The Next Everest

March 5, 2021

In 2015, a severe earthquake ended motivational speaker and author Davidson's (The Ledge) attempt to climb Mt. Everest, just several thousand feet below the summit. Davidson worried that his three-decade-long quest to summit Mt. Everest was over; he felt he was too old to muster the necessary financial resources, stamina, and strength. But Davidson dedicated himself in his mid-50s to almost a year of strenuous training for another month-long ordeal to summit Everest in 2017, demonstrating the resilience that he preaches to his audiences. The author vividly describes the aftermath of the April 2015 Nepal earthquake and the resulting avalanches on Everest's slopes. Fans of climbing memoirs will appreciate Davidson's recollections of his trek two years later, especially as he and his team reached Lhotse Face. In between recalling the thrills and terrors of climbing a glacier, the author includes letters from his wife and sons, which offered encouragement and inspired him to keep going. VERDICT Davidson's latest will appeal to readers interested in Everest and mountain climbing and to those seeking stories about overcoming setbacks.--Mark Jones, Mercantile Lib., Cincinnati

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March 15, 2021
A practiced mountaineer recounts his fraught efforts to scale the world's tallest mountain. For Colorado-based climber and speaker Davidson, summiting Mount Everest was a longtime dream. He trained hard for it, arriving at base camp in 2015 and making his way up icefalls and over crevasses only to experience the devastating avalanche following a massive earthquake. Even in tamer weather, the mountain can be deadly: In one key moment, the author contemplates the body of a climber who, like him, survived the earthquake only to return the next year and die within sight of the summit. The year before his first effort, "a glacial block the size of a ten-story building sheared away from an ice ramp," killing 16 Nepali workers below. Pausing to pay them his respects, Davidson contemplates other ice fields above him on the trail and thinks, "stopping for even a second might give gravity an opening to drop an ice building on us." The giant mountain offers countless ways to die, including slipping off the rickety ladders that span breaks in the ice. Living through avalanches and helping locate and identify the dead were terrible enough, but the disappointment over the end of his first climb "just nine hours after I left base camp" was nearly spirit-crushing, as was the discovery that he had "officially crossed the line from prediabetic to diabetic." All good reasons to try again, the prospect of death be damned: "Risky climbs...had taught me that if I was afraid of dying, and wanted to see my loved ones again, I should temporarily put thoughts of them away." The book nicely bookends Into Thin Air and the author's own Ledge as considerations of adventures that have only three outcomes: summiting, turning back, or dying. Essential for alpinists, though armchair travelers will be bound up in Davidson's thrill-a-minute narrative, too.

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