Great Adventure Books

Holy jezum crow! If ever anyone needed a ghost writer, its him! I wonder if he held the pen between his fingers or stuffed into his fist? :laughing:
MT, if you manage to get all the way through that thing, itā€™ll be an achievement that will make all his summits pale into insignificance!

[quote=ā€œMother Theresaā€]Well, I finally read this book.

Guy starts sailing solo from the northern coast of Africa to the Caribbean in a small sailboat that he built himself, thereā€™s a sudden huge SLAM in the middle of the night, water rushes in and the boat sinks in just a minute, giving him just enough time to grab his inflatable survival raft and one bag of survival goods, before embarking on a 76 day voyage, traveling 1,800 miles across the ocean. . . . [/quote]

Not quite as long a voyage, but great story in the news today about 3 teenage boys (14 and 15 yrs old) who live on an island near Fiji and set out to travel from their island to the neighboring island in a 12 foot boat, but missed their destination and ended up traveling for 50 days and 240 miles before being rescued, naked, sunburned and near death. They were spotted and rescued in the middle of the ocean by a 280 foot tuna fishing boat. They had been presumed dead and their memorial service was held two weeks ago, but theyā€™re now in the hospital recovering in good spirits.

edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiap ā€¦ l?iref=NS1

And, Iā€™m finishing another great adventure book now, this sequel to Touching the Void, written by the guy whose rope was intentionally cut by his partner (because he had no choice) in remote, high altitude Peru, plunging hundreds of feet down, with knee horribly broken, into a crevasse, abandoned for dead, only to crawl out later to a miraculous survival.

Anyway, thatā€™s the story of Touching the Void. This is the book he wrote next, in his lengthy recovery period, when he couldnā€™t climb and had no interest in doing so (though he later took it up again), so he sat down and reminisced about all his crazy adventures (mountaineering and otherwise) in this good page-turner.


amazon.com/This-Game-Ghosts- ā€¦ t_ep_dpt_3

sandman, Iā€™d bet you know a few of the people you mentioned in the book, being from Scotland and having done some climbing. I recall you mentioned that someone in your family knows Joe Simpson or Simon Yates (the two from Touching the Void). Well, the UK climbing community seems quite close knit, judging from this book. They all seem to know each other, though sadly he rattled off the names of at least a dozen climbers who died.

As for the author, heā€™s been lucky. Got buried in and swept 1,000 feet downhill by an avalanche that miraculously and mercifully spit him out at the end to live another day. Was sleeping tied to cliff another time when the supporting rock they were sleeping on suddenly broke and crashed 1,000 feet down, leaving him and his partner dangling precariously, with all their gear dumped down the cliff and the two of them hanging for dear life to one weak, wobbly piton that was gradually pulling out as they waited 15 hours for a rescuer to be helicoptered in to save them. Lots of crazy stuff. Good reading. :thumbsup:

Read this great, real-life adventure story over CNY.

Small fishing boat packed full of explosives sails all the way from England to Nazi-occupied Norway, during WWII, carrying a crew of 8, and 4 Norwegian commandos who plan to unload the explosives and use it to blow up Nazi airstrips in their country. But, theyā€™re found out right from the start and all but one get killed/captured immediately, and this is the tale of the one guy, shot and seriously injured, making a miraculous escape over the rugged, snow-covered hills, pursued by the Nazis. Amazing story, well told. :thumbsup:

amazon.com/gp/product/1599210630

Whatā€™s next? Iā€™ve got a few more books already lined up, but later this summer I want to read this one, which sounds terrific.

[quote]Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry, staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling the local police. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance, crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off the Reich Chancellery. He was preparing for the 1940 Olympics, and closing in on the fabled four-minute mile, when World War II began. Louie joined the Army Air Corps, becoming a bombardier. Stationed on Oahu, he survived harrowing combat, including an epic air battle that ended when his plane crash-landed, some six hundred holes in its fuselage and half the crew seriously wounded.

On a May afternoon in 1943, Louie took off on a search mission for a lost plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, the engines on his bomber failed. The plane plummeted into the sea, leaving Louie and two other men stranded on a tiny raft. Drifting for weeks and thousands of miles, they endured starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the raft, trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high. At last, they spotted an island. As they rowed toward it, unbeknownst to them, a Japanese military boat was lurking nearby. Louieā€™s journey had only just begun. . . .[/quote]
amazon.com/Unbroken-World-Su ā€¦ d_sim_b_15

Donā€™t want to go and on about Joe Simpson, but I really enjoyed The Beckoning Silence, kind of a potted history of the attempts to climb the north face of the Eiger.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beckoning-Silence-Joe-Simpson/dp/0099422433

I donā€™t know any of them, really. Climbed with a good few of the younger ones, though ā€“ people willing to get up at 4am and drive through blizzards for 4 hours on the off-chance of a climb are not that many, so you do tend to meet them. My dad, though, knows pretty much all of the older guys in Simpsonā€™s circle ā€“ the old fogeys. I used to meet some of them at parties (sneaking downstairs in my jammies and hiding in a corner of the room until I was chivvied upstairs upon being noticed.) A pretty much wild bunch of strange, strange people. Google Tom Patey. He went to uni with my dad and they were both GPs in Scotland after that. I think I might have attended his funeral. He and my dad did several first ascents, although according to my dad, he was jsut an appendage on the end of a rope, while Patey did all the climbing. Still. MY god! When I think of it now, and when I see my dadā€™s old gear in his shed, it brings it home just how fucking HARDCORE those guys were. Hemp ropes, canvas and tweed jackets, hobnailed ex-army boots, packs that UNLOADED probably weighed more than fully laden modern packs, 7-foot-long heavy wooden skis with strips of sealskin tied to the soles so they could climb uphill on them ā€¦ different age altogether.
Patey did the first ascent of the Mustagh Tower in 1956 and I failed to make the summit some 30 years later. I stuck an old tobacco tin containing one of his poems into a crack in the rocks up there for him, though.