The Will to Climb

The bestselling author of The Mountain and No Shortcuts to the Top chronicles his three attempts to climb the world's tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made-or attempted-the ascentAs a high school student, 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 and co-author David Roberts bring 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 Viesturs ponders what Annapurna reveals about some of our most fundamental moral and spiritual questions--questions, he believes, that we need to answer to lead our lives well.

Foreword, by Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the National Football         League                     Chapter One: The Brick Wall                 Chapter Two: A New and Splendid Life                Chapter Three: South Face                    Chapter Four: So Close to the Dead                          Chapter Five: The Door to the Land of the Living                  Chapter Six: Messner and Kukuczka                        Chapter Seven: Comet on Annapurna                       Chapter Eight: My Annapurna                Epilogue: Goddess of the Harvests                   Acknowledgments                                 Bibliography