num_pages: 366
description: Mountaintops have long been seen as sacred places home to gods and dreams. In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very different sacred mountains. He began on the South Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This is the highest point between the Andes and the Himalaya  and one of the most inaccessible rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone Age tribes. During the spring Boardman made a four-man oxygen-free attempt on the world's third highest peak Kangchenjunga . Hurricane-force winds beat back their first two bids on the unclimbed North Ridge but they eventually stood within feet of the summit  leaving the final few yards untrodden in deference to the inhabiting deity. In October he climbed the mountain most sacred to the the twin-summited Gauri Sankar . Renowned for its technical difficulty and spectacular profile it is aptly dubbed the Eiger of the Himalaya and Boardman's first ascent took a gruelling twenty-three days. Three sacred mountains three very different expeditions all superbly captured by Boardman in Sacred Summits  his second book first published shortly after his death in 1982. Combining the excitement of extreme climbing with acute observation of life in the mountains this is an amusing dramatic poignant and thought-provoking book. Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker died on Everest in 1982 whilst attempting a new and unclimbed line. Both men were superb mountaineers and talented writers. Their literary legacy lives on through the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature  established by family and friends in 1983 and presented annually to the author or co-authors of an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature.
language: English
title: Sacred Summits: Kangchenjunga, the Carstensz Pyramid, and Gauri Sankar
publisher: Vertebrate Digital