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

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.

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.

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 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.

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