annapurna and climbing at a high level (in both senses), the book serves in ways as an introduction to mountaineering. One learns that there are two broad methods—the alpine style and the expedition, the former traveling fast and light, the latter slower, more methodical, consolidating each gain with a stocked camp—and you find individual styles as well. (There is also, I was glad to learn, more than one gender on these slopes. Men predominate, but Viesturs takes note of a team of women who tackled Annapurna, some of whom reached the summit.) There are many potential routes to the top of most mountains. The most ambitious climbers have won their renown by doing something new—if not a new route, then a different season, or a solo attempt. And there’s more than one approach to recounting what one has done. It may be stereotyping, but one is tempted to see something traditionally Gallic in Loretan’s style, something more Germanic in the heroic tone of master climber Reinhold Messner, and possibly something American in the straightforward, declarative style of Viesturs.

One learns a good deal more from The Will to Climb as well. Filling out the statistics I quoted, the text is shot through with the names and stories of climbers who have died, whether on Annapurna or on another of the 14. (As with styles and routes, there are many ways to die.) The names of the peaks and their ranges are here too, sometimes plain, sometimes nearly unpronounceable, usually scented with the exotic: the Karakoram and Himalaya ranges, and mountains ranging from K2 (a never-replaced map designation) and Broad Peak to Gasherbrum I and II, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, and Cho Oyu. And one comes to appreciate the sense of Viesturs’s climbing principles. His motto may seem obvious and might not be contested, down at ground level, by most other climbers, but with a summit in view, some have ignored it: “Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” That’s smart, though it’s not all one needs: “to a certain extent you’re always rolling the dice.”

Does any of this really tell you what it’s like? Yes and no. Nowadays one may hear it said, by people in the throes of some arduous but hardly unique experience, that no one can imagine it, or at least that no one who hasn’t been there can. There’s some truth to this. But there would be little point in writing if one felt that one couldn’t convey much and that readers wouldn’t understand—little point in reading the result either. Words in good hands do point to something beyond themselves. Annapurna now means much more to me.

There really is no frigate like a book; books can take us where boats don’t go. How The Will to Climb will sit with those who have experience in the extreme, almost absurd “sport” of mountaineering I can’t judge. But for me it was a voyage all right.

[P.S. I read an advance uncorrected proof, with none of the photographs mentioned in the acknowledgments.](less)

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Apr 04, 2012 Kris Madaus rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love reading about Annapurna. But I have read so many mountaineering books, that I feel I am reading the same story again and again. This book was different. I was intrigued by the challenges of Annapurna including another perspective on the first ascent and the first winter ascent. There is also some good stories of the other people that have climbed all of the 8000 meter peaks. I really like the way Viesturs gives the facts without strongly placing judgement. Granted, he has opinions of his...more

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Dec 31, 2011 josh rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: outdoors, history, climbing or himalayan enthusiasts

Recommended to josh by: shelf @ UAPL

Shelves: non-fiction, sports, travel, mountaineering

one of the first full books I've read on mountaineering (though I've certainly read a number of articles on climbing, rock & ice, backpacker, nat geo adventure and the like). I'm a fan of history and traditions. brotherhood and self-sacrifice (on a level far beyond my capabilities). so, to that end I was a huge fan of the stories within the bounds of this book's covers. yet, I found the beauty of the prose to be sorely lacking in a number of places. I certainly do not find any faults with mr...more

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Mar 26, 2013 Arnie rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is not as good ad Viesturs other books, and although I've never read his magnum opus, "No Shortcuts to the Top", I suspect it's not as good as that one either. It reads more like a collection of things Ed's already written about, peppered with his own experiences.

Still, a solid book about a single mountain and the numerous attempts to conquer it, and a worthy investment of your time if you're into the outdoors, climbing, or stories about endurance. I would love to meet Viesturs and have a...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Maria rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love Ed Viesturs books. He has a casual, engaging conversational style perfect for the armchair mountaineer. Similar to his book on K2, this one is about the history of climbing Annapurna, the "deadliest" mountain, as well as reflections on his own climb (successful on his 3rd attempt). I read it after reading the book on K2 and the contrast of the histories I found very interesting. If you have a casual interest in mountaineering then this is probably not the book for you, but anyone with a p...more

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Aug 03, 2012 Dan-o rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was an interesting book, but different than what I expected. For a nearly 300 page book, Viesturs only used about 40 pages to describe his ascent of Annapurna. The rest of the book recounted the myriad of ascents of that mountain. I certainly enjoyed hearing about all the people who had gone up. It was particularly cool to get some insight into the small community of 8000 meter peak summiters. Annapurna was actually climbed before Everest was, but it is a considerably harder mountain to cli...more

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Jan 10, 2012 Anna rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: audio, cold-books

Maybe I took too much time to listen to this book - perhaps that's why I couldn't seem to follow the structure of it. It seemed to jump around between different expeditions to Annapurna too much. Annapurna sounds horrible! Apparently, it's not technically difficult but without any somewhat safe routes and a relatively high number of people die on it compared to those who make it to the top. Viesturs has climbed all 14 8,000 metre mountains and he has climbed them without oxygen. I'm certainly am...more

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Jan 25, 2013 Nicky McHugh rated it 2 of 5 stars

So so badly wanted to like this more -- I even read most of it quite literally in the shadow of Annapurna, while trekking in Nepal -- but this book left me wanting more. It is impressive in that it seems to capture every expedition and ascent of the mountain and some of the stories are riveting. But in the end it is a bit rambling and disconnected as a narrative as it jumps from one ascent to the next and goes ... nowhere. Viesturs' main theme seems to be the tension between obsession and commit...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Irene rated it 3 of 5 stars

HB -- 3.5 -- Ya, I am a sucker for any adventure. I have read all of of Ed's writings even his interviews and most of the sritings of the great and deceased Mt climbers he names in this book. It is rivieting to try to understand how these strong climbers face their mortality everytime they wake up on these 8000'ers.
well done and I am glad he has climbed all of them.

