Customer Reviews

Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure

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Coffey is to be applauded for asking the hard questions about the climbing game. In my experience, mountaineers too often pay lip service to the death toll in the hills, regardless of their own struggles with grief and fear. I think it's because grief and fear become so tied up together for a high-altitude climber of any enduring ambition, it becomes very difficult for them to honestly talk about the issues -- because it's all very close to the surface and uncomfortable. Coffey's exploration, filtered through her own grief, is compelling but not complete. What's missing is that internal monologue where grief and fear are seen to be in starkest play. I certainly recommend Coffey's book, but I would urge you to look at the new book by Peter Hillary, `In The Ghost Country', to complete the picture of the dark side. There you'll enter Hillary's mind and find the grief and fear of the game working there for all to see, a lifetime of horror playing out in his head on a walk to the South Pole. I love both books.

This engrossing and enjoyable read is one of the most thought provoking books to ever deal with mountaineering. Most books that have related the exploits and perils of mountain climbers have been first person accounts that balance observation with self-analysis, or journalistic efforts that seek to glorify or demonize the intensely individualistic adventurers that comprise the community of climbers. The views and impressions of those closest to the climbers, their spouses, lovers and children, have largely been ignored or suppressed... until now.

Within a two page introduction, Maria Coffey firmly establishes her credentials to create this work. Hers' is a perspective that is simultaneously critical, yet admiring of the people that pursue adventure through mountain climbing. One of those climbers was Joe Tasker, her partner of two and a half years, who disappeared from the Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest more than twenty years ago. In the time since, Ms. Coffey has dealt with the abrupt end to his life and their relationship through an examination of the motivations that drive men and women to risk their lives in an exercise where success is achieved not by just reaching the top of a mountain, but safely returning to the bottom.

Mountaineering is a unique endeavor, one without the usual trophies or audible applause of most other sports. It's a sport in which records are established not by a higher score or faster time but by the realization of firsts - the first to summit, the first woman, first blind climber to summit, first one to pioneer a new route and so forth. It's an activity that draws highly motivated people capable of surviving alone in the most harsh and solitary places on Earth. Despite this solitary, sometimes selfish pursuit, others are left behind to deal with the consequences of a climber's mistakes or bad luck.

Ms. Coffey relates the stories of the wives, lovers and children with the type of empathy that can only be experienced by one who has shared experience. A combination of admiration and exasperation with their risk-taking loved ones is a common thread throughout this book. There is the expected pain of separation as their loved one is away for three or more months on yet another expedition, but they also must deal with the frustration of trying to maintain a "normal" home with while faced with the specter of a spouse or parent in near-constant peril. Some strive to build a life of their own, separate and distinct from that of their climber. Others network with the partners of other climbers, sharing news, monitoring the progress of each expedition from base camp or home.

As Ms. Coffey illustrates, the price of failure for these adventurers is thrust on their surviving loved ones as well. Many are left with the doubt and denial left by a report that someone has "disappeared", never knowing precisely how or why the climber died. They might cling to a dwindling thread of hope that somehow he has survived, only to learn five, ten or more years later that a mummified body has been found near a summit. Often, the fate of their climber is all too clearly known as a when teammates witness their entombment under an avalanche of snow, rock and ice. This burden of witness often torments the surviving climbers, as they are left to question the deaths of close friends when they themselves were spared.

Every account, every personal story is different, from the individual epics related by the survivors of incidents on Everest, Annapurna, The Eiger, K2 and other legendary mountains, to children's' memories of a parent removed from their life long before they were capable of understanding. Each resounds in a differing way. A climbing team survives by the chance discovery of a bag of supplies left behind more than a year ago in tribute to teammates lost on a vertical wall. A daughter builds a collection of teddy bears by giving her father a different one to carry on each climb, with one providing a psychological rescue for him during a near-death crisis. A son bonds with his dad through climbing; then is arbitrarily removed by his father from the summit team just days before the final push. The reason for his demotion goes unresolved for nearly twenty years. There are also the countless bargains struck at moments of peril; where a climber vows to himself or others to abandon climbing should they survive, only to be drawn back to the mountains again and again.

