The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone - Hardcover

Jenkins, Mckay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037550303X ISBN 13: 9780375503030

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

The day after Christmas 1969, five robust young men set out to climb the imposing north face of Mount Cleveland in Glacier National Park. One of the highest vertical walls in the United States, the face had never before been scaled--and certainly not in winter, when it was bound with ice.

But the mountain was to become a memorial for the boys. After they failed to return to their families, an aerial search found the boys' tracks dead-ending at the jagged edge of a colossal avalanche. A massive search effort turned up little until the spring thaw, when searchers recovered a camera, dragged a half mile down the mountain. Its film, miraculously intact, eventually pointed the way to the boys' bodies, suspended upside down in a cave of snow and ice.

In The White Death, McKay Jenkins unfolds a gripping natural history of avalanches, framed by the story of one of the worst avalanche disasters in mountaineering history. Ranking among the most destructive natural phenomena on earth, ava-lanches have shaped human endeavors from the beginning of recorded history. In 218 b.c., Hannibal lost more than eighteen thousand men, two thousand horses, and several elephants in deadly slides in the Italian Alps. During the First World War, combatants launched explosives onto the slopes above enemy troops, triggering slides that killed more effectively than firepower--and, paradoxically, pioneered the technology now used to tame avalanches on ski slopes all over the world. Yet our lifesaving skills remain almost as crude and limited as they were centuries ago: the rescuer's best tool is still a long, thin pole used for probing the packed snow for its victims.

The White Death merges a fascinating natural history with a cautionary tale of the damage our sense of invincibility can do in the face of awesome natural power. Like Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, The White Death chronicles an American tragedy of lives cut short. And just as Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm re-creates the sensation of drowning, this unforgettable book provides the disturbing details of every climber's worst nightmare: being buried alive in a torrent of snow and ice. Those who read it will never venture unwarily into the hills again.

About this title

Review:

By turns gripping, informative, and even frightening, The White Death probes the interplay of human endeavor in the mountains, the fragile beauty of snow, and nature's mysterious power. Jenkins succeeds admirably in melding human drama with the indifference of natural forces, allowing the "avalanche-beast" to build in character through survivors' reports, news clippings, and scientific findings. The book's emotional centerpiece is the tragic story of an avalanche that roared down Mount Cleveland in Glacier National Park, where five young climbers set out to scale the treacherous North Face. Just days into their climb, snow and strong winds set in. "What they saw could not have been inviting: snow clouds covered the mountain's summit...with loose powder avalanches regularly scrubbing it clean." Bud Anderson, older brother to one of the climbers, flew his single-engine plane over the mountain to observe the team's progress. "He hoped, perhaps, to rock his wings at them as a sign of encouragement, or congratulations." Instead, "his breath caught. The tracks ended at the unmistakable edge of a massive fresh avalanche..." Jenkins's stirring account pieces the clues and rescue efforts together to read like a true and terrible mystery being solved.

The horror of being buried alive by snow is vivid and sober among these pages, and is sure to chill climbers as well as those reading from the comforts of central heating. The author's vision is acute and helps better assess the bounds of our human capacity and domain. --Byron Ricks

From the Back Cover:

Advance praise for The White Death

"To be caught in an avalanche has to be one of the worst ways to die I've ever heard of. The White Death is a vivid and engrossing story of the violence of snow and great mountains, told through the story of five young men who went climbing in Montana, never to return. The White Death is rich with sharp characters and strong history."

--Richard Preston

"A dramatic account of an ill-fated mountaineering family, and a well-researched study of avalanches and the mysterious nature of snow, which makes the collapse of its formations the great underlying danger in high mountains."

--Peter Matthiessen

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 037550303X
• ISBN 13: 9780375503030
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256