Winter 8000: Climbing the World’s Highest Mountains in the Coldest Season

Limited, Signed, & Numbered Edition of 250

While you wouldn’t expect climbing an 8000-meter peak in winter to be a popular activity, there have been 178 expeditions (as of 2019) to the Himalaya and Karakoram during the cruelest season to do just that. Polish alpinist, Voytek Kurtyka, termed the practice the "art of suffering." The stories begin with the original “Ice Warrior” – Andrzej Zawada – and his Polish team of Himalayan climbers who systematically claimed first winter ascents of more than half of the 8000ers. But although Polish climbers dominated the winter game for a generation, this story is international: Swiss climber Marianne Chapuisat’s first female winter ascent of an 8000er (Cho Oyu), American Cory Richards and his dramatic effort on Gasherbrum II with famed Italian alpinist Simone Moro and Kazakh hard man Denis Urubko, and many more.

Award-winning author Bernadette McDonald traveled extensively to interview many of the climbers featured in this book—including Élisabeth Revol, who made the first female winter ascent of Nanga Parbat with Tomek Mackiewicz, as well as Anna Mackiewicz, his widow, meeting them shortly after Tomek’s death on the mountain and Élisabeth’s dramatic solo descent and rescue. McDonald’s many personal relationships with profiled climbers and her ability to tap into emotions and family histories lend Winter 8000 an intimacy too often lacking in mountaineering histories. These accounts prove the point: Nature is not subservient to man.

This special, signed edition has a different binding from the unsigned trade edition and contains an additional signature page with the limitation number and Bernadette’s signature.

Finalist 2020 Banff Mountain Book Festival Mountain Literature Award, shortlisted for the UK’s 2020 Great Outdoors Book of the Year, and Winner 2021 ITAS Prize Mountaineering and Mountain Sports.