Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest [Hardcover]

Ed Webster (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2001

Snow in the Kingdom is the Everest autobiography of Ed Webster’s five "Storm Years" on and off of Mount Everest following the climbing death of his girlfriend, Lauren Husted, in Colorado's Black Canyon. A milestone in American mountaineering literature, Snow in the Kingdom will appeal to climbers and "armchair climbers" alike. It’s an adventure story penned in the tradition of the great explorers; a seminal document on modern lightweight, ethical Himalayan climbing; and a deeply personal account of one man’s search for redemption and achievement while pioneering an uncharted route up Everest’s most dangerous side. An astounding 150 pages of vivid color photographs — over 450 photographs in all — add depth and beauty to the compelling narrative. Webster attempted Everest from three sides: the West, North, and East, from both Nepal and Tibet. Webster soloed Everest’s north peak, Changtse, then pioneered a new route up the 12,000-foot precipices of Mount Everest’s Kangshung Face in Tibet, with a 4-man team and NO bottled oxygen, radios, or Sherpa support. Also included are the unpublished 1921 and 1924 Everest photographs of the legendary British pioneers George Mallory and Noel Odell, plus the never-before-told story of Tenzing Norgay’s birthplace and boyhood home in Moyun Village, Tibet — and the astounding assertion that in 1921, Mallory and Tenzing met one another in Tibet.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...Webster's powerfully written Snow in the Kingdom escapes being swallowed in the [Everest] deluge ... is meticulously researched and emotionally charged." -- Rock & Ice Magazine, Feb/March, 2001

"Emotionally charged ... (the book is) an examination of Webster's soul, rather than a simple story of a great climb." -- Joe Simpson, High Mountain Sports, England, December 2001

"Engrossing and detailed writing, candid introspection, generous color photography ... It belongs on the shelf among the great annals of mountain literature." -- Don Mellor, GORP.com, May 10, 2001

"Much more than a climbing book, Snow In The Kingdom is about the making of a man. [Reading] the do-or-die summit push it was impossible to put the book down." -- Thom Pollard, EverestNews.com, May 17, 2001

"Snow in the Kingdom dazzles the eye as much as the imagination ... Heroic, upbeat, and powerful." -- Midwest Book Review, October 2001

"This miraculous account of struggle and survival rivets the reader to discover what the fate of these friends will be." -- Rain Taxi literary review, Autumn, 2001

"Webster's most intriguing claim is that seven-year-old Tenzing Norgay may have met George Mallory ... whose body was discovered last year." -- The Observer, London, Dec. 24, 2000

"the strongest [book] of its sort since Touching the Void. Perhaps a closer comparison is Herzog’s Annapurna." -- SECOND PLACE Winner, 2001 Boardman-Tasker Mountain Literature Prize, London.

FINALIST, Mountain Literature catagory -- 2001 Banff Mountain Book Festival, Banff, Canada

One of the Top Ten greatest hits of Everest Lit. An exhaustive memoir ... including the near-fatal 1988 Kangshung face expedition. -- OUTSIDE Magazine, USA, May, 2003

From the Publisher

Physical Description: 6 x 9.25 inches, hard back, color laminated dust jacket, 580 pages printed on high-quality coated paper. Also included are 150 pages of color photographs, 282 black and white photos, maps of Asia and the Tibetan Plateau, 3 climbing route maps of Everest’s three faces, and 8 Everest climbing route photo-diagrams.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 580 pages
• Publisher: Mountain Imagery; 1st edition (January 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965319911
• ISBN-13: 978-0965319911
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #868,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome photos, moving story, March 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest (Hardcover)

Webster's Snow in the Kingdom is different than, and better than, the many Everest books that have come out in recent years. The stunning photography--literally hundreds of photos, many in color and many appropriately in black and white--come at a great price for Webster and are worthy of a more expensive coffee table book themselves. Add to that a fascinating, moving text that goes far beyond the usual "we climbed, we almost died, we made it out" adventure saga. Webster talks about excursions and experiences that made him the person who wanted to climb a new route up Everest. He humanizes Himalayan moutaineering in a way that not even Krakauer does. It's an exciting story, but it's much more than an adventure yarn. This is one of the best text-photo combination books on any subject I have seen.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What is it like being there?, July 6, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest (Hardcover)

