Publisher's Synopsis
In the tradition of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb, Jon E. Lewis takes the reader into the depleted zone of extreme mountaineering. Presenting first-hand accounts of climbs on the great peaks and 'big walls' of five continents, spanning an arc in time from the new alpinism of the 1930s to the present, On the Edge is a book about the furthest reaches of human daring and endurance.
Among the accounts:
Reinhold Messner's successful scaling of Nanga Parbat in 1970, only to lose his brother in an avalanche on the descent
Maurice Herzog's unstoppable ascent of Annapurna at the cost of his frost-bitten fingers
Sebastian Snow's peak-to-peak scaling of two Ecuadorean mountains
Walter Bonatti's tragic attempt on Mont Blanc, leaving four of his seven-man party dead in the snow
