Mountain: A Life on the Rocks

Backshall’s love affair with the mountains has taken him to some of the world’s wildest places, environments that have the power to make a human being feel very small, very vulnerable and very alive. This is an account of his most breath-taking expeditions heading into the Death Zone on the roof of the world in the Himalaya, and picking a precarious route up hundreds of metres of rock in the Arctic and Alps. There are expeditions of exploration, as Steve makes the first ascent of Mount Kuli in the Bornean rainforest and scales the tabletop mountains of the ‘Lost World’, Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, in search of undiscovered animal species on their summits. He recalls his apprenticeship in the art of mountaineering with the Indian army, an attempt on Cholatse (2005), his ascent of Cho Oyu (2006), and the terror and near-disaster of some of his more ill-fated adventures, including the fall that should have ended his life in 2008.