Teach Yourself
2 total works
No Place to Fall is Victor Saunders' follow up to his Boardman Tasker Prize winning debut book Elusive Summits. Covering three expeditions in Nepal, the Karakoram and the Kumaon, each shares the exhilaration of attempting new alpine-style routes on terrifyingly committing mountains.
In 1989 Victor Saunders and Steve Sustad completed a difficult route on the West Face of Makalu II, only to be brought to a storm-bound halt above 7,000 metres while descending. Without food or bivouac gear, they endured a tortuous descent after a night in the open. Two years later the pair were with a small team in the Hunza valley exploring elusive access to a giant hidden pillar on the unvisited South-East Face of Ultar, one of the highest and most shapely of the world's unclimbed peaks.
In 1992 Victor Saunders was part of a joint Indian-British team climbing various peaks in the Panch Chuli range. A happy and successful expedition narrowly avoided ending in tragedy when Stephen Venables broke both legs in a fall on the descent from Panch Chuli V and Chris Bonington survived another fall going to his aid. The dramatic evacuation of Venables, in which the author took a major part, forms an exciting climax to a story of cutting-edge, alpine-style climbing in the world's highest mountains.
No Place to Fall offers enviable mountain exploration, enriched by sharing the lives of the mountain peoples along the way. Victor Saunders casts a perceptive, if bemused, eye over his fellow climbers and reflects on the calculation of risk that drives them back year after year to chance their lives in high places.
At a time when the greatest mountains in the greatest ranges had been climbed by numerous routes, collected like stamps and written about extensively, Victor Saunders and his friends relished the exploration of the slightly lower, slightly humbler, but often more aesthetically satisfying and no less testing summits in the 6,000- and 7,000-metre range. With thousands of unclimbed peaks in the Karakoram and Himalaya to choose from, these were ripe fruit for the committed mountaineers of the day.
In his Boardman-Tasker-winning Elusive Summits, Victor Saunders describes four expeditions to the Karakoram, to Uzum Brakk, Bojohaghur Duanasir, Rimo and the stunning Spantik. Battling crevasses and violent weather, injured climbers and dropped rucksacks, Saunders and his friends make a string of exciting and difficult ascents.
Saunders communicates the highs and lows of expedition life with relish, good humour, and a keen eye for the idiosyncratic among his companions. His first book, Elusive Summits, is a wonderful celebration of the sheer exhilaration that comes from the hardest level of alpine-style exploration in the Karakoram.