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Forever on the Mountain: The Truth Behind One of Mountaineering's Most Controversial and Mysterious Disasters
Winner of the 2007 Banff Mountain Festival Book Awards Grand Prize (The Phyllis & Don Munday Award): "A riveting account of a long-ago mountaineering disaster."—Time
In 1967, seven young men, members of a twelve-man expedition led by twenty-four-year-old Joe Wilcox, were stranded on Alaska's Mount McKinley in a vicious arctic storm. All seven perished on what remains the most tragic expedition in American climbing history. Revisiting the event in the tradition of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, James M. Tabor uncovers elements of controversy, finger-pointing, and cover-up that combine to make this disaster unlike any other. .
In 1967, seven young men, members of a twelve-man expedition led by twenty-four-year-old Joe Wilcox, were stranded on Alaska's Mount McKinley in a vicious arctic storm. All seven perished on what remains the most tragic expedition in American climbing history. Revisiting the event in the tradition of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, James M. Tabor uncovers elements of controversy, finger-pointing, and cover-up that combine to make this disaster unlike any other. .
432 pages, Paperback
First published June 20, 2007
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April 18, 2018
James M. Tabor suffers from two problems in this book: he doesn't have enough mountaineering experience to adequately understand what happened in this disaster, and he can't write. Since the story is about the somewhat mysterious deaths of seven of twelve members of a 1967 American expedition to Denali and a botched and confusing rescue attempt by the National Park Service (NPS), the only qualifications needed to write a great book about this expedition are:
1) Mountaineering experience to understand what happened in this disaster
2) Ability to write
There were just so many things wrong with this account. He inserts himself in the book way too much and what he says is quite dumb - at one point he says, "When it gets really bad, you do pray... whatever your sea-level agnostic pretensions".* His evidence is quite horrible: "One of the most interesting photographs is that taken by Dennis Luchterhand, he of Rainier premonition [he had a dream that he was going to die]. He looks down at the snow instead of toward the camera, so you can't see his face. That's an odd way for a man to pose... maybe there's something else going on in some deep place in his mind, the same place from which the premonition came, and maybe looking at the camera somehow seems to summon it up when what he really wants to do is keep it down there". Of course, this is after he says that "you can learn an immense amount, as police work has taught me and the popular television series CSI has taught many others, from photographs."
The most egregiously bad section is when he concocts a fictionalized account of what may have happened when no evidence is present. The crux of the mystery is that there is no photographic or diarily evidence of what happened to the seven men when the ten-day storm hit and killed them high on the mountain. This doesn't stop the author from positing that one team member "finally runs out of patience and proclaims, Come on you slackers, it's time to get up this mountain, goddamnit!". This goes on for multiple chapters. And I won't even begin to talk about the stupid cliches; the dumb references to Malcolm Gladwell, CSI, and Hemingway; and the mind-numbingly bad metaphors.
The best parts of the book are when he quotes wholesale from other accounts of the '67 disaster and literally everything he writes makes the book worse.
According to his website, James M. Tabor fancies himself as a "a mountaineer, scuba diver, caver, hang glider pilot, horseman, firearms expert, and father" who "MFAed at Johns Hopkins". I understand the irony of an arm-chair mountaineer levying this accusation, but it seems that the author is a dilettante at life. At least I don't subject you to 400 pages of drivel (just this goodreads review).
*This is not even true. In Joe Simpson's "Touching the Void", Joe Simpson, who was close to death after breaking his leg on the mountain, bluntly claimed that he had no illusions about a god or afterlife. What's worse is that Tabor read this book, and then tells us in FotM that he read it.
1) Mountaineering experience to understand what happened in this disaster
2) Ability to write
There were just so many things wrong with this account. He inserts himself in the book way too much and what he says is quite dumb - at one point he says, "When it gets really bad, you do pray... whatever your sea-level agnostic pretensions".* His evidence is quite horrible: "One of the most interesting photographs is that taken by Dennis Luchterhand, he of Rainier premonition [he had a dream that he was going to die]. He looks down at the snow instead of toward the camera, so you can't see his face. That's an odd way for a man to pose... maybe there's something else going on in some deep place in his mind, the same place from which the premonition came, and maybe looking at the camera somehow seems to summon it up when what he really wants to do is keep it down there". Of course, this is after he says that "you can learn an immense amount, as police work has taught me and the popular television series CSI has taught many others, from photographs."
The most egregiously bad section is when he concocts a fictionalized account of what may have happened when no evidence is present. The crux of the mystery is that there is no photographic or diarily evidence of what happened to the seven men when the ten-day storm hit and killed them high on the mountain. This doesn't stop the author from positing that one team member "finally runs out of patience and proclaims, Come on you slackers, it's time to get up this mountain, goddamnit!". This goes on for multiple chapters. And I won't even begin to talk about the stupid cliches; the dumb references to Malcolm Gladwell, CSI, and Hemingway; and the mind-numbingly bad metaphors.
The best parts of the book are when he quotes wholesale from other accounts of the '67 disaster and literally everything he writes makes the book worse.
According to his website, James M. Tabor fancies himself as a "a mountaineer, scuba diver, caver, hang glider pilot, horseman, firearms expert, and father" who "MFAed at Johns Hopkins". I understand the irony of an arm-chair mountaineer levying this accusation, but it seems that the author is a dilettante at life. At least I don't subject you to 400 pages of drivel (just this goodreads review).
*This is not even true. In Joe Simpson's "Touching the Void", Joe Simpson, who was close to death after breaking his leg on the mountain, bluntly claimed that he had no illusions about a god or afterlife. What's worse is that Tabor read this book, and then tells us in FotM that he read it.
November 6, 2021
Here we have a very thorough account of a doomed 1967 expedition to Alaska's Mt. McKinley (or Denali, as the native people of the area call it). Tabor is a former Outside magazine editor, and to say that he "can't write" (as the top-rated review here does) is totally asinine. To say that he makes some odd narrative choices here and there would be, I think, fair. Imagining the dialogue of the climbers who were trapped at altitude and whose bodies were never found, for example, complete with paragraph breaks. That was disconcerting, the first time he did it. I also don't think that I needed references to Malcolm Gladwell to explain to me why tempers are going to flare when a group of guys who don't know each other real well are put in a stressful, life-or-death situation. Sounds like the most natural thing in the world to me. Still, this is a pretty harrowing, empathetic and nonjudgmental reconstruction of events, probably a good corrective to what seems like a lot of finger-pointing in the (decades-long) wake of the tragedy. And if Tabor occasionally oversteps in his speculations, I think it's because he's clearly obsessed with this story, with the lives of the men who died as well as those who survived. I especially liked the last couple of chapters, in which he visits with the survivors individually (the two who wrote books about what happened still want nothing to do with each other), and tries not to assign blame, but to understand how the tragedy has shaped their lives in the decades since. I suppose the lesson here is that if you ever find yourself getting drunk at a pub in Anchorage or Fairbanks, and someone challenges you to climb Denali, at the very least suggest that it might be wiser to try Rainier first.
April 27, 2016
"Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion."
-- Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind
Forever on the Mountain tells the story of 12 young men who went up Denali (Mt. McKinley, for you white people) in 1967. Only five came back down. The fate of the seven left on the mountain is not known, beyond the fact that they died.
The expedition was led by 24 year-old Joe Wilcox. He had a nine-man team ready to go when he was contacted by 22 year-old Howard Snyder, who was going to take a 4-man team up Denali when one of their members was injured. Because the National Park Service wouldn't allow a three-man expedition, Snyder coaxed Wilcox into letting his group join. Oil, meet water. The rest is tragedy.
