num_pages: 288
description: My eyes travel up the frozen walls. I figure it is eighty feet up to the sunlight. The walls above me climb up at about eighty degrees then they go dead vertical and then higher up they overhang. It is as if I am looking out from the belly of a beast its jagged white teeth interlocking above me. In June 1992 best friends Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood triumphantly atop Washingtons Mount Rainier celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate young mountaineers. Instead their conquest gave way to catastrophe when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevassethe pitch-black ice-walled hell that every climbers nightmares are made of.An avid adventurer from an early age Davidson was already a seasoned climber at the time of the Rainier ascent fully aware of the risks and hopelessly in love with the challenge. But in the blur of a harrowing free fall he suddenly found himself challenged by natures grandeur at its most unforgiving. Trapped on a narrow unstable frozen ledge deep below daylight and high above a yawning chasm he would desperately battle crumbling ice and snow that threatened to bury him alive while struggling in vain to save his fatally injured companion. And finally with little equipment no partner and rapidly dwindling hope he would have to make a fateful choicebetween the certainty of a slow lonely death or the seeming impossibility of climbing for his life.At once a heart-stopping adventure story a heartfelt memoir of friendship and a stirring meditation on fleeting mortality and immutable nature The Ledge chronicles one mans transforming odyssey from the dizzying heights of elation and awe to the punishing depths of grief and hard-won wisdom. This books visceral lyrical prose sings the praises of the physical worlds wonders while searching the souls of those willing for better or worse to fully embrace it.
language: English
title: The Ledge: An Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier
publisher: Ballantine Books