Throughout the book, Maria Coffey weaves her own memories and emotions into the narrative, laying bare the good and the bad of her relationship with Joe Tasker. While the question so often asked of the mountaineers is "why do you do it?" The one posed to their families might be more along the lines of "how can you stand them?" Ms. Coffey provides some potential answers, each of them as profound and personal as the next.

This is a deeply personal and sensitive portrayal of lives left shattered after a death from a climbing accident. My husband died as the result of a skydiving accident and the two sports seem to have more in common than I ever would have known. The climber's drive, determination, and absolute need to engage in a dangerous sport is so much like that of a skydiver's that I found her book a deeply personal & accurate account of what I have lived through. She helped me understand and come to terms with my late husband's insatiable need for an intense existence. And as she so eloquently writes, "that intensity, I now realize, was ...his legacy to me." Why, with spouses and children, are people driven to extremes? Maria addresses these questions with sensitivity that struck directly at my heart. My copy of the book is so underlined and marked that I can't share it with anyone, I'll just have to buy them a fresh copy.

My friend Arlene Blum (Anapurna: A Woman's Place) climbed in the Himalayas and elsewhere and lived to tell the tale. She now leads treks into the world's remote and wild regions, but she once rendered me speechless with her offhand reply to my horror at one hair-raising tale she told of crossing an ice bridge about a million miles up a some scary mountain.
"Why on earth would you do that?" I had asked, when I recovered my voice. And another unspoken question hung right behind the first: Having done it once and survived, why on God's green earth would you do it again? And again, and again.
"Oh, it's not really dangerous," and she poured me another cup of tea.
Not dangerous. Yeah, right.
Arlene had already lost a lover and several friends to accidents in high places, and others have died cold and lonely deaths since then. Not dangerous? I mean, what??
But there will still be those who MUST climb mountains. Some of them will die, and their survivors often are quoted as saying, "He died doing what he loved best," or the feminine equivalent. Maria Coffey's book, Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow," chronicles the naked underbelly of the experience of this particular kind of loss. It looks behind the public quotes into the hearts and bleeding souls of the survivors, and I believe it's a story whose exposure is long overdue. The personal costs of extreme adventure are too often dismissed for the thrill of reading about the adventures themselves. Coffey handles with grace and delicacy the stories of wives, husbands, lovers, friends, and children left behind my someone who just had to climb yet one more mountain - for reasons the rest of us armchair travelers can't even begin to imagine.

A terrific successor to Fragile Edge by the same author. That book was a personal journey - a quest for answers - followed by the author after the death of her famous mountain climber boyfriend on the slopes of Everest.

This book looks at the effect of following this most dangerous of passions on the partners left behind and some who sometimes accompany their loved ones. Even more interestingly, Maria Coffey looks at the point of views of those who have no choice in their relationships with those whose addiction seems as self-serving and as inevitable as any other addiction - parents and children.

I really liked Coffey's earlier book, and I recommend this one as much. I believe she has matured as a writer as well. She has the knack of addressing very large picture issues yet not losing sight of the personal and `small moments'.

Some of the personal testimonies about coming to terms with loss and dealing with grief are true not only for losses under such circumstances, but there are some universal truths particularly for anyone who has had to deal with death and the "loss of a future", rather than a mere celebration of a life fulfilled (as many older person funerals have become in my culture in recent years).

An understated but important subtext for me is what this has to say about gender relations. It is no accident that most of those off risking their lives, and the fur=tures of those around them are male. Ms Coffey does touch on this, and especially the unusual circumstance of women with children who still pursue the apex of whatever mass of rock and ice they have their heart set on. However, she never table thumps an agenda . . . you are lft to ponder your own conclusions.

A remarkable achievement.That Ms Coffey has the confidence of so many associated with the pursuit is a testament to her insight and empathy.

I rate this alongside Ed Douglas's book "Chomolungma Sings The Blues" as my favourite books discussing ethical and spititual concerns about mountaineering.