The group never cohered as they slogged their way across tundra and up glaciers. There was bickering and animosity. Snyder's men were moving too fast, or maybe Wilcox's men were moving too slow. Each side questioned the others motives and experience and ability. Wilcox never asserted firm leadership - he was only 24, for goodness sake - but that only explains the problems with the expedition in general, not why it proved fatal to seven men.
The expedition tackled the summit in two groups. Three men, including Joe and Howard went up one day. Then they went down, taking two weaker men with them. The next group tackled the summit a day or two later. They made it to the top - that much is clear from radio reports - but they never got back down. Therein lies a mystery.
James Tabor, a climber himself - though he never summitted Denali - tries to answer that mystery. He gets off to a bad start, by inviting comparisons to Norman MacLean's magnificient Young Men and Fire. Tabor is no MacLean. His writing is journalistic: fast-moving, packed with often-gratuitious detail, but lacking any of MacLean's beautiful prose. Using a variety of sources, including his own experiences, he tries to put the pieces together as to what went wrong on the Wilcox-McKinley expedition.
In doing so, he attempts to find the middle ground between Snyder, who castigated Wilcox in his book, Hall of the Mountain King, and Wilcox, who defended himself in his own book, White Winds. Throughout the book, Tabor tries to be fair, and ends up withholding any judgment whatsoever. This equanamity left be a little befuddled. For instance, I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around why the little fights and nitpicking leading up to the summit had any bearing on the ultimate disaster. Sure, Wilcox and Snyder fought for years over Wilcox's leadership, but Wilcox wasn't with the group that died. The climbers who died did not die from group dynamics. If there was any criticism of Joe, it's that he chose to spend a day resting instead of climbing, and that he split the group. But as Tabor notes, neither of these decisions was unsupportable. So where, then, is the beef. The conclusion I came to was that this supposed "controversy" is an internal, mountaineer-community thing, where hypercritical alpha-males decide to parse and critique.
Indeed, at the very end of the book, literally the last three pages from the epilogue, Tabor sort of agrees with Wilcox's contention that the reason these men died was because of a storm. A huge freaking storm with winds as high as 150 miles per hour. That and the fact that the NPS didn't get around to thinking of mounting a rescue for 12 days.
Yeah, that might have had something to do with it. Mystery solved.
The book falls far, far short of Young Men and Fire, which it aspires to be. Tabor is a good journalist and researcher, and I found the book quite interesting. He is a curious man, and quotes liberally from famous mountain tracts, as well as Kubler-Ross and Dave Grossman, in order to fill in the gaps left by the historical record. However, he is kept from achieving what he wants to do, which is tell us what happened at the end. Unlike the Mann Gulch Fire, detailed in Young Men and Fire, there is no forensic evidence to sift. MacLean was able to go to the Gulch and walk in the footsteps of those young smokejumpers. There are markers on the hill, showing where each man died. There are pictures and diagrams and aerial photos. All of which helped him determine the course of events. This evidence is lacking no Denali. Tabor isn't able to go to the slopes of Denali. Even if he did, there's nothing there. Only three bodies were ever seen. The rest were buried in the snow. Only one of those three bodies was even recorded on film. None of the seven bodies were ever recovered or, in fact, seen again. Even the three known bodies disappeared within weeks of their first sighting.
Thus, we'll never know what happened. Whether those guys were able to dig in before the storm hit, or whether they tried to make a beeline from the summit to summit camp. It remains a mountain mystery. The only truth behind the disaster is that when you go to the mountains, you put yourself in the hands of the gods.
-- Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind
Forever on the Mountain tells the story of 12 young men who went up Denali (Mt. McKinley, for you white people) in 1967. Only five came back down. The fate of the seven left on the mountain is not known, beyond the fact that they died.
The expedition was led by 24 year-old Joe Wilcox. He had a nine-man team ready to go when he was contacted by 22 year-old Howard Snyder, who was going to take a 4-man team up Denali when one of their members was injured. Because the National Park Service wouldn't allow a three-man expedition, Snyder coaxed Wilcox into letting his group join. Oil, meet water. The rest is tragedy.
The group never cohered as they slogged their way across tundra and up glaciers. There was bickering and animosity. Snyder's men were moving too fast, or maybe Wilcox's men were moving too slow. Each side questioned the others motives and experience and ability. Wilcox never asserted firm leadership - he was only 24, for goodness sake - but that only explains the problems with the expedition in general, not why it proved fatal to seven men.
The expedition tackled the summit in two groups. Three men, including Joe and Howard went up one day. Then they went down, taking two weaker men with them. The next group tackled the summit a day or two later. They made it to the top - that much is clear from radio reports - but they never got back down. Therein lies a mystery.
James Tabor, a climber himself - though he never summitted Denali - tries to answer that mystery. He gets off to a bad start, by inviting comparisons to Norman MacLean's magnificient Young Men and Fire. Tabor is no MacLean. His writing is journalistic: fast-moving, packed with often-gratuitious detail, but lacking any of MacLean's beautiful prose. Using a variety of sources, including his own experiences, he tries to put the pieces together as to what went wrong on the Wilcox-McKinley expedition.
In doing so, he attempts to find the middle ground between Snyder, who castigated Wilcox in his book, Hall of the Mountain King, and Wilcox, who defended himself in his own book, White Winds. Throughout the book, Tabor tries to be fair, and ends up withholding any judgment whatsoever. This equanamity left be a little befuddled. For instance, I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around why the little fights and nitpicking leading up to the summit had any bearing on the ultimate disaster. Sure, Wilcox and Snyder fought for years over Wilcox's leadership, but Wilcox wasn't with the group that died. The climbers who died did not die from group dynamics. If there was any criticism of Joe, it's that he chose to spend a day resting instead of climbing, and that he split the group. But as Tabor notes, neither of these decisions was unsupportable. So where, then, is the beef. The conclusion I came to was that this supposed "controversy" is an internal, mountaineer-community thing, where hypercritical alpha-males decide to parse and critique.
Indeed, at the very end of the book, literally the last three pages from the epilogue, Tabor sort of agrees with Wilcox's contention that the reason these men died was because of a storm. A huge freaking storm with winds as high as 150 miles per hour. That and the fact that the NPS didn't get around to thinking of mounting a rescue for 12 days.
Yeah, that might have had something to do with it. Mystery solved.
The book falls far, far short of Young Men and Fire, which it aspires to be. Tabor is a good journalist and researcher, and I found the book quite interesting. He is a curious man, and quotes liberally from famous mountain tracts, as well as Kubler-Ross and Dave Grossman, in order to fill in the gaps left by the historical record. However, he is kept from achieving what he wants to do, which is tell us what happened at the end. Unlike the Mann Gulch Fire, detailed in Young Men and Fire, there is no forensic evidence to sift. MacLean was able to go to the Gulch and walk in the footsteps of those young smokejumpers. There are markers on the hill, showing where each man died. There are pictures and diagrams and aerial photos. All of which helped him determine the course of events. This evidence is lacking no Denali. Tabor isn't able to go to the slopes of Denali. Even if he did, there's nothing there. Only three bodies were ever seen. The rest were buried in the snow. Only one of those three bodies was even recorded on film. None of the seven bodies were ever recovered or, in fact, seen again. Even the three known bodies disappeared within weeks of their first sighting.
Thus, we'll never know what happened. Whether those guys were able to dig in before the storm hit, or whether they tried to make a beeline from the summit to summit camp. It remains a mountain mystery. The only truth behind the disaster is that when you go to the mountains, you put yourself in the hands of the gods.
February 20, 2016
Don't know why I am interested in high-altitude mountaineering (when you will never see me do it), except that it usually provides a compelling story about individuals struggling against difficult odds. This book is well-written and informative, keeps the reader interested in the fate of the participants, before and after the central events, and ends up being more about leadership, personality, and ego. The author's intent, beyond describing the ordeal of twelve men (seven of whom died) while struggling to conquer Denali (Mt. McKinley) in Alaska, is to repair the skewed and incorrect perceptions that developed concerning the tragedy. Although he is careful not to assign too much blame, realizing that mistakes were made and nature played a prominent (though not necessarily insurmountable) hand, the author does question the decisionmaking of NPS officials (who in some cases were untrained and inexperienced concerning mountaineering) and the role of a prominent climber/scholar in both (in a way) cursing and then slanting blame. The author weaves personal information, history, and opinion in a compelling way. What it basically comes down to is that two (really three) separate groups of climbers never really jelled as a team (where teamwork is at a premium), and inexperience and personality problems of two young leaders were magnified by schisms they were sadly unable to control and faced brutal weather this mountain can throw at athletes (especially back in the sixties, in the early years of high-altitude climbing, when many things were still new). I think this would be a good read for anyone who considers starting up a climbing expedition to this mountain (or others of similar challenge). Altitude can change attitude. Climbing can kill. People who do climb take risks, and sometimes the result is deadly (but I doubt they would really have it any other way). Not too many heroes in this story, but I think the author shows that the climbing party was experienced and fairly well-prepared; that mistakes, even small ones, can have cumulative and deadly results (simply forgetting to bring enough wands, for instance); that good communication and weather forecasting is vital; that quick and intelligent management of these types of natural sites is necessesary; and that team-building and confidence in your fellows is vital. Ultimately, however, there will always be deaths in this (and other) extreme sports, especially when records or new paths are being blazed. God bless them and protect them.
May 14, 2008
I was interviewed by the author, James Tabor, for this book. Joe Wilcox was my husband at the time this mountaineering disaster happened. I helped with the planning and preparation of this ill-fated expedition.
January 30, 2016
This book is the true tale of a mountaineering expedition on Mt. McKinley in 1967. 7 out of 12 men died on the mountain, but the exact reasons why and how were somewhat of a mystery. Tabor, a journalist, sets out to uncover exactly what happened and why.
I found this a very engaging read, but it probably isn't for everyone. It isn't quite as gripping as Into Thin Air, but has more of a tone of investigative journalism (think 60 Minutes). I just find it riveting to read about the challenges on the mountain and how the individual personalities handle them. One hard thing though was that with 12 men, it took some concentration to recall who was who - - some had the same first names.
This book really combines all the elements of an adventure, a mystery and a psychological thriller into one story. No stone was left unturned. A great piece of journalism and a great read!
I found this a very engaging read, but it probably isn't for everyone. It isn't quite as gripping as Into Thin Air, but has more of a tone of investigative journalism (think 60 Minutes). I just find it riveting to read about the challenges on the mountain and how the individual personalities handle them. One hard thing though was that with 12 men, it took some concentration to recall who was who - - some had the same first names.
This book really combines all the elements of an adventure, a mystery and a psychological thriller into one story. No stone was left unturned. A great piece of journalism and a great read!
July 29, 2010
This true story of a 1967 mountaineering disaster on Denali is a real page-turner. The author, a mountaneer himself, is a skilled writer who makes you feel as if you are a member of this ill-fated expedition. With excellent illustrations of their route, you are drawn in to every aspect of this journey, from the planning, the interpersonal struggles, the grueling camp-to-camp treks of men and supplies, the summit reach, and beyond. Written with great detail and a clear head, he painstakingly uncovers the myraid ways that things went wrong, from huge personality clashes, oversights, terrible weather, and clouded judgement on the slopes, to the politics, poor communication, and group-think of the tragically failed rescue operation. His follow-up of the survivors 40 years later is particularly touching and revealing. If you love true adventure and the investigation of a mystery (and it is still part mystery) you will love this book.
October 15, 2008
An excellent (and very well-written) look at a disastrous expedition to Mt. McKinley in 1967. Tabor's meticulous research and excellent writing brought this story alive in all its tragic detail, thoroughly exploring the problems that beset the expedition both from within and without. I was especially fascinated by his careful descriptions of the people in the 12 man party and their personality clashes, and I appreciated the detail about the actual nuts and bolts of such an operation -- what the terrain was like, how the chores were divvied up, etc. Tabor also offered an unflinching look at the completely botched "rescue" and the NPS's cover up, and at the politics and petty egos that were behind that.
A great read.
A great read.
January 14, 2023
This is one of the most poorly argued published books I've ever read. I only continued reading it out of sheer morbid curiosity and a perverse desire to keep arguing with the author in my head.
This book is a recap of the disastrous Wilcox expedition to Denali in 1967. I'd previously read and enjoyed Denali's Howl about the same topic, and I'm really glad I read that book first. In that one, the author distributes the blame rather fairly while also acknowledging it was a historic storm that hit.
Tabor, meanwhile, mainly has an agenda--to defend expedition leader Joe Wilcox against any and all criticism. The result is contradictory, hypocritical, hysterical, and at times downright nonsensical. I actually was less sympathetic to Wilcox while reading these arguments in his favor than I was when reading Denali's Howl, in which I felt like Wilcox essentially came off as a good guy who was way in over his head. At the end of the day, I suspect that is still the case, but Tabor does Wilcox no favors with his "defense." With allies like these, who needs enemies?
Ultimately, I agree with the analysis of expedition member Howard Snyder (whom Wilcox likes to bash since he wrote a book critical of Wilcox's leadership) in that Wilcox was not to blame for the historic storm and that anyone trapped in it likely would have died, but that Wilcox--and Jerry Clark, who was leading the smaller group that got trapped and died--made poor decisions in the leadup to the storm that placed them there and could have been avoided.
I'd go farther to also note there's a big difference between arguing that Wilcox receives unfair criticism for his role in the disaster and arguing that he was an excellent leader with superb decision-making skills. I'd agree with the former, but Wilcox argues the latter and does a poor job of it in the process.
I was astonished at how many examples he used to defend Wilcox that ended up painting the exact opposite picture of what he was trying to say.
Wilcox gets particularly indignant in arguing that the Wilcox expedition was not too inexperienced to climb Denali. He also talks about an incident when one of the men who eventually died started digging snow caves during an earlier weather event on the mountain. It's SOP. Wilcox, meanwhile, just thought the guy was goofing around and had to be told he was digging a snow cave. Tabor presents this as an example of playfulness and high spirits. It reads very differently to me and just underscores Wilcox's grave inexperience.
Some of Tabor's arguments are also, essentially, straw men. He keeps bringing up other examples of "inexperienced" people who climbed Denali and survived, as if that's proof of something, and also insisting that most of the men were experienced mountain climbers. This isn't a good-faith discussion of the critiques of their experience that I've seen. Denali and other Alaskan mountains are notorious for their uniqueness among North American peaks, so just because someone is experienced in the Lower 48 doesn't mean they're equipped for the glacier landscape, winter camping, high altitudes, or Denali-specific issues lurking on the mountain. That's what the Wilcox expedition is frequently criticized for, but Tabor has no rebuttal for that. Also the experiences of people who lived seems less relevant when discussing people who died and were documented to have made poor decisions that led to their deaths.
Another that left me scratching my head is when he defends Clark's party's delays and compares them to the rescue party that found bodies. Tabor says that they delayed, too, ignoring the fact that they were also highly exhausted from covering ground very fast in a rescue attempt. Clark's party didn't have that excuse and did seem to dawdle for no particular reason.
He also leaves out pertinent information, either entirely or when it is relevant, only to mention it again without acknowledging its role in other events he's discussed.
