num_pages: 625
description:  Winner: Himalayan Club Kekoo Naoroji Award for Mountain Literature A full and fascinating portrait of one of the great figures of mountaineering.  Michael Palin As well as relaying the literal ups and downs of the biggest walls and highest mountains in the world Scott writes with honesty about the emotional and personal peaks and troughs of a life where family relationships are put under strain and life itself is so often at risk.  The Westmorland GazetteAt dusk on 24 September 1975 Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to reach the summit of Everest as lead climbers on Chris Boningtons epic expedition to the mountains immense south-west face. As darkness fell Scott and Haston scraped a small cave in the snow 100 metres below the summit and survived the highest bivouac ever  without bottled oxygen sleeping bags and as it turned out frostbite. For Doug Scott it was the fulfilment of a fortune-tellers prophecy given to his mother: that her eldest son would be in danger in a high place with the whole world watching. Scott and Haston returned home national heroes with their image splashed across the front pages. Scott went on to become one of Britains greatest ever mountaineers pioneering new climbs in the remotest corners of the globe. His career spans the golden age of British climbing from the 1960s boom in outdoor adventure to the new wave of lightweight alpinism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In Up and About the first volume of his autobiography Scott tells his story from his birth in Nottingham during the darkest days of war to the summit of the world. Surviving the unplanned bivouac without oxygen near the summit of Everest widened the range of what and how he would climb in the future. In fact Scott established more climbs on the high mountains of the world after his ascent of Everest than before. Those climbs will be covered in the second volume of his life and times.
language: English
title: Up and About: The Hard Road to Everest
publisher: Vertebrate Digital