The Mountain of My Fear / Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative

by David Roberts, Jon Krakauer (Foreword by)

Describes the tragedies, frustrations, and triumphs of two mountain climbing expeditions in Alaska.

Genres: Adventure, Mountaineering, Nonfiction, Memoir, Climbing, Outdoors, Biography

368 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1968

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
See this thread for more information.

David Roberts is the award-winning author of twenty-nine books about mountaineering, exploration, and anthropology. His most recent publication, Alone on the Wall, was written with world-class rock climber Alex Honnold, whose historic feats were featured in the film Free Solo.

Reviews

[Athena · Rating 5 out of 5]

How rare to find a true climber and explorer who can actually write! The two novel pairing reissued by the Mountaineers in single book, contrasts David Roberts’s writing styles in bold ways. Both were engaging and enthralling. However, one is a rapid recounting of a successful summit with a tragic ending, with less cerebral analysis, yet with delightful prose. You feel every bit of fear and emotion he feels - like you are dangling on the edge of the mountain with him. The other book is a more thoughtful, digested work of the tremendous difficulties of a long expedition and a love/hate relationship with the only other person with him for 42 days. Roberts’s musings are so brutally honest with emotion, disappointment and frustration. He captures the difficulty with his climbing partner vividly. The fear, exhaustion, exasperation and grief were palpable in these books. While many climbing books have a thrilling tale to recount, few are also brilliantly written.

[Jan vanTilburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic! Journeys into the soul of maintainering.

The Mountain of my Fear is great.
In wonderfull detail the climb is described.
Exciting to read. The maps and pictures made it very insightfull and immersive. And what makes this such a good story are the emotional and philosophical musings about climbing and life and death. Is it worth the risks?
More about that later.

The Deborah expedition took place a year before the Huntington climb (the Mountain of my Fear). I decided to read them in that order too.
I also thought it would give me more appreciation of the climb the following year, with the same dude: Don Jensen and two others, Matt Hale and Ed Bernd.

So Deborah first. A Wilderness Narrative. 4*

Two man, a mountain, glaciers, crevasses, adverse weather, tempers and a tent. An exercise in friendship?
A bit of depressing story.

I was amazed that the Wickersham Wall climb (1963), the north face of Denali (20,310ft) (14,000 vertical ft!, never climbed before) was just glossed over as; “ a difficult climb and a tiring trip [..] the adventure had been closer to a lark than an ordeal.” Yet till now (2022) it has supposedly never been repeated! Roberts would later say that they were naive and did not really appreciated the dangers of this route with avalanges and rockfall. It would have made a good story all by itself!

Back to Deborah (12,339ft, steep on all sides, June 18 - July 29, 1964. East Ridge)
Really, why did they even go together? Even before the trip they argued and on the way they continued. p47: “[..]we sat in silent hostility for hours. [..] It was the first hint of what the bad moments of the expedition itself would be like.”
Unpleasant character traits are revealed. Roberts describes and inpatient streak in himself.
What was I in for? Reading about this? For sure something different from all glorious expeditions where everyone gets along. (Read Annapurna from Herzog for instance) We know that’s not true and here it is actually addressed.

What follows is an seemingly honest narrative about their trip. Emotions are genuinly described. Climbing decisions explained. Pitches lived through.

The journey up Deborah is vividly narrated. The weather is awfull. They are more in their tent than actual climbing.
There is a lot of talk about food. With the amount of energy they use, they need a lot. It seems never enough.
It’s arduous. Carrying ones own supplies requieres constant back and forwards trips.
Going up a glacier, up the mountain and going back over glaciers.

I won’t go into details. It’s fun to explore them yourself when reading. It is a good story. About endurance, how to cope with cold, emotions, pitches (one rope lengh). In short what to expect on a 42 days trip up a mountain far from civilization.

At the end they feel a sense of loss. “a vague sorrow”. They would have to adjust to society again.


The Mountain of my Fear. 5*

As said: a superb story.