One of these is when he's bashing Denali expert Brad Washburn for the heated letters he exchanged with Wilcox before climbing. Washburn does come off looking pissy, but despite Tabor's insistence that's all on Washburn, Wilcox also looks particularly childish and incapable of understanding that the amount of PR generated between a genuine first on the mountain and the inane things he thought would be firsts are not comparable. Tabor also omits previous neutral discussions that Wilcox had with Washburn about doing scientific work on the mountain, which was dropped once he was told they didn't have the credentials for it. I can't blame Washburn for concluding that Wilcox was a publicity seeker.
Another major one Tabor never mentions is the fact that the men who died didn't have complete snow shovels, which renders all of his arguments about experience and how long they could have survived on the mountain rather moot. Their rescue party was mortified when they realized the lost climbers abandoned their own shovels in parts since it meant there's no way they could have built snow caves or other protection against the vicious weather.
Tabor also loves to mention how historic the storm was in relation to the climbers but leaves that part out when he's criticizing thwarted rescue efforts.
Actually, he does that a lot--bring people to task for things he gives the climbing party a pass on. One of my favorites is a particularly pompous passage on how even great people can be fallible, an awareness he never applies to his favorites. I snorted so loud while reading that that I woke up my dog.
Just in general, Tabor seems to single out particular sources as favorites and then doesn't interact critically with them while his efforts to critique sources he disagrees with are hampered by terrible logic.
The book's other sins include highly speculative passages wherein Tabor imagines himself in the shoes of the men who died and writes what he thinks happens. In the hands of a better writer and thinker, this may have been compelling, but it ends up just seeming silly and embarrassing. Tabor also insists in his conclusion he avoided doing this in the book intentionally . . . except he does.
He also likes to paint people as villains, in rather strong terms, before backtracking and halfheartedly admitting that maybe they're not. He puts a lot less effort into these attempts to be "fair" than he does in bashing them.
One of his villains, though he interviews him for the book, is the aforementioned Snyder. He and a small group of Colorado climbers were integrated last minute into Wilcox's larger party. The Colorado group were experienced and knew each other well. Wilcox's party largely consisted of mail order participants who were strangers to one another. The integration did not go well and created stress and tension throughout. Tabor loves to emphasize this and blame it all on Snyder. I don't doubt that Snyder was a prickly presence, but ultimately, Wilcox comes across like a very poor leader in these encounters, by turns overbearing and passive. I found myself frequently sympathizing with Snyder because a lot of his complaints did seem valid (it's actually noted in Denali's Howl that Snyder's memory of events aligns far more closely with third-party documentation than anyone else's, including Wilcox's), even if his method of handling it didn't diffuse the tension. Tabor, meanwhile, pays much less attention to how divisive another participant--one who died--was, though he was frequently singled out by survivors as a major disruptor of the peace and harmony of the group. To the point people said he should never have been allowed on the climb to begin with.
Ultimately, I'd 10 to 1 rather have climbed with Snyder or the rescue group (which was also not comprised of strangers) rather than under Wilcox's leadership. Incidentally, Snyder and another surviving climber both point to Walt Taylor, who died on the mountain, as the most natural leader on the expedition.
There are also just flat-out mistakes in this manuscript. One I found particularly egregious is he offhand mentions one of the rescuers was a full-blooded Native American. Further research on my part quickly yielded that the man was part Inuit. Those cultures are distinct and not interchangeable.
After slogging through this book, I'll never read another Tabor book again.
This book is a recap of the disastrous Wilcox expedition to Denali in 1967. I'd previously read and enjoyed Denali's Howl about the same topic, and I'm really glad I read that book first. In that one, the author distributes the blame rather fairly while also acknowledging it was a historic storm that hit.
Tabor, meanwhile, mainly has an agenda--to defend expedition leader Joe Wilcox against any and all criticism. The result is contradictory, hypocritical, hysterical, and at times downright nonsensical. I actually was less sympathetic to Wilcox while reading these arguments in his favor than I was when reading Denali's Howl, in which I felt like Wilcox essentially came off as a good guy who was way in over his head. At the end of the day, I suspect that is still the case, but Tabor does Wilcox no favors with his "defense." With allies like these, who needs enemies?
Ultimately, I agree with the analysis of expedition member Howard Snyder (whom Wilcox likes to bash since he wrote a book critical of Wilcox's leadership) in that Wilcox was not to blame for the historic storm and that anyone trapped in it likely would have died, but that Wilcox--and Jerry Clark, who was leading the smaller group that got trapped and died--made poor decisions in the leadup to the storm that placed them there and could have been avoided.
I'd go farther to also note there's a big difference between arguing that Wilcox receives unfair criticism for his role in the disaster and arguing that he was an excellent leader with superb decision-making skills. I'd agree with the former, but Wilcox argues the latter and does a poor job of it in the process.
I was astonished at how many examples he used to defend Wilcox that ended up painting the exact opposite picture of what he was trying to say.
Wilcox gets particularly indignant in arguing that the Wilcox expedition was not too inexperienced to climb Denali. He also talks about an incident when one of the men who eventually died started digging snow caves during an earlier weather event on the mountain. It's SOP. Wilcox, meanwhile, just thought the guy was goofing around and had to be told he was digging a snow cave. Tabor presents this as an example of playfulness and high spirits. It reads very differently to me and just underscores Wilcox's grave inexperience.
Some of Tabor's arguments are also, essentially, straw men. He keeps bringing up other examples of "inexperienced" people who climbed Denali and survived, as if that's proof of something, and also insisting that most of the men were experienced mountain climbers. This isn't a good-faith discussion of the critiques of their experience that I've seen. Denali and other Alaskan mountains are notorious for their uniqueness among North American peaks, so just because someone is experienced in the Lower 48 doesn't mean they're equipped for the glacier landscape, winter camping, high altitudes, or Denali-specific issues lurking on the mountain. That's what the Wilcox expedition is frequently criticized for, but Tabor has no rebuttal for that. Also the experiences of people who lived seems less relevant when discussing people who died and were documented to have made poor decisions that led to their deaths.
Another that left me scratching my head is when he defends Clark's party's delays and compares them to the rescue party that found bodies. Tabor says that they delayed, too, ignoring the fact that they were also highly exhausted from covering ground very fast in a rescue attempt. Clark's party didn't have that excuse and did seem to dawdle for no particular reason.
He also leaves out pertinent information, either entirely or when it is relevant, only to mention it again without acknowledging its role in other events he's discussed.
One of these is when he's bashing Denali expert Brad Washburn for the heated letters he exchanged with Wilcox before climbing. Washburn does come off looking pissy, but despite Tabor's insistence that's all on Washburn, Wilcox also looks particularly childish and incapable of understanding that the amount of PR generated between a genuine first on the mountain and the inane things he thought would be firsts are not comparable. Tabor also omits previous neutral discussions that Wilcox had with Washburn about doing scientific work on the mountain, which was dropped once he was told they didn't have the credentials for it. I can't blame Washburn for concluding that Wilcox was a publicity seeker.
Another major one Tabor never mentions is the fact that the men who died didn't have complete snow shovels, which renders all of his arguments about experience and how long they could have survived on the mountain rather moot. Their rescue party was mortified when they realized the lost climbers abandoned their own shovels in parts since it meant there's no way they could have built snow caves or other protection against the vicious weather.
Tabor also loves to mention how historic the storm was in relation to the climbers but leaves that part out when he's criticizing thwarted rescue efforts.
Actually, he does that a lot--bring people to task for things he gives the climbing party a pass on. One of my favorites is a particularly pompous passage on how even great people can be fallible, an awareness he never applies to his favorites. I snorted so loud while reading that that I woke up my dog.
