The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation

Willis’ latest tells the story of a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest’s first ascent in 1953. It is a story of tremendous courage, astonishing achievement and heart-breaking loss. Their leader was the boyish, fanatically driven Chris Bonington. His inner circle, which came to be known as Bonington’s Boys, included a baker’s dozen who became climbing’s greatest generation – Boardman, Boysen, Burke, Clough, Estcourt, Harlin, Haston, MacInnes, Renshaw, Rouse, Scott, Tasker, and Whillans. Bonington’s Boys gave birth to a new brand of climbing. They took increasingly terrible risks on now-legendary expeditions to the world’s most fearsome peaks, including Annapurna, Central Tower of Paine, Changabang, Dunagiri, Eiger, Everest, Gauri Sankar, Grandes Jorasses, K2, Kangchenjunga, Kongur, Mont Blanc, Nuptse, The Ogre, and the Petit Dru. And they paid an enormous price for their achievements. Most of Bonington’s Boys died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: Was it worth it? This is based on interviews with surviving climbers and other individuals, as well as five decades of journals, expedition accounts, and letters, and provides the closest thing to an answer we’ll ever have. It offers riveting descriptions of what Bonington's Boys found in the mountains, as well as an understanding of what they lost there.