Huntington; The second ascent, 1965, via the West Face/West Rib.
To give it perspective, Wikipedia mentions as follows: “While overshadowed in absolute elevation by Denali, Huntington is a steeper peak: in almost every direction, faces drop over 5,000 feet (1,520 m) in about a mile (1.6 km). Even its easiest route presents significantly more technical challenge than the standard route on Denali, and it is a favorite peak for high-standard technical climbers.”

Roberts is very narrow focused, p.232; not to climb at all would be very disappointing: “Hence the mountains in a sense, could mean more to me than people could.”
(later in life Roberts would be more nuanced)

The appeal of climbing for Roberts, p233: “What can be more appalling than the sovereign power of nature directed by no mind, spirited by no will, indifferent, dwarfing? Vision of malignity can equal the darkness of that of a universe that is running down, of a cosmos that neither orders nor obeys man’s yearnings, but blindly collapses toward a final motionlesness?” … “Death, our only glimpse of that entropic end, had its seductive fascination. Hence, the risk of climbing stir and motivate us, …”

p.237: “Mountains might end in summits, but there was no limit to the mountaineer’s urge.”

p.258. About the inability to capture mointaineering experience: “A man’s best moments seem to go by before he notices them; and he spends a large part of his life reaching back for them,”

p.258, about team dynamics: “a largely internal one, whose conflict stems from the stress between private desire and co-operative skill that climbing imposes.”

p.259: “No one has explained the basic truth of climbing, the interplay beneath its alternating fear and hope. What goes on […] is profound.”

p.281, about the reason of climbing: “… it would be nice to believe that climbing could somehow be a search for truth as well as for a summit. Or, if one assumes that life itself is that kind of search, it would be nice to believe that climbing could actually find something. It would somehow justify the effort.”
p.282: “Men, among them mountaineers, have claimed that the only discovery one can make climbing is that of oneself. But there must be easier ways;…” [..] And Roberts has come down comprehending no better who he is or why he climbed when he set out and still been happy. He concludes that climbing is like life for him, by trying to explain it, perhaps we betray it.

So, on to the actual climb of Huntington.
Pitch by pitch they climb up. Weather moves in and they have to wait. Supplies are painstakingly hauled up to establish higher camps. At times Roberts becomes euphoric. He becomes his senses. Philosophical musings about man’s place in the universe, flash by.
p.312: “The trouble with the deep end of awareness, the honest vision of a soundless everywhere in which there is no up and down, is that everything human shrinks to nothingness before it.”
And, “Climbing is defined by a purposed completion, the summit; yet the best of it is never that final victory, for after that there is only the descent. The best moments lurk in the tension just before success.”
And all the while they climb higher.

Route finding is meticulously described. Options given. Decisions explained. It’s hard going. Vertigo! Not for the faint of heart!
And one has to be in amazing shape.

The summit push gives for exciting reading! We know the outcome. But still. I read anxiously on. The summit is almost an anticlimax. They are too tired. They rest. Robers contemplates his feelings and wonders how the others felt.
p.334: “For each of us, the high place we had finally reached culminated ambitions and secret desires we could scarcely have articulated had we wanted to.”
And then they still have to go down. A dangerous endeavor. A last glance back. And there they go…

We all know what happened on the descent. Tragedy strikes. And the inevitable question arises. Is it worth the risks?
Thirty-one days to get to the summit! Via the treacherous west face. A dangerous route. Descending pitches on which fixed ropes have been left is usually routine.

Roberts finds no solace in the usual thoughts. Or maybe this one, p.357; “some image of beauty [..], as if his fall without a sound had owned, for an instant, a freedom no one ever knew in life.”
But in the end he admits that they “had found no answers to life: perhaps only the room in which to look for them.”

And that was it. A triumph, but at great costs.

A picture of the four who did this climb shows how young they were. In their early twenties. Doing this kind of stuff requires a recklessness that belongs to youth. No worries about tomorrow or loved ones. An almost mindless obsession to get to the top!