Just in general, Tabor seems to single out particular sources as favorites and then doesn't interact critically with them while his efforts to critique sources he disagrees with are hampered by terrible logic.
The book's other sins include highly speculative passages wherein Tabor imagines himself in the shoes of the men who died and writes what he thinks happens. In the hands of a better writer and thinker, this may have been compelling, but it ends up just seeming silly and embarrassing. Tabor also insists in his conclusion he avoided doing this in the book intentionally . . . except he does.
He also likes to paint people as villains, in rather strong terms, before backtracking and halfheartedly admitting that maybe they're not. He puts a lot less effort into these attempts to be "fair" than he does in bashing them.
One of his villains, though he interviews him for the book, is the aforementioned Snyder. He and a small group of Colorado climbers were integrated last minute into Wilcox's larger party. The Colorado group were experienced and knew each other well. Wilcox's party largely consisted of mail order participants who were strangers to one another. The integration did not go well and created stress and tension throughout. Tabor loves to emphasize this and blame it all on Snyder. I don't doubt that Snyder was a prickly presence, but ultimately, Wilcox comes across like a very poor leader in these encounters, by turns overbearing and passive. I found myself frequently sympathizing with Snyder because a lot of his complaints did seem valid (it's actually noted in Denali's Howl that Snyder's memory of events aligns far more closely with third-party documentation than anyone else's, including Wilcox's), even if his method of handling it didn't diffuse the tension. Tabor, meanwhile, pays much less attention to how divisive another participant--one who died--was, though he was frequently singled out by survivors as a major disruptor of the peace and harmony of the group. To the point people said he should never have been allowed on the climb to begin with.
Ultimately, I'd 10 to 1 rather have climbed with Snyder or the rescue group (which was also not comprised of strangers) rather than under Wilcox's leadership. Incidentally, Snyder and another surviving climber both point to Walt Taylor, who died on the mountain, as the most natural leader on the expedition.
There are also just flat-out mistakes in this manuscript. One I found particularly egregious is he offhand mentions one of the rescuers was a full-blooded Native American. Further research on my part quickly yielded that the man was part Inuit. Those cultures are distinct and not interchangeable.
After slogging through this book, I'll never read another Tabor book again.
January 27, 2015
I'd read the other 2 books about this event,
I wasn't sure another book would be worth the time,
but in January, lots of time to read :)
This is actually the best of the 3,
important details the other 2 don't have,
and written without personal bias.
I didn't know Brad Washburn was such a mean, petty, asshole.
His reputation is totally shot now.
Like all writers of high altitude climbing the author misleads
readers about a few things.
From Newton: F=MV
force is equal to mass times velocity.
He talks about 100mph winds,
and yes that's a strong wind,
but when you get up to 17000' or so when
the density of the air is half what it is at sea level,
the force is half as much also.
Like 50mph at sea level
Windchill is more complicated,
but related to density of air
and so less that comparable temp & wind speed at sea level.
As for all those 100 pound packs,
I don't believe it.
I've been on expeditions so I know an 80# pack
on solid ground with a tree behind me for bracing
is about the max one person can lift off the ground,
on snow, forget it.
Making an extra carry is easier than carrying more than 60-70#
photo after p266 shows J Lewis with a big pack on
but he's standing straight up,
I'd think he'd have to strain forward a bit if the
pack was really heavy so to get pack weight
over his legs & feet.
Hall of the Mountain King is very biased,
but that's its attraction.
I found it interesting that except for the summit day
the Colorado climbers did almost no trail breaking.
(about 1-2% of total distance)
They let the other guys do the hard work of making trail,
coasted behind them,
and then not being worn out,
could go to the summit the first good day.
Yet Snyder was always bitching about them being slow.
Why didn't he do some of the hard work lower down?
And he was the only person on the trip to gain weight,
evidence he did as little work as possible till the summit day.
I wasn't sure another book would be worth the time,
but in January, lots of time to read :)
This is actually the best of the 3,
important details the other 2 don't have,
and written without personal bias.
I didn't know Brad Washburn was such a mean, petty, asshole.
His reputation is totally shot now.
Like all writers of high altitude climbing the author misleads
readers about a few things.
From Newton: F=MV
force is equal to mass times velocity.
He talks about 100mph winds,
and yes that's a strong wind,
but when you get up to 17000' or so when
the density of the air is half what it is at sea level,
the force is half as much also.
Like 50mph at sea level
Windchill is more complicated,
but related to density of air
and so less that comparable temp & wind speed at sea level.
As for all those 100 pound packs,
I don't believe it.
I've been on expeditions so I know an 80# pack
on solid ground with a tree behind me for bracing
is about the max one person can lift off the ground,
on snow, forget it.
Making an extra carry is easier than carrying more than 60-70#
photo after p266 shows J Lewis with a big pack on
but he's standing straight up,
I'd think he'd have to strain forward a bit if the
pack was really heavy so to get pack weight
over his legs & feet.
Hall of the Mountain King is very biased,
but that's its attraction.
I found it interesting that except for the summit day
the Colorado climbers did almost no trail breaking.
(about 1-2% of total distance)
They let the other guys do the hard work of making trail,
coasted behind them,
and then not being worn out,
could go to the summit the first good day.
Yet Snyder was always bitching about them being slow.
Why didn't he do some of the hard work lower down?
And he was the only person on the trip to gain weight,
evidence he did as little work as possible till the summit day.
July 9, 2013
I had read Howard Snyder's "Hall of the Mountain King" and Joe Wilcox's "White Winds" years ago. Two totally different books about the same subject. I remember thinking at the time that I'd like to write one book incorporating these two books and fortunately, James Tabor has done just that with "Forever on the Mountain". He looks really hard at ALL the information at hand. He is perhaps more lenient with Washburn and Sheldon than I would be but probably is fairer than I am. I thought that he treated both Snyder and Wilcox justly. Outstanding synopsis of a terrible tragedy.
December 7, 2024
A good analysis —not just a description— of the 1967 Denali tragedy with an impressive amount of reproduced correspondence/other primary sources (both from the time surrounding the accident and from research for the book). Took kind of a circuitous approach to trying to describe the (sometimes unknown) actions and emotions of each climbing party. Also prone to “pigeonholing” the men involved with repeated and one-dimensional adjectives and using that to speculate on their state of mind or decision making.
March 19, 2018
I've been reading the Grand Prize Winners from the Banff Mountain Film Festival. I can't believe this won. The writing was terrible. The book could have been at least 100 pages shorter without all the constant repetitions and comparisons to a forest fire or whatever strange references he makes. I give him credit for the research and taking the time to find the survivors to talk to them, but he should have hired an editor.
It doesn't seem like a mystery to me why 7 climbers died. When the weather is good on the mountain you MOVE either up or down. The fact that 7 people who supposedly know about mountains can't get their sh*t together to climb with the others, including Joe and Howard, the leaders, might be part of the problem. If you're not up to going to the summit, get down to a lower elevation. Two of the climbers declined an invitation to descend with the first summit team so they died too. The other climber Anshel Schiff didn't summit, but didn't stay put either. He went down and lived.
It doesn't seem like a mystery to me why 7 climbers died. When the weather is good on the mountain you MOVE either up or down. The fact that 7 people who supposedly know about mountains can't get their sh*t together to climb with the others, including Joe and Howard, the leaders, might be part of the problem. If you're not up to going to the summit, get down to a lower elevation. Two of the climbers declined an invitation to descend with the first summit team so they died too. The other climber Anshel Schiff didn't summit, but didn't stay put either. He went down and lived.