As a non-climber, I've often wondered, "What does it feel like to be on Everest?" Many climber/authors seem to approach the question primarily by describing their emotions, not their senses. The result is often an unsatisfying allegorical sense of Everyman's struggle against the forces of nature. But I wanted to know what it felt like in terms of what your senses are feeding you. What do you see? What do you hear? What does it look like when you pause for breath and look around? What does the top look like, not just as you peer off to Tibet, but what is the ground like under your feet? Does it feel as if you're going to fall off the top? And what's it like to come back down? I think Ed Webster's book, Snow in the Kingdom, answers these questions better than anything else I've read. And the pictures complement the text wonderfully. I couldn't put it down. Read it in one sitting, and my cozy easy chair and favorite briar have never been as appreciated. Though at one point I could have persuaded myself that my toes were feeling a little chill. Thanks for the trip, Ed.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the most handsomely crafted Everest Book ever produced, May 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest (Hardcover)

Oh no, not another Everest book! you're thinking, right? But as one of the last in the recent glut of Everest memoirs (written by and about survivors/clients whom would have remained anonymous except for their friends/guides who died in 1996) Snow in the Kingdom may well be the magnum opus of all Everest books.

Herein, you'll find no clients being towed by their guides, no tourist routes, no bottled oxygen, no climber traffic jams, and no Sherpas hauling the author's gear. This book is about the ultimate climb: the hardest route up the highest mountain. Finally, the author and his partners completed the climb for love rather than money.

In Snow in the Kingdom, Ed Webster is a photographer above all else. Like others before him (Lito Tejada-Flores, James Balog, Galen Rowell) Ed knew that publishing his photo-intensive book with a conventional publisher would not allow him to obtain either the clarity or quantity that he needed to properly tell his story So Ed spent a decade rounding up the money, hired the best editors/designers/scanners that money could buy in Colorado (subsequently going into debt), and laboriously began self publishing his own book. We should be thankful that he's been down the road of self publishing before, because this is no amateur's tome. The end result: 150 pages of color photos in five separate signatures! Not counting 582 pages of text¾and even then you can't turn the book more than four pages without being arrested by a new black and white photo! All printed sharply on a 70-pound stock that does the photographer's work justice. If this isn't enough, the author has obtained unpublished photographs of Noel Odell's from Mallory's Everest expeditions, along with a host of pictures taken by other well-known Everest climbers and photographers. If you were to buy such a beautifully laid-out book like this from a conventional photo-book publisher, say Abrams or Chronicle, you'd pay twice as much and get half the text (eg, Bradford Washburn's elegant Mount McKinley opus).

Because Snow in the Kingdom is not just breath-taking photographs of culture and history and real climbing. You will, and I would like to emphasize will, buy this book because Ed Webster gives us his heart and soul on a platter. His is a deeply personal story about loss. The loss of Lauren Husted, a woman he once loved, who died with her head in his lap after their climbing accident in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. Loss of his fingers and toes to Everest. And loss of his ability to climb--a talent that sustained Ed Webster for nearly thirty years. Or to put it in one of his fondest quotes (by Elizabeth Knowlton): "To those men who are born for mountains, the struggle can never end, until their lives end¾to them it holds the very quintessence of living¾the fiery core, after the lesser parts have burned away."

This is also a story about climbing the Kangshung Face of Mount Everest in 1989. The route is menaced by hanging glacier avalanches and technical climbing difficulties (famed alpinists Alex Lowe and David Breashears returned to the Kangshung several years later and found that they could not drag up their wealthy client, who later became famous in Into Thin Air for being dragged up the tourist route) and remains the territory of only world-class alpinists. On the way, the reader is given both an in-depth tour to Ed's emotions and the climbing history of Everest, including two of Ed's earlier attempts on the mountain. Through text and pictures, you meet many of the personalities of Everest and luminaries of climbing: Reinhold Messner, Sir John Hunt, Jim Bridwell, Audrey Saukeld, Peter Athens, rock star Billy Squier (one of Ed's clients), Sir Chris Bonnington, Joe Brown, Roger Marshall, Tenzing Norgay (and his son), Jay Smith, Sir Edmond Hillary, Fritz Wiessner; and Ed's Kangshung teammates: Paul Teare, Robert Anderson, and Stephen Venables.

Of course, by the end, we learn the specific price for the 1989 Kangshung Face Team's boldness. Ed escorts his partners, more dead than alive, back down the face. No one is really unscathed, but Ed in particular will never be the same again. I'm not going to spill the denouement here, so the best I can do is encourage you to read the book and find out for yourself what happens, in the most handsomely crafted Everest book ever produced.