In 2007 he wrote about the expedition: “
Twenty-two years old, we were at the zenith of our mountaineering fanaticism, so it seemed logical to invite two younger Harvard students—Matt Hale and Ed Bernd—who had no expedition experience at all. Matt had proved his mettle in ranges in the Lower 48, but on Huntington Ed was really in over his head. That knowledge has haunted me for the last forty-two years.”

In an interview with Outside (2021) he says he would have “..willingly give my life for the quest for a summit. Youthful obsession is fanatic, and it holds life cheap. But in one’s later years, there’s nothing quite so deeply involving.” So on the question if climbing is worth the risk he answered at a younger age with a resounding “Yes”, but realizing what it does to ones loved ones he would later in life answer with a “Maybe”.

Roberts died at age 78 on August 20, 2021.

A compelling read. A must for mountain aficionados!

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book here on Good reads (and for the record The Mountaineers Press packed this book for shipment like I paid money for it,wrapped in tissue and a strong padded envelope so it would get here in prefect condition, thanks!)

I enjoyed this book and can see why it's thought a classic. I did a good job of catching the emotions of being there and the exhaustion and stress as well as the drive to do it in the first place.
The adventure didn't even wait for the mountains with the author and his partner's cross country trip towards Alaska taking a strange turn as they found themselves getting chased around Minneapolis by two enraged men pulling a boat.
Of course like many of these kinds of books the real story starts on the mountain, where body and mind and drive are put to the test.
Two books in one, printed in a nice paperback edition.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only are these two extremely well-written and riveting stories, but they also demonstrate the evolution of the author and his style. Deborah is an example of flowery prose while The Mountain of My Fear seem like something Strunk and White would pen. Both are great reads - if only all climbers wrote so well.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE book, THE seminal book on mountaineering which I read at the onset of my follies in the mountains. Crazy...

[P.S. Winn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two great stories of adventure that seem unbelievable but are true stories. This author has several amazing books that look into not only adventure but some that take the journey a step further by adding history to the narrative.

[Bill Woodburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dave Roberts is one of the best mountaineering authors, and these accounts of his early climbs in Alaska are fascinating.

[Octoberbear · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Audiobook) A compilation of two books -- Deborah was about a failed attempt on Mt. Deborah, and the Mountain of My Fear is a climb on Mt. Huntington, with two additional members. I rated the book 2 stars when I was in the middle of reading Deborah, but the writing got better and better in the second book to urge me to a 5 star.

What is unusual about this book amongst mountaineering writings is its deep, subtle, and complex reflections and feelings that David Roberts managed to pin down. In this book, I read the best paragraphs narrating a mountain climber's fear, frustration, motivation, secret desires, connections with the mundane, and the most convoluted thoughts about one's relations with the universe and unknown. It keeps getting deeper and deeper, alongside of David's desires to know, to feel, to really understand, what humans feel while climbing mountains. Many paragraphs resonated with me. Two spots hit me really hard, one about richness of inner life and loneliness in Chapter 4, and another about feelings on the summit of Huntington:

Chapter 4:

”Of course, Matt’s thought at the moment were different. He seemed understandably subdued. To suddenly find oneself in a place like this is bound to be chastening. Matt probably felt neither the sense of having cheated, nor the sense of having missed anything. But I couldn’t really know what he was thinking. And I wanted to then. I could remember my first sight of McKinley. That was from a road. I could try to empathize with him. But he was difficult to interpret. He couldn’t explain the strange mixture of sensations he must have felt then. Even if he had wanted to. Perhaps he didn’t. But what I write now, must to some extent, stand for all four of us.