May 13, 2021
4+ out of 5
In July 1967, twelve strapping young American men -- not unlike their peers facing death in Vietnam at the time -- ascended the grueling and cruel inclines of Denali, aka. Mt. McKinley, the North American continent's highest peak. Most of them made the summit, but only five survived. How they came to meet this fate remains, to this day, a bone of fierce contention. And, it will probably always remain so.
With the dogged determination of detective Lieutenant Columbo or an archeologist trying to solve the mystery of the fate of the dinosaurs, author James M. Tabor has conducted an exhaustive study of what happened during those fateful days when a complex set of factors: pernicious rivalries, quirky leadership, questionable decisions, miscommunications, mistakes, casual accidents, tempers, a clusterfuck lazy rescue effort, bureaucratic ineptitude, and fickle nature may -- or may not have -- led to the deaths of the seven men high on the mountain.
No two mountaineering expeditions are the same, including ones where death occurs. And one might argue that the storms that battered the mountain during that fateful week rendered all other factors -- including the many human actions -- moot. Even so, there is a mystery afoot in the events examined in the book. And one may simply be the human heart. The story of the tragic expedition and its aftermath was fraught with recrimination, finger-pointing, bad blood, guilt, and intense debate. The Denali story is a story of he said, he said, he said, and he said ... ad infinitum.
It is a story of the egos by its participants and leaders and by third parties with their own agendas, but also by biases, loyalties, interpretations, and judgment by others in the mountaineering community, the press, and even readers of various books of the story who've taken sides in the fray. The need to blame, to find fault, to find a final answer to it all, may be -- ultimately -- beside the point, but it remains a very human trait and need.
Tabor has sifted through all this complexity, interviewed participants, read all the accounts -- including weather reports -- and researched this thing up the wazoo. The very doing of this is fascinating, in and of itself.
His interpretations of actions and events are even-handed, scrupulous, and fair to all parties, and his deductions and speculations are based on sound arguments, presentation of the known facts and solid reasoning.
No, I'm not going into the various stories of expedition leaders Joe Wilcox, and Howard Snyder, and the mountaineering legend, Brad Washburn -- a third party who became injected into the ferocity of this firestorm of controversy. Tabor has given us a whole book about it, and you can read it.
Suffice it to say, the bad blood that coursed through this expedition continued through the climb, the deaths and the aftermath. This book is as much as story about how humans cling to agendas and react to divided and undivided loyalties. It's a story about human frailty really. And as that, I found it really poignant and affecting. The book left me deeply moved, and very unsettled. I never require answers, not in literature, or in life. I know better. And so does Tabor.
This is as good a place as any to examine this still-debated event. It's a solid foothold onto a very slippery mountain. An adventure where all hopes led upward, sideways, and downward, to Hell.
EG-KR@KY 2021
In July 1967, twelve strapping young American men -- not unlike their peers facing death in Vietnam at the time -- ascended the grueling and cruel inclines of Denali, aka. Mt. McKinley, the North American continent's highest peak. Most of them made the summit, but only five survived. How they came to meet this fate remains, to this day, a bone of fierce contention. And, it will probably always remain so.
With the dogged determination of detective Lieutenant Columbo or an archeologist trying to solve the mystery of the fate of the dinosaurs, author James M. Tabor has conducted an exhaustive study of what happened during those fateful days when a complex set of factors: pernicious rivalries, quirky leadership, questionable decisions, miscommunications, mistakes, casual accidents, tempers, a clusterfuck lazy rescue effort, bureaucratic ineptitude, and fickle nature may -- or may not have -- led to the deaths of the seven men high on the mountain.
No two mountaineering expeditions are the same, including ones where death occurs. And one might argue that the storms that battered the mountain during that fateful week rendered all other factors -- including the many human actions -- moot. Even so, there is a mystery afoot in the events examined in the book. And one may simply be the human heart. The story of the tragic expedition and its aftermath was fraught with recrimination, finger-pointing, bad blood, guilt, and intense debate. The Denali story is a story of he said, he said, he said, and he said ... ad infinitum.
It is a story of the egos by its participants and leaders and by third parties with their own agendas, but also by biases, loyalties, interpretations, and judgment by others in the mountaineering community, the press, and even readers of various books of the story who've taken sides in the fray. The need to blame, to find fault, to find a final answer to it all, may be -- ultimately -- beside the point, but it remains a very human trait and need.
Tabor has sifted through all this complexity, interviewed participants, read all the accounts -- including weather reports -- and researched this thing up the wazoo. The very doing of this is fascinating, in and of itself.
His interpretations of actions and events are even-handed, scrupulous, and fair to all parties, and his deductions and speculations are based on sound arguments, presentation of the known facts and solid reasoning.
No, I'm not going into the various stories of expedition leaders Joe Wilcox, and Howard Snyder, and the mountaineering legend, Brad Washburn -- a third party who became injected into the ferocity of this firestorm of controversy. Tabor has given us a whole book about it, and you can read it.
Suffice it to say, the bad blood that coursed through this expedition continued through the climb, the deaths and the aftermath. This book is as much as story about how humans cling to agendas and react to divided and undivided loyalties. It's a story about human frailty really. And as that, I found it really poignant and affecting. The book left me deeply moved, and very unsettled. I never require answers, not in literature, or in life. I know better. And so does Tabor.
This is as good a place as any to examine this still-debated event. It's a solid foothold onto a very slippery mountain. An adventure where all hopes led upward, sideways, and downward, to Hell.
EG-KR@KY 2021
November 8, 2023
Forever On the Mountain by James M. Tabor is a non-fiction book about the June/July 1967 Wilcox Expedition, led by Joe Wilcox, which would result in the death of seven out of the twelve members of the expedition after a blizzard hit Denali the day after the seven men reached the coveted summit after weeks of climbing and years of preparation.
This was a compelling and well-written book that explores the events leading up to the expedition, what went horribly wrong, and the search efforts that led to the discovery of three bodies near the summit. Tabor, after interviewing the five survivors forty years later, pieces together what happened on the mountain and theorizes about what might have happened to the men who did not survive, because most were never found, and there were no diaries or logs recovered. He also explains the rifts in the group, the conflict between the leaders, Joe Wilcox and Howard Synder, and how that affected the expedition.
This was a sad book. It shows how badly things can go wrong while mountain climbing, similar to Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air which was a first-hand account of the 1996 Everest Disaster. It was interesting to read about the gear and supplies they took, the acclimation process, and their journey up the mountain. It was also interesting to read about the survivor's thoughts on what happened so many years later.
This was a compelling and well-written book that explores the events leading up to the expedition, what went horribly wrong, and the search efforts that led to the discovery of three bodies near the summit. Tabor, after interviewing the five survivors forty years later, pieces together what happened on the mountain and theorizes about what might have happened to the men who did not survive, because most were never found, and there were no diaries or logs recovered. He also explains the rifts in the group, the conflict between the leaders, Joe Wilcox and Howard Synder, and how that affected the expedition.
This was a sad book. It shows how badly things can go wrong while mountain climbing, similar to Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air which was a first-hand account of the 1996 Everest Disaster. It was interesting to read about the gear and supplies they took, the acclimation process, and their journey up the mountain. It was also interesting to read about the survivor's thoughts on what happened so many years later.
January 2, 2020
"Forever on the Mountain" tells the story of the 1967 climbing disaster on Denali that resulted in 7 deaths. It's an interesting book, but if you're like me and were unfamiliar with the disaster in the first place, this book is probably more than you're looking for. Tabor is attempting to referee the claims of two previous books "The Hall of the Mountain King" and "White Winds" each written by survivors of the climb.
Because Tabor is concerned with acting impartial he ends up providing excessive amounts of evidence and discussing competing claims rather than driving the narrative forward. This even-handed approach, necessary when the other two main books on the subject contradict and indict each other, results in an often plodding pace.
