What do you think?
Rate this book
I'll Climb Mount Everest Alone: The Story of Maurice Wilson
This is a sad, strange and touchingly heroic book. It tells of a mad, misguided adventure: one man's attempt to conquer Mount Everest.
Maurice Wilson belonged to the 'lost generation'. He fought in the First World War, winning the Military Cross, but found the transition to civilian life difficult. He led a restless, rootless life and suffered ill-health. This changed mysteriously in 1932 when through, it would seem, a combination of prayer and fasting he cured himself. His Mount Everest ambitions started to take shape. They could not have been more ambitious. His odyssey was to begin in Britain. He bought himself an airplane. He couldn't fly, was a poor student, but finally learnt the rudiments. Despite all the odds, and much official obstruction, he managed to fly to India. More obstacles followed, but on 21 March, 1934 Maurice Wilson and three Sherpas slipped out of Darjeeling disguises as Buddhist monks. Wilson's first attempt on Mount Everest was solo. It failed. He tried again this time with the three Sherpas. They made better progress initially. From the base camp, Wilson made two more attempts on the final ascent. A year later Eric Shipton's reconnaissance party found his body at the approaches to the North Col. They also found his diary: the final entry read, 'Off again, gorgeous day.' The diary provides an astonishing record of persistence, courage, and a faith that never wavered in the face of appalling hardship and adversity.
Although this is a chronicle of failure, the achievement can still be marvelled at. Here was a man with no flying or mountaineering experience whatsoever who managed to fly from Britain to India and then nearly conquers Mount Everest : there are even those who speculate he might have done so but even without that fanciful embellishment it is an extraordinary story.
This book, first published in 1957, has been out of print for a very long time. Its renewed availability will delight not just those interested in mountaineering but also connoisseurs of adventure stories.
Maurice Wilson belonged to the 'lost generation'. He fought in the First World War, winning the Military Cross, but found the transition to civilian life difficult. He led a restless, rootless life and suffered ill-health. This changed mysteriously in 1932 when through, it would seem, a combination of prayer and fasting he cured himself. His Mount Everest ambitions started to take shape. They could not have been more ambitious. His odyssey was to begin in Britain. He bought himself an airplane. He couldn't fly, was a poor student, but finally learnt the rudiments. Despite all the odds, and much official obstruction, he managed to fly to India. More obstacles followed, but on 21 March, 1934 Maurice Wilson and three Sherpas slipped out of Darjeeling disguises as Buddhist monks. Wilson's first attempt on Mount Everest was solo. It failed. He tried again this time with the three Sherpas. They made better progress initially. From the base camp, Wilson made two more attempts on the final ascent. A year later Eric Shipton's reconnaissance party found his body at the approaches to the North Col. They also found his diary: the final entry read, 'Off again, gorgeous day.' The diary provides an astonishing record of persistence, courage, and a faith that never wavered in the face of appalling hardship and adversity.
Although this is a chronicle of failure, the achievement can still be marvelled at. Here was a man with no flying or mountaineering experience whatsoever who managed to fly from Britain to India and then nearly conquers Mount Everest : there are even those who speculate he might have done so but even without that fanciful embellishment it is an extraordinary story.
This book, first published in 1957, has been out of print for a very long time. Its renewed availability will delight not just those interested in mountaineering but also connoisseurs of adventure stories.
174 pages, Paperback
First published May 20, 2010
4 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 17, 2018
It's a pity there isn't more published material about Maurice Wilson, although I can see why - in Everest history he's not much more than a weird footnote and since he wasn't a mountaineer, I'm guessing there can't have been much interest in him from the climbing community. Which is too bad, really. While Wilson was undoubtedly wildly wrong about his ability to climb Everest - in 1934, alone, with next to no mountaineering experience - he did accomplish the first, almost equally impossible part of his plan: to fly a plane from England to India, also alone, also with minimal piloting experience; and from there he made it all the way to Everest on foot. This often seems to have been overlooked in the face of his eventual failure, or brushed off as more luck than one unprepared idiot really deserved. I tended to fall into the latter category myself, but after reading about Wilson's careful route-planning and well-organised flight and constant dogged good humour when dealing with obstacles, I can't help being a little impressed as well. Had he actually BEEN a mountaineer, this story could've ended very differently.
As is often the case in Everest stories, the immense work done by Sherpas often doesn't get enough credit. Before reading this, I had no idea that Wilson actually did have three Sherpas to help him across the Tibetan plateau and later on the access route to the lower Everest camps. In fact, it seems that without those guys, he'd never even have made it to Rongbuk, never mind Camp III. So much for the "lonely crackpot doing cracky impossible thing on his own" myth.