Climbing together, which forces men close to each other physically and sometimes spiritually still can’t overcome the irreducible barrier of their separate selves. Nor can writing ultimate translate the experience. So in words, all may ultimately get through is some third-hand filtration of life that was once lived. A man’s best moments seem to go by before he noticed them. And he spends the large part of his life reaching back for that, like a runner for the baton that would never come. In disappointment he grows nostalgic. And the nostalgia inevitably blurs the memory of the immediate thrills, which simply because it had to be instantaneous, could not have lasted. Now our whole expedition has paste. Now that I sit in a warm room with pencil and a blank paper before me instead of a rock and snow. I feel our vanished moments forever lost. I want to read their reminisce and feelings I’ve never felt before. especially not while the moments have lived. The frustration of it reminds me too, how I felt sitting on my pack on June 29, waiting for the plane wanting to know what Matt was thinking.

People placed in any isolation even together, lose something in their humanity. And a style of isolation so complete as mountaineering begs for someone to understand it, to convey it as it is not as the melodrama of death and courages that it seemed to to resemble. Courage plays a smaller part then the tension and the dependence that being alone together in dangerous place forces on men. The drama is largely an internal one, whose conflicts from the stress between private desire and cooperative skills that climbing imposes. Perhaps that is why mountaineers are usually inarticulate. Everything having to do with climbing seems to stifle the soul’s urge to communicate. Part of the strange sorrow I felt then on a glacier must have a reason from dilemma no more peculiar to me than to anyone, of being born alone, with the desire not to be. If the mind can escape itself a little better than the body can, still something goes on between being men and the mountains, something lost in the static rigor of reporting it.”


Chapter 7:

“The summit itself was a cornice, so we had to remain a few feet below it. But our heads stood higher. It was 3:30am, we’ve been going for 16 hours without rest. Now, we are too tired even to exult. The sun has just risen in the northeast. One hundred thirty miles away, we could see Deborah only a shadow in the sky. As Don looked at it I said:”This makes up for a lot.” He knoded. There was no-one to tell about it. There was perhaps nothing to tell. All the world we could see lay motionless in the mute splendor of sunrise. Nothing stirred; only we lived. Even the wind had forgotten us. Had we been able to hear a bird calling from some pine tree, or sheep in some valley. The summit’s stillness would have been familiar. Now it was different. Perfect. It was as if the world had held its breath for us. Yet, we were so tired. The summit meant first of all, a place to rest. We sat down just beneath the top. Ate a little of our lunch and had a few sips of water. Ed had brought a few firecrackers, all the way up. Now he wanted to set one off. But we were afraid that it would knock the cornices loose. There were so little to do, nothing we really had the energy for, no gesture appropriate for what we felt we had accomplished. Only a numb happiness. Almost a languor. We photographed each other and the views, trying, even as we took the pictures, to impress the side of our memories more than our cameras could on the film. If only this moment could last, I thought. If no longer than we do. But I knew even then that we would forget. Someday I should remember should be the memories themselves, rehearsed like an archaic dance. But I should stare at the pictures and try to get back inside them, reaching out to something that had slipped out of my hands, and spilled in the darkness of the past. And that someday I might be so old that all that might pierce my seniority would be the vague hardpan of something lost, inexplicably sacred, maybe not even the name Huntington meaning anything to me, nor the names of the three friends. But only the precious sweetness leaving its faint taste, mingled with the bitter ones of dying. And that there were only four of us. Four is not many. And that surely, within 80 years, and maybe within five, for climbing is dangerous, we would all be dead. The last of our death, closing the legacy that even the mountain itself could forever attest to. We sat near the summit, already beginning to feel the cold. I got up and walked a little bit beyond, still roped. Down the top of the east ridge, which someday men would also climb. From there I could see the underside of the summit cornice, which we had judge right not to step exactly on top...

I wanted to know how the others felt but couldn’t. Trying to talk about it now would have seemed profane. If there is anything we shared, it was the sudden sense of quiet and rest. For each of us, the high place we had finally reached culminated ambitions and secret desires we could scarcely have articulated had we wanted to. And the chances are, our various dreams were different. If we had been able to know each others, perhaps we could not have worked so well together. Perhaps we could have recognized in our partnership the vague threats of ambition, like boats through a fog, the unrealizable desires that drove us beyond anything we could achieve, that drove us in the face of danger, our unanswerable complaints against the universe, that we die, that we have so little power, that we are locked apart, that we do not know. So perhaps the best things that happened on the summit were what we could see happening, not anything beneath. Perhaps it was important for Don to watch Matt to walk across the top of the east ridge, for Matt to see Ed stand with a cigarette in his mouth, staring at the sun, for me to notice how Matt sat, eating only half of his candy bar, for Ed to Insist Don in changing to black and white films. No one else could see these things. No one else could even ask whether or not these were important. Perhaps it were all that happened.”