What ultimately brought the book down from 4 stars to 3 stars though was when Tabor attempts to piece together what happened to the 7 who died. No documentary evidence was recovered and most bodies were never found. It's fine to speculate on what likely occurred based on the evidence and what happened in similar situations on other mountains, but Tabor goes far over the line by providing speculative conversations that could have occurred.
It's an interesting, but flawed book. Essential reading for those interested in the disaster or Denali, but not for those just looking for an interesting read.
Because Tabor is concerned with acting impartial he ends up providing excessive amounts of evidence and discussing competing claims rather than driving the narrative forward. This even-handed approach, necessary when the other two main books on the subject contradict and indict each other, results in an often plodding pace.
What ultimately brought the book down from 4 stars to 3 stars though was when Tabor attempts to piece together what happened to the 7 who died. No documentary evidence was recovered and most bodies were never found. It's fine to speculate on what likely occurred based on the evidence and what happened in similar situations on other mountains, but Tabor goes far over the line by providing speculative conversations that could have occurred.
It's an interesting, but flawed book. Essential reading for those interested in the disaster or Denali, but not for those just looking for an interesting read.
March 29, 2024
The author spends a lot of time quoting from other books. I kept wondering why he wrote it if he had nothing new to say. In the last chapter he finally says he wrote it to try and understand why his father drank himself to death after serving in 3 wars. Not sure I see the connection but at least it was an explanation
August 6, 2018
If you’re interested in hearing about this tragedy but prefer accuracy in your nonfiction reading, check out Denali’s Howl by Andy Hall.
April 18, 2024
Cool bit of history, tragic story, long book. I feel like it could have been a little shorter without losing anything. I read a lot of mountaineering books, many of which I would recommend over this, but if you like investigative journalism, this one is pretty good. I'd give it 3.5 stars, but since I can't, it gets the benefit of rounding up.
December 19, 2016
Books about mountain climbing and polar exploration are endlessly fascinating, despite the uniformly bad writing. The type of person who would willingly give huge amounts of time and money to a hobby that involves relentless pain, drudgery and cold, not to mention an enormous risk of death, or of at least a few lost toes, is not the type of person who would enjoy crafting perfect sentences alone in a quiet room. This is why Into Thin Air was a bestseller; Jon Krakauer was a writer who was secondarily a climber and able to write lucidly about something so mysterious to the rest of us.
Forever on the Mountain was not written by Jon Krakauer. I've read a lot of books by climbers and they are usually really badly written, the force of the story they are telling overcomes the dense prose and inability to communicate intangibles. James M. Tabor's writing is much better than average, but that's faint praise--this is not a well-written book. It's much given to hyperbole, a lack of objectivity and, well, banal writing. Oh, but the story is compelling.
In 1967, a group of 12 climbers set off to climb Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. A month later, seven climbers are left dead on the mountain, victims of bureaucratic missteps, poor leadership and a storm that arose unexpectedly and raged for ten days. The most attention is given to the dynamics of the group of climbers and how their 24 year old leader, Joe Wilcox, was held to blame by many for the disaster. Tabor is convinced of Wilcox's innocence, driving the point home relentlessly over the course of the book.
Wilcox was the kind of guy who preferred to be in charge, was quick to take offense and who was a poor leader, but the men who chose to climb with him were all adults and responsible for their own safety. The National Park Service, still smarting from a media drubbing over the cost of a rescue effort just a few months before, refused to begin organizing a rescue at all, depending instead on other groups of climbers already on the mountain. And then there was that storm, which arose without warning and continued for ten full days.
The story transcends the writing while the men are on the mountain. I recommend sticking with this book through the slow and overlong opening, because when the climbers reach Denali, you won't be able to put the book down.
Forever on the Mountain was not written by Jon Krakauer. I've read a lot of books by climbers and they are usually really badly written, the force of the story they are telling overcomes the dense prose and inability to communicate intangibles. James M. Tabor's writing is much better than average, but that's faint praise--this is not a well-written book. It's much given to hyperbole, a lack of objectivity and, well, banal writing. Oh, but the story is compelling.
In 1967, a group of 12 climbers set off to climb Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. A month later, seven climbers are left dead on the mountain, victims of bureaucratic missteps, poor leadership and a storm that arose unexpectedly and raged for ten days. The most attention is given to the dynamics of the group of climbers and how their 24 year old leader, Joe Wilcox, was held to blame by many for the disaster. Tabor is convinced of Wilcox's innocence, driving the point home relentlessly over the course of the book.
Wilcox was the kind of guy who preferred to be in charge, was quick to take offense and who was a poor leader, but the men who chose to climb with him were all adults and responsible for their own safety. The National Park Service, still smarting from a media drubbing over the cost of a rescue effort just a few months before, refused to begin organizing a rescue at all, depending instead on other groups of climbers already on the mountain. And then there was that storm, which arose without warning and continued for ten full days.
The story transcends the writing while the men are on the mountain. I recommend sticking with this book through the slow and overlong opening, because when the climbers reach Denali, you won't be able to put the book down.
December 16, 2015
I'd never read a mountaineering book before I read The Ledge, but this one sounded especially intriguing. It was! Since the author started researching the book, it was essentially a mystery from 1967 to the time of publication, 2007. When I read The Ledge, I vowed never to go mountain climbing. After this book, I even avoid small hills in people's yards.
The research the author did for this book is incredible. He interviewed as many climbers who were still alive as he could (seven remained on Mt. McKinley--now Denali; only two bodies were found). He even convinced the completely reticent and traumatized survivors that he was a safe person to do an interview, and that he was in pursuit of the truth. He read volumes of reports about the incident; he read the climbers' journals, written during the climb. He also interviewed men in the DNR and the rescue teams who were working there at the time of the climb.
He lays to rest, as well as anyone can, what really happened during the ascent and descent. Until this book the disaster had been blamed on several people and agencies. He draws a picture of the ungodly extremes and rapid changes in temperature and wind chill on this mountain, and how the disaster could hardly have been avoided during a 100-year storm no matter what the preparation or expertise of the climbers.
This account is so chilling that I actually had to put on a down vest to read it, because the reality is so precisely described--down to the temperatures and the winds and even what it's like to freeze to death from a "resurrected" person on another climb.
I would highly recommend this book. You won't forget it.
The research the author did for this book is incredible. He interviewed as many climbers who were still alive as he could (seven remained on Mt. McKinley--now Denali; only two bodies were found). He even convinced the completely reticent and traumatized survivors that he was a safe person to do an interview, and that he was in pursuit of the truth. He read volumes of reports about the incident; he read the climbers' journals, written during the climb. He also interviewed men in the DNR and the rescue teams who were working there at the time of the climb.
He lays to rest, as well as anyone can, what really happened during the ascent and descent. Until this book the disaster had been blamed on several people and agencies. He draws a picture of the ungodly extremes and rapid changes in temperature and wind chill on this mountain, and how the disaster could hardly have been avoided during a 100-year storm no matter what the preparation or expertise of the climbers.
This account is so chilling that I actually had to put on a down vest to read it, because the reality is so precisely described--down to the temperatures and the winds and even what it's like to freeze to death from a "resurrected" person on another climb.
I would highly recommend this book. You won't forget it.
November 20, 2014
In 1973 a co-worker recommended the book "The Hall of the Mountain King: The True Story of a Tragic Climb" by Howard Snyder, one of the climbers. It was a stunning story and led me to a lifetime of reading about mountain climbing disasters. Different than the usual mountain climbing books that preceded it, Snyder's book concentrated on the human dynamics of the climb rather than the technical aspects, laying blame for the disaster clearly on expedition leader Joe Wilcox. It was well written and no one doubted the veracity of the story. Now, however, 40 years after the "fact", James Tabor writes a truly unbiased book about the climb: "Forever on the mountain: The truth behind one of mountaineering's most controversial and mysterious disasters". Joe Wilcox was NOT to blame. Howard Snyder was NOT to blame. The worst storm to ever hit Mt. McKinley/Denali was to blame.