Losing a friend or loved one is never an easy process, but it becomes even more tangled when they leave for a mountain adventure and never return. I first experienced this in the early 70's when 3 close friends were killed while attempting Mt. Elias in Canada. Maria Coffey examines how climbers and their families and friends cope with the devastating losses that shadow this sport.
She begins with a search for why people climb in the first place, and in particular why they continue after close calls; without becoming banal, she quotes Jim Wickwire, "One of the addictive aspects of climbing is that it allows you to be in the present moment in ways that are impossible in ordinary life". Similar thoughts come from Csikszentmihalyi's concept of 'flow' - which finds that the "enjoyment of risk comes not from the danger itself but from managing it, from the sense of exercising control in difficult situations." And then, there's the ultimate mountaineering existential futility of Camus' Sisyphus facing an "unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing... Each atom of that stone , each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart".
The bulk of this powerful book interviews the survivors and comrades of lost climbers. At times, its difficult to read, but the feelings expressed range from acceptance to anger and denial. In most cases, there is a community of shared experience and values. Whether you're an active climber or arm chair mountaineer this book gives a much needed balance to the hyberbolic tales of expedition climbing. And for those of us who have lost people to the mountains it offers, not comfort, but a stoic acceptance.

To start, I have never climbed a mountain nor have I considered it, but if I had, this book would certainly make me think twice.

Maria Coffey knows very well the stories of the world's elite climbers. Associated with many of the world's top alpinists, she has seen many friends conquer the world's highest places, but she has also known many of them to lose their lives on snowy peaks on every continent (the death rate on Everest alone is 14%). And it is this story that she brings to light for the first time.

Anybody who reads mountain literature has read the gruelling stories of survival and danger on Everest, K2, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, McKinley and many others. But how many of those books have looked at what happens to the people at home when the mountaineers don't make it back?

Using her own story of losing her partner on Everest as a backdrop, Coffey explores how the tragedy of losing a loved one to the mountains affects the families left behind. Interviews and first-person experiences from some of the world's best climbers and their families make Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow a great insider view of mountaineering, but it the story of how the people left behind are transformed by tragedy that sets this book apart from other mountain books.

Tragedy necessitates survival through transformation and Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow is an excellent and courageous testament to that.

I couldn't put it down from the moment I beagn to read it. It was a deeply moving and intersting book. It mad me laugh, it made me cry. A great book for anyone who is interested in "the other side" of climbing.

I've read many, many books on mountaineering, and I wasn't sure if this might not be a bit maudlin, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Maria Coffey has written a clear-eyed, compelling book about the experiences of those who love mountaineers, as well as a intimate look at what compels athletes who are addicted to such a dangerous sport. Well worth the read.

There is a time in every climber's life when they reach a certain realisation that if a certain set of circumstances continues one will surely die. For me it was on a mountain in Japan in late winter benighted on a long route with no bivvy gear. Your brain tells you two things: 1) that you cannot travel at night, and 2) if the weather turns you will die because of lack of gear. The faces of your kids emerge large in your head, you know almost exactly how you will die, how your body will gradually shut down and you will die in degrees. One knows this before the climb... but one goes anyway... moreover if death was not present and real it would rob one of the ultimate experience of climbing.

Maria Coffey knows her stuff because she was married to one of my childhood heros -- Joe Tasker, who, along with Dougal Haston were the men I wanted to become! I wanted to define myself like them and surrounded myself with people who gained the reaffirming ethic and sometimes egotistical death-defying feats of the mountaineer. Of course I never really made it in this journey -- life family, job, the prospect of a stable career with family and kids intervened. But Coffey describes the reality of being married to one of the centuries real "hard men" and the world that surrounds them and what makes is reaffirming in risking your life for some individual fleeting glory. Those who did not compromise and in the end were killed by the very thing they loved and defined their existence.

She does this while chronicling the inherent risks well known to anyone raised in the mountains. The details are graphic and disturbing: like watching your friend freeze to death and being unable to do anything about it... that is the savage arena where nature makes life a pitiable shambles but also has the power to instill in people a sense of personal strength and fortitude. A feeling that is often more powerful than the prospect of the many limbs lost, the scars and the broken bones. One does all this with the prospect that they will be neither admired by many others, nor appreciated by many, and certainly will gain little money. In foreign wars soldiers go into battle mostly because they have to ... but with mountaineering, people place themselves in harm's way to reaffirm humanity... no one forces it upon them. It is this feeling that needs to be explained and which Maria Coffey chronicles so well in clear lucid prose in a way forcing reflection... she does this without the Krakauer trend to sensationalise. She writes in many ways similar to the classists in Mountaineering literature of the 1950s. She has written a very powerful and thought provoking book.