[Marilyn Yung]

This is an awesome book that continued to satisfy my penchant for mountaineering literature PLUS the foreword is by one of my all-time favorite writers Jon Krakauer, so there you go. I read Deborah first and then Mountain of My Fear. Roberts is an excellent storyteller. Some other climbing books I've read aren't written that well. They drag, get bogged down in alpinist technicalities, or feel self-congratulatory, but David Roberts doesn't take that route. With these two stories, he conveys two unforgettable experiences in Alaska that test the friendships of Roberts and his fellow climbers. I don't want to spoil either of these tales, so I'll stop there. If you like mountaineering lit, you should add this to your reading list. I had never heard of it or David Roberts until reading one of Krakauer's essays in his new anthology, Classic Krakauer: Essays on Wilderness and Risk. Glad I stumbled upon these two stories that, for me, have provided a fresh --and yet sobering-- look at climbing.

[David Yohalem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Deborah in the early 1970s when I owned a Jensen tent (it doesn't flap, it hums!) around the time I heard of Jensen's death (bicycle accident) in Scotland. It impressed me mightily. I re-read the Mountaineers volume, which included the successful second ascent of Huntington and subsequent shocking death of one of Roberts' partners (one hopes this isn't a spoiler.) Roberts' self-awareness is scathing and his articulate use of language is overwhelmingly evocative of both the joys and miseries of alpine climbing (I've climbed in Antarctica, the Karokoram, the Brooks Range, the Pyrenees and the Alps.) True, one finds more joy in Teray's Conquistadors of the Useless but one finds more of the frequently alarming details of life on mountains here.

Yesterday I read of DR's death and today I am made sad by the news.

[Jean Dupenloup · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two of David Roberts’s best adventure memoirs rolled into one enthralling book.

Mr. Roberts’ exploits on Mounts Huntington and Deborah are engaging in the extreme.

To read “the dean of American climbing lit” is to follow him to his favored realm of Alaskan expedition climbing, where ski-planes deposit you on massive and remote glaciers, monstrous storms pin you in camp for days, and where youth, boldness, and tragedy are the currency of adventure.

Two tales of victory and defeat, triumph and loss. As introspective as they come, Roberts’ musings are more cerebral and honest than perhaps any others’ in the climbing community.

A seminal work.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two classics of mountaineering by an accomplished wilderness mountaineer and excellent writer.
Deborah covers his unsuccessful climb with his best friend on Mt. Deborah in Alaska and how their relationship deteriorated over the climb. Mountain of My Fear is about a successful climb of Mt. Huntington (also in Alaska) and the death of one of their party.

[Dacky2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the top 3 climbing books ever written. Ever. The honesty of Roberts writing is shocking. Most people are not even that honest with themselves, to say little of their readers. Easy for the non climber to understand, and the climbers who read this book will catch a lot between the lines. I get a chill everytime I open this book to re-read it.

[Zardoz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without doubt the finest mountaineering account that I've ever read. Roberts can write which is something that a lot of climbers can't do well.
This book combines two different expeditions in Alaska one is successful and one is not. Robert's descriptions are very vivid and pull you back in time to the 60's when Alaskian peaks were unclimbed.

[Stephen Flanagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read the original "Mountain of my Fear." Excellent narrative of the very real danger of death amidst the glory of mountaineering. This story has stuck throughout my life and would be worth a second read.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most mountaineering books are just an account of what happened. This is much more. Exploring the whys (why it went right, why it went wrong, why do it at all) it so much more interesting. Even if, typical of all the mountaineering books I have read, someone dies at the end.