Tabor did an impressive amount of research in writing this book. He interviewed the surviving members of the expedition and, in a truly impressive chapter, he updates their lives in detail and records their thoughts about the expedition and how it affected their lives.
Tabor did an impressive amount of research in writing this book. He interviewed the surviving members of the expedition and, in a truly impressive chapter, he updates their lives in detail and records their thoughts about the expedition and how it affected their lives.
April 26, 2015
Tabor claims to have access to new information about the event, but that isn't really evident in the book. All that is new is Tabor's somewhat reckless comfort in reporting the actions, motivations and thoughts of actors, despite the fact that they are wholly fabricated from his imagination. Particularly irksome is his willingness to propose his theory as truth, and then use pop psychology to 'prove' what happened and why it happens. He also seems particularly obsessed with rehabilitating Wilcox and placing all blame at the feet of the National Park Service. While WIlcox has probably been ill-used by history, he's hardly blameless, and the desire to place the blame for the result on people who were not on the mountain betray's the authors ignorance of what can and can't be done at high altitude during a storm. Certainly the NPS could have done far better, and hopefully learned some lessons, but it is extremely unlikely that actions by anyone not on Denali could have any impact on the course of events.
Read Denali's Howl, instead. A far better treatment, even if it doesn't criticize the Park Service.
Read Denali's Howl, instead. A far better treatment, even if it doesn't criticize the Park Service.
May 14, 2016
The story of 12 men attempting to summit Denali and only five surviving is, by its nature, an intriguing story. The author gets one of his three stars for picking a compelling topic. He gets the other two stars for having good vocabulary, narrating a story well, and clearly doing his research. I'd probably give 2.5 stars if GR allowed.
Here's why he doesn't get five stars:
1) excessive hypothetical conversations and reenactments of the missing seven men, when no journals have ever been recovered from them; it's like one of those real life murder stories on cable where they reenact with corny actors and dialogue; all that research is great but don't cloud it with your imagination.
2) far too many unnecessary quotes and references, like naming Einstein who said ... Or Mohammed Ali... It was like a student padding a paper when he doesn't have enough original material -- except he had plenty already.
3) he starts the critique before he gets us familiar with the story; this is the most important one. We needed to get pulled into the story before he started talking about all the things that were going wrong.
It doesn't even come close to Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air.
Here's why he doesn't get five stars:
1) excessive hypothetical conversations and reenactments of the missing seven men, when no journals have ever been recovered from them; it's like one of those real life murder stories on cable where they reenact with corny actors and dialogue; all that research is great but don't cloud it with your imagination.
2) far too many unnecessary quotes and references, like naming Einstein who said ... Or Mohammed Ali... It was like a student padding a paper when he doesn't have enough original material -- except he had plenty already.
3) he starts the critique before he gets us familiar with the story; this is the most important one. We needed to get pulled into the story before he started talking about all the things that were going wrong.
It doesn't even come close to Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air.
February 11, 2014
The third book I've read about climbing Mt. McKinley, this one was much harder to put down than the others.
Twelve men, two different teams, were united by fate to climb North America's tallest mountain in 1967. The teams never merged into one cohesive unit. Accordingly, there was much discord among the members of these two teams.
Most of the men reached the summit of Mt. McKinley, but on two different days. When the second team descended, the worst storm in over 30 years hit the mountain with full fury. There were 7 men in the second team, all of which perished in the storm.
Most of the blame fell on one man, Joe Wilcox, the leader of the team.
The author, James M. Tabor, goes into incredible detail to explain with equally incredible exactness the many and various causes of the tragedy.
Although I knew from the beginning that the 7 had perished, reading the book made me feel like they were my friends and I found myself hoping that they had, indeed, survived the horrendous storm and would be found by the rescue team.
Twelve men, two different teams, were united by fate to climb North America's tallest mountain in 1967. The teams never merged into one cohesive unit. Accordingly, there was much discord among the members of these two teams.
Most of the men reached the summit of Mt. McKinley, but on two different days. When the second team descended, the worst storm in over 30 years hit the mountain with full fury. There were 7 men in the second team, all of which perished in the storm.
Most of the blame fell on one man, Joe Wilcox, the leader of the team.
The author, James M. Tabor, goes into incredible detail to explain with equally incredible exactness the many and various causes of the tragedy.
Although I knew from the beginning that the 7 had perished, reading the book made me feel like they were my friends and I found myself hoping that they had, indeed, survived the horrendous storm and would be found by the rescue team.
March 30, 2018
Eh, I wasn't too impressed by this book. Tabor has a somewhat schlocky style and I didn't get a real sense of mountaineering expertise from him. Some of the research is outdated (somatypes, super-alphas, etc) and his agenda is so clear that it makes it hard to trust him. He has a habit of putting words into people's mouths. He also keeps going on strange sidetracks, mentioning the Mann Gulch fire several times and inserting himself into a lot of the anecdotes.
He does a decent job pulling together the tale of the expedition's climb, but this book falls more and more apart as he moves away from the climb and towards his thesis -- that the NPS is to blame for the 7 deaths. Regardless of whether you agree with his conclusions or not (I did not, just as full disclosure), the structuring, research, and writing in this book are just not very well done.
He does a decent job pulling together the tale of the expedition's climb, but this book falls more and more apart as he moves away from the climb and towards his thesis -- that the NPS is to blame for the 7 deaths. Regardless of whether you agree with his conclusions or not (I did not, just as full disclosure), the structuring, research, and writing in this book are just not very well done.
July 27, 2012
Interesting story of the 1967 Wilcox Expedition of Denali, where seven people died near the summit. I enjoyed reading about the expedition, but I found Tabor's analysis to be a little too defensive of expedition leader Joe Wilcox. While the expedition was certainly endangered by the extremely bad weather, the national park service's slow reaction to the tragedy and a feud with legendary mountaineer Brad Washburn, Tabor underestimates the problems created by Wilcox's lack of leadership. The two teams that merged into one were not cohesive from the day they drove up to Denali and it impacted everything from how gear made it up the mountain to the fatal decision to pass up a good weather day for a trip to the summit. Overall, the book is an interesting look at the tragedy, however.
July 8, 2017
I'm not sure why I am attracted to strength-enduring, tragic outcome for some stories, but I apparently am. I have read several books about trips up Mt. Everest, but never Mt McKinley. This book was very interesting to read. Though other books have been written about this 1967 tragedy, (including by some survivors), this author really goes in depth to find out what really happened. There are a few parts that are a little long in detail (like preparing for the trip, and the afterword with who to blame, etc.), but overall I found this book interesting for it's challenges against the odds in people thrown together that don't care for each other. I appreciated the challenges that this expedition faced, and most were not from the mountain itself. Good read for me.
March 17, 2014
This was a very compelling story about a terrible mountaineering disaster but I was definitely not sucked into it like I was hoping. The author spends innumerable pages going into blame and motivation and speculation. The same ideas kept repeating over and again. It got old really fast. Sometimes a book's story can rise above those problems-- this was not the book. This was like a boring version of Into Thin Air.
September 11, 2011
Wow - this book is great! It is about the ill-fated 1967 mountain climb on Denali - and all the things that went wrong. You will end up with a real appreciation of the mountain and its power over mere humans. You will also learn the importance of proper planning and preparation. I love mountaineering books anyway and this was one of the best.
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