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Summary
Summary
One of Atlas & Boots' Top 10 Adventure Travel Books of 2021
A dramatic account of the deadly earthquake on Everest--and a return to reach the summit.
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.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A practiced mountaineer recounts his fraught efforts to scale the world's tallest mountain. For Colorado-based climber and speaker Davidson, summiting Mount Everest was a longtime dream. He trained hard for it, arriving at base camp in 2015 and making his way up icefalls and over crevasses only to experience the devastating avalanche following a massive earthquake. Even in tamer weather, the mountain can be deadly: In one key moment, the author contemplates the body of a climber who, like him, survived the earthquake only to return the next year and die within sight of the summit. The year before his first effort, "a glacial block the size of a ten-story building sheared away from an ice ramp," killing 16 Nepali workers below. Pausing to pay them his respects, Davidson contemplates other ice fields above him on the trail and thinks, "stopping for even a second might give gravity an opening to drop an ice building on us." The giant mountain offers countless ways to die, including slipping off the rickety ladders that span breaks in the ice. Living through avalanches and helping locate and identify the dead were terrible enough, but the disappointment over the end of his first climb "just nine hours after I left base camp" was nearly spirit-crushing, as was the discovery that he had "officially crossed the line from prediabetic to diabetic." All good reasons to try again, the prospect of death be damned: "Risky climbs…had taught me that if I was afraid of dying, and wanted to see my loved ones again, I should temporarily put thoughts of them away." The book nicely bookends Into Thin Air and the author's own Ledge as considerations of adventures that have only three outcomes: summiting, turning back, or dying. Essential for alpinists, though armchair travelers will be bound up in Davidson's thrill-a-minute narrative, too. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.