[James Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn good. There is always the question, "Why do climbers climb." There are no easy answers. Yet these stories get to that question in engrossing narratives, conjecture, and insights I haven't seen in many other books I have read on the subject.

[Moberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great mountaineering adventure.

[Shuheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating for Deborah. It was just meh...a bit of a let down after reading his "The Mountain of My Fear".

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two mountaineering classics written in the 60s about climbs in Alaska, when the author was a Harvard undergraduate. (The author went on to an outstanding climbing career, bagging many firsts, and a successful writing life, mostly about climbing and adventuring, but also about such things as explorers. In fact, it was his book published this year about the Escalante expedition that brought him to my attention.) The climbs took place in back-to-back summers, Mt. Deborah first, then Mt. Huntington. Both were gruelling and dangerous, the first with a team of two only, the second with a team of 4, one of whom perished on the mountain. Neither account really solved the mystery for me of what the appeal of mountaineering is. To spend a month or two in subzero temperatures, with only the food and supplies you can carry to the base camps and forward camps, living in tents and subject to the most horrendous weather. It’s impossible to stay warm and dry or to be well rested and fed. Also, the two climbers in Deborah (all the climbers were undergrads, so boys in their early 20s), good friends at Harvard, bickered nonstop during their months on the Deborah attempt. Every single thing about each other got on their nerves (the way one chewed a candy bar) and they agreed about virtually nothing. The first account is a fairly dry, straightforward narrative about what happened, but the second, in addition to being a detailed account of the expedition, is a flood of almost metaphysical musings about the why and other big questions, man’s place in the universe and such. Darn interesting stuff, but I’m still shaking my head about what drives them to do it.

[Eugene Miya · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my climbing partners did a winter ascent of the West face of Deborah. Winter is merely a nominal word as it was early March when there was a little sunlight. David Roberts was not successful on Deborah, so his account was about spending a lot of time with his climbing buddy Don Jensen. That's why this was a wilderness narrative.

This edition is actually 2 separate books. Fear was about Roberts and Jensen's successful ascent of Mt Huntington. Theirs was not without loss of one of their teammates. My partner Keith was not successful on a different Huntington route (a very beautiful mountain).

Neither of these mountains is anywhere near at tall as Denali. Armchair types might be bored of these ascents. These guys were fortunate enough in a younger era of Alaskan climbing. These were lighter weight expeditions derived from the Harvard Mountaineering Club (a review of one of Roberts books called Roberts arrogant).

I enjoyed Fear with its mixed climbing and the aid climbing they had to do on the Nose overhang. Deborah was a little harder to wrap one's thought about (the Alaska Range). Non-climbers who focus on the elevation might not appreciate these books. Read Art Davidson's Minus 148 Degrees: The First Winter Ascent of Mount McKinley, instead.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of these books is captivating. In Mountain of My Fear you can hear the avalanches roaring down the chutes, you can sense the danger of the cornice ridge that made the summit so elusive.

Deborah is a wonderful epic adventure as the climbers first had to trek to the base of the climb and then pioneer a route up a head-wall and then along an impossible cornice ridge.

Both of these books are outstanding and I can't recommend them enough.

[Nik W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Roberts was able to capture his experiences so well that Deborah was almost an unenjoyable read. His decision for The Mountain of My Fear to come second was wise, though. The triumphant and tragic story was beautifully written. 3 stars for Deborah and 5 for The Mountain of My Fear.

[Daniel Merrick]

A true mountaineering classic recounting the author's personal adventures and tragedy.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved Deborah. Liked Mtn of my Fear but the voice of Deborah is gripping.

[Jacob Starner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mountain of my Fear was excellent. Deborah didn't need to be written.

[Rose Von · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve ever read. The writing is beautiful and the descriptions of life in the mountains is put so perfectly.

[Marius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping, understated

[Bryce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deborah was fantastic, the mountain of my fear was not.

[Oliver Harner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The all too real tragedy of mountaineering