Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2, the World's Most Feared Mountain

At the beginning of the 2004 climbing season, ninety women had successfully summited Everest, but only five female climbers had reached the top of K2. Today, all of those brave pioneers are dead. In 1986 Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz became the first woman ever to reach the summit of K2 and was followed to the summit that same year by French climber Liliane Barrard and British climber Julie Tullis, both of whom died on their way down the mountain. Then in 1992, the summer that Rutkiewicz perished on Kangchenjunga, French alpinist Chantal Mauduit summited K2 and survived, only to die six years later on Dhaulagiri. Finally, in 1995 British climber and mother Alison Hargreaves reached the top but was killed shortly after starting her descent from its perilous summit. Jordan tells the haunting and compelling, sometimes tragic, stories of how these women lived and died on the mountains they pursued. Mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, poets and engineers, the female pioneers of K2 were complex personalities in the controversial world of high-altitude mountaineering, and their lives and deaths are a reminder of the high price climbers often pay to follow their dreams.

Winner 2005 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature and Finalist 2005 Banff Mountain Book Festival Best Book Mountain Literature.