This book was written in 1957, a mere 20+ years after Wilson's ill-advised Everest expedition, so that was interesting in its own right - it was close enough in time so the author presumably still had access to direct sources, and while Everest had been successfully summitted by then, a solo ascent (as intended by Wilson) was still inconceivable, as stated multiple times by the author. (Wonder if he was still around 20 years later for Messner to set him straight). Basically it was two slices out of Everest history - the actual story of Maurice Wilson and the status quo of Everest in 1957, with the author's attendant assumptions and convictions of the time.
The age of the book has its downsides too - the tone is at times unpleasantly colonialist, at other times overly interpretive of situations in which Wilson WAS alone, and the author is rather heavy-handed and prescriptive in how the reader is supposed to feel about Wilson, with lots of unquestioning patriotic King and Country Boys Club nonsense (I may have snorted when he passionately proclaims that Wilson had the spirit of Mallory). But I did enjoy the thoroughness of the report, complete with Wilson's diary entries, as well as newspaper articles and quotes from friends.
Everest's conquest and commercialisation has evolved so rapidly over a period of less than a hundred years, with so many records set and broken and so many dramas layered over top of each other that this one story of this one eccentric who was convinced he could do the impossible a long time ago will probably slip even farther into obscurity. For my part, reading this book did slightly shift my perspective on Maurice Wilson. I still think believing that he could climb the world's highest mountain on faith and fasting is bollocks, but the guy obviously had real gumption and came farther than anyone thought he possibly could. Failure or not, as a story about the power of conviction, this is impressive stuff.
As is often the case in Everest stories, the immense work done by Sherpas often doesn't get enough credit. Before reading this, I had no idea that Wilson actually did have three Sherpas to help him across the Tibetan plateau and later on the access route to the lower Everest camps. In fact, it seems that without those guys, he'd never even have made it to Rongbuk, never mind Camp III. So much for the "lonely crackpot doing cracky impossible thing on his own" myth.
This book was written in 1957, a mere 20+ years after Wilson's ill-advised Everest expedition, so that was interesting in its own right - it was close enough in time so the author presumably still had access to direct sources, and while Everest had been successfully summitted by then, a solo ascent (as intended by Wilson) was still inconceivable, as stated multiple times by the author. (Wonder if he was still around 20 years later for Messner to set him straight). Basically it was two slices out of Everest history - the actual story of Maurice Wilson and the status quo of Everest in 1957, with the author's attendant assumptions and convictions of the time.
The age of the book has its downsides too - the tone is at times unpleasantly colonialist, at other times overly interpretive of situations in which Wilson WAS alone, and the author is rather heavy-handed and prescriptive in how the reader is supposed to feel about Wilson, with lots of unquestioning patriotic King and Country Boys Club nonsense (I may have snorted when he passionately proclaims that Wilson had the spirit of Mallory). But I did enjoy the thoroughness of the report, complete with Wilson's diary entries, as well as newspaper articles and quotes from friends.
Everest's conquest and commercialisation has evolved so rapidly over a period of less than a hundred years, with so many records set and broken and so many dramas layered over top of each other that this one story of this one eccentric who was convinced he could do the impossible a long time ago will probably slip even farther into obscurity. For my part, reading this book did slightly shift my perspective on Maurice Wilson. I still think believing that he could climb the world's highest mountain on faith and fasting is bollocks, but the guy obviously had real gumption and came farther than anyone thought he possibly could. Failure or not, as a story about the power of conviction, this is impressive stuff.
July 5, 2021
This ought to be a cultish book. I can't find anything about the author, but he has written a wonderful account of a great English eccentric, although I suspect that psychiatrists these days would diagnose a constellation of conditions. Wilson was driven by an odd compulsion that he could (and should) climb Everest alone, on his diet of figs and not much else. You might think he must have been a rather strange mountaineer, but the story is odder than that, as he wasn't a mountaineer at all. He didn't know how to cut ices steps and when he came across some useful crampons on the mountain, he threw them away. The tale has an inevitable end. The prose is quite spare and the story pieced together from Wilson's diary entries. Very highly recommended read.
August 5, 2018
L'incredibile avventura di Maurice Wilson, pazzo o sognatore, che voleva scalare l'Everest da solo. Del tutto privo di esperienza, ma con un incredibile tenacia, volò per 5000 km in solitaria da Londra fino in Pakistan, per raggiungere l'Himalaya e in seguito provò a conquistare la vetta dell' Everest, a quel tempo (1934) non ancora espugnata.
August 19, 2015
Loved it! Page turner.
October 22, 2017
Very informative and detailed. A beautiful little gem.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews