Contents

1 Death or Glory

2 Hope Is God

3 Better to Die Than to Be a Coward

4 The Unrelenting Pursuit of Excellence

5 Into the Death Zone

6 Swimming to the Moon

7 The Mission

8 The Highest Stakes

9 Respect Is Earned

10 The Normality of the Extreme

11 Rescue!

12 Into the Dark

13 In Times of Chaos

14 Summit Fever

15 The Politics of a Mountain

16 Quitting’s Not in the Blood

17 Through the Storm

18 The Savage Mountain

19 A Mountain Mind

20 The People’s Project

21 Epic

 

Epilogue: At the Peak

Appendix One: Lessons from the Death Zone

Appendix Two: Fourteen Mountains: The Schedule

Appendix Three: The World Records

Acknowledgements

Picture Acknowledgements

 

Footnotes

Picture Section 1

Picture Section 2