Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest Hardcover – April 25, 2000

Beck Weathers lived a nightmare few ever will. As a member of the Rob Hall "Adventure Consultants" climbing team on Mt. Everest during the worst tragedy ever (to that point) May 9, 10, 11, 1996. Beck Weathers had spent years using his time off from his work to go mountain climbing to the detriment of his marriage and to his wife's growing dislike. Peach Weathers was ready to throw in the towel as Beck readied for the trip to Nepal. Beck and Peach sent faxes to each other, back and forth, during the weeks Beck was on the mountain training for the summit bid.On summit day, the "Adventure Consultants" team left Camp 4 for the summit about Midnight May 10th. The higher they climbed and as the sun was rising, Beck realized he was becoming blind. At first he stayed as close as he could to the person ahead of him but when he reached "the balcony" he steps off the trail, realizing that he is blind and cannot go farther up no can he go down. Team leader, Rob Hall, climbing at the rear of his climbers, finds Beck on "the balcony" and Beck explains his problem. Rob Hall gets Beck to promise to not move off "the balcony" until he, Rob Hall, comes back for him. Beck promises. Beck talks with those climbers going up and or down as the day progresses. When Beck's team mates try to get him to let them take him down, he refuses saying he promised Rob Hall he would wait for Rob to return. Rob never returns and perishes on the mountain above Beck.Some of Beck's team mates and some of the Scott Fischer team from "Mountain Madness" finally convince Beck to go down the mountain to Camp 4 with them. They end up descending into a blizzard whiteout and become lost, 900 yards from Camp 4. The group make a huddle in the snow and try to keep each other alive by pounding on back, massaging feet and legs, etc. During a brief clearing, one of the team figures out where they are and goes to Camp 4 for help. When he arrives, Fischer guide Anatoli Boukreev is awake and goes looking for the missing people. In the whiteout conditions he is unable to find them. Back at Camp 4 he tries to awaken Sherpas, other climbers, but all are too depleted by low oxygen and unable to help. Boukreev goes out again and finds the group that is stranded. All except for Beck Weathers who has seemingly wandered off. Additionally, one of the women climbers in the group is beyond helping. They return to Camp 4 without Beck or the woman and consider them dead.Over the next many hours, Beck lies immobile in the snow, then gets up and wanders around, only to again fall. He begins to think about home and family and Peach whom he desperately wants to go home to. On one of his wanderings, 36 hours or later since descending, he has strong visions of his family. He longs to go home.Beck wanders into Camp 4 to the amazement of the climbers who are preparing to descend. Beck looks so bad they just put him into a sleeping bag in one of the tents and leave him, thinking he is close to death. The next day as climbers from below arrive to help the few left at Camp 4, Beck realizes he is being left yet again and yells for help. The climbers who find him are dumbfounded he is alive and begin working to get him down from the Death Zone. Beck can feel he is going home.From this point is an amazing rescue, an international effort to get a helicopter up to where one has never been to fly him down the mountain and then on to a hospital in Nepal. The rebuilding of a life surrounded by family, love, and commitment to each other for Beck and Peach is what makes this story great.Admittedly, some of this story is difficult to read. And it's easy to shed tears