'Fatal Mountaineer: The High-Altitude Life and Death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan Legend'
by Robert Roper
St. Martin's Press, $25.95
Willi Unsoeld, the Washington state mountaineer and climbing legend, lived a life of astonishing conquests and staggering loss. It is a terrific story and one that should easily dwarf the drama of the Everest climbing fiasco recounted in the best seller "Into Thin Air." Unfortunately, Robert Roper falls woefully short of the mark, and his thin, meandering writing all but destroys this compelling drama.
Unsoeld, one of the most accomplished American climbers of his generation, sealed his fame in 1963 with a first ascent of Mount Everest's west ridge. He and a partner climbed over the summit with the audacious plan to cross the mountaintop and descend the opposite face, where they could meet the remainder of their party and replenish their supplies. They reached the summit at 6 p.m. Unable to descend before nightfall, they were forced to spend the night at 28,000 feet, an almost certain death sentence given their lack of equipment.
Only a freakish calm allowed their survival, and even with that, Unsoeld lost nine toes to frostbite. But he came back an undisputed American climbing hero.
Unsoeld, husband of former U.S. Rep. Jolene Unsoeld, had a lifelong fascination with the Himalayas. Indeed, he named his daughter after Nanda Devi, a spectacular Himalayan peak surrounded by a ring of forbidding and daunting mountains and cliffs.
His daughter was, by all accounts, a remarkable mountaineer in her own right. At 23, she formed a team that included her father to climb the peak for which she was named.
In "Fatal Mountaineer," Roper recounts Devi Unsoeld's 1976 attempt to climb her namesake. The climb from the outset was badly fractured by competing egos, by resentment from one of the team leaders that a woman was included on the climb, and by an almost reckless inattention to safety.
Notwithstanding all the obstacles, Devi Unsoeld almost realized her dream of reaching the summit. But on a precarious ledge in her tent at 23,000 feet, she became ill. After several days of battling the illness, weather and altitude, she died in the midst of a ferocious snowstorm.
Stricken, Willi Unsoeld committed his daughter's body to the mountain and descended into a swirl of controversy over his actions, which some believe endangered his daughter.
Unsoeld, a professor at The Evergreen State College in Olympia at the time, buried his grief in his work and in teaching others his gift for mountaineering.
In 1979, he died in an avalanche on Mount Rainier's Cadaver Gap while leading a group of novice climbers in a winter climb in treacherous conditions.
Almost any one of these elements - Unsoeld's stunning first ascent of the west ridge of Everest, Devi Unsoeld's tragic death climbing the mountain for which she was named or the avalanche that killed Willi Unsoeld - could have formed the basis of a compelling book.
But Roper falls short by almost any measure. The writing itself veers from pedantic to awkward, and the pacing is even worse. To Roper, almost any tangent is worth exploring, but only in superficial detail, from Himalayan religious traditions to Unsoeld's psychological theories to mini-reviews of other accounts of Unsoeld's climbs.
Stripped of this superfluous padding, what remains is at best a poorly written extended magazine-length recounting of the Devi climb, with a brief and incomplete summary of Unsoeld's life appended. Some day Unsoeld's life and death will be the stuff of a great book. Unfortunately, this book is not it.