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Jan 12, 2012 Andrea rated it 4 of 5 stars

Amazing stories of both Viesturs' own attempts on Annapurna as well as past successes and failures on that very dangerous mountain. This book isn't for everyone, but anyone with an interest in or a fascination with mountain climbing, especially the 8,000'ers, will enjoy this read. My only complaint is that all the stories and names blended together for me after a while, and I had trouble keeping track of who's who. Otherwise, fascinating story!

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May 28, 2012 Joanna Croston rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: mountain-lit

A little disappointing. It never seems to dig in deep to what Viesturs may have actually been feeling while climbing this peak. More attention is given to the exploits of others, which made for good reading in most cases. But his own accounts of his experience fall a bit flat. Maybe it's modesty or maybe it's just not introspective enough to make it a thrilling read.

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Feb 29, 2012 Jonathan rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: mountaineers

I found this an interesting history of attempts to climb Annapurna, including Viesturs' own three attempts, the last successful in 2005. The author is the first (and perhaps still the only) American to climb all of the fourteen 8000 meter peaks in the world.

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Oct 31, 2012 allimo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adventure-survival, interesting-nf

Surprisingly, less of this was rehashing the same stories from "No Shortcuts" than I expected. As always, I really appreciated the accounts of historical climbs and the death and danger encountered by the brave souls attempting such a deadly mountain.

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Dec 20, 2011 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

Viesturs phoned this one in. It's a sloppily-edited rehash of mountaineering anecdotes from other climber's books. It's also full of sniping at Jon Krakauer, who really writes good stuff about climbing. Take a pass on this book.

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Nov 06, 2011 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Another excellent read! I really like his style, it sounds just like his lectures and shares both the mountaineering experience and general climbing history that most people are not aware of. Can't wait to see what mountain he covers next!

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Jan 31, 2013 Sanjeev Asher rated it 4 of 5 stars

Must read for people interested in Mountaineering. Story of great adventure, discipline and will power and above all knowing your limitations and respecting nature.

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Jun 04, 2012 Rich rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

If you've read Ed Viesturs other books, you'll realize this one covers some of the same ground, but there's still enough new material here to make it worth the read.

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Jan 13, 2012 Susan O'brien rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is another solid Viesturs mountaineering book. I hadn't read much about Annapurna but she is a beast of a mountain. I'm keeping my distance.

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Feb 17, 2013 Kathryn Drennan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ed Viesturs always tells a good story, but the book almost seemed a little disorganized and in some ways, perfunctory in places.

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Nov 28, 2011 Suman added it

Shelves: audiobook

Meh. A couple interesting stories (especially Loretan's traverse of the East ridge of Annapurna), but not nearly as interesting or polished as Viestur's book about K2.

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Nov 25, 2011 Sarah rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, audiobook

Audiobook.

Not nearly as good as Ed Viestur's K2, but still interesting.

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Mar 13, 2012 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars

Story of the author's path to climbing Annapurna, as well as the history of others' attempts at this mountain.

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Nov 26, 2011 Yvonne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: kindle

Interesting stories on the Annapurna's ascents.

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Feb 15, 2012 Suep marked it as stopped-midway

Having a reading crisis! This was not interesting to me right now......

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Sep 04, 2012 Steven Wadzinski added it

great read, wonderful insights/ideas on some of the great mountaineers of the Himalaya.

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Feb 12, 2012 Adrian Neal rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great book! This book not only chronicles Ed's adventures on Annapurna, but also highlights the attempts of others as well on this dangerous mountain.

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Sep 26, 2011 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars

I won a copy of this book and received it last week and it is absolutely amazing so far! Ed has a way of writing so that you feel like you're right there with him on the mountain...and my hands sometimes sweat like I'm 20,000 feet up! So far, so amazing!

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Nov 18, 2012 Stan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mountaineering

One of several books I am reading for the Banff Mountain Book Festival this year. I'm not too far into this yet, but if it is like previous collaborations between Viesturs and Roberts it will be good.

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About Ed Viesturs

Ed Viesturs is America's leading high altitude mountaineer, having climbed many of the world's most challenging summits, including ascending Mount Everest seven times. He recently completed a 16-year quest to climb all 14 of the world's highest mountains (above 8,000 meters) without the use of supplemental oxygen. In doing so, he became the first American and the 5th person in the world to accomp...more

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Books by Ed Viesturs

No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks

K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain

Himalayan Quest: Ed Viesturs on the 8,000-Meter Giants

The Mountain: Epic Adventures on Everest

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