Jon E. Lewis - MBO On the Edge

Jon E. Lewis is a writer and historian. His previous books include The Mammoth Book of Boys Own Stuff, Fatherhood: An Anthology, The Mammoth Book of Pirates, The Mammoth Book of True War Stories, The Mammoth Book of the West, The New Rights of Man, The Mammoth Book of Endurance and Adventure, The Mammoth Book of Polar Journeys and The Mammoth Book of How It Happened.

Constable & Robinson Ltd
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London WC1B 4HP
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First published in the UK as The Mammoth Book of Climbing Adventures, 2001 and
The Mammoth Book of The Edge,
by Constable & Robinson, 2003.
This revised and updated edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009

Copyright Jon E. Lewis, 2009 (unless otherwise indicated)

The right of Jon E. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

UK ISBN 978-1-84529-924-8
eISBN: 978-1-78033-733-3

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First published in the United States in 2009 by
Running Press Book Publishers
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and
International Copyright Conventions

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

US Library of Congress number: 2008940990
US ISBN 978-0-7624-3632-3

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Printed and bound in the EU

Well, we knocked the bastard off

Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves

Robert Bates

Edward Whymper

Herbert Tichy

Walter Bonatti

Ed Drummond

Greg Child

Jon Krakauer

H.W. Tilman

Maurice Herzog

Jonathan Waterman

Ren Desmaison

Hermann Buhl

Kurt Diemberger

Doug Scott and Dougal Hasten

F.S. Smythe

Tom Hornbein

Peter Boardman

Heinrich Harrer

Geoffrey Winthrop Young

George Leigh Mallory

Conrad Anker

Kees Egeler

Aron Ralston

Tenzing Norgay

Murray Sayle

Chris Bonnington

Anatoli Boukreev

Peter Habeler

Reinhold Messner

Joe Simpson

Stephen Venables

AFTERWORD
THE PLEASURES AND PENALTIES OF MOUNTAINEERING

A.F. Mummery

There is, of course, nothing new about climbing mountains. Humankind has probably scrambled up slopes and along ridges since they took to two legs way back in the African dawn. Doubtless these early ventures were prompted by needs of warfare, of hunting, of exploration and colonization, but it is tempting to think that some ancestral homo sapiens sapiens reached the top simply because the mountain was there.

As an organized sport, however, mountaineering is an entirely modern phenomenon and owes much to de Saussures reward, offered in 1760, to the first person to conquer Mont Blanc. This was not achieved until 1786, when Balmat and Paccard reached the top, followed by de Saussure himself a year later. Within a century, Mont Blanc and the Alps were crawling with advocates of the new sport of mountaineering, the Alpine Club had been formed, and Edward Whymper had become the pursuits first bonafide star, a celestial ranking he ensured by his 1865 ascent of the Matterhorn. And like many a climber after him, Whymper was no mean hand with a pen as well as a piton. Mountaineering literature may not have begun with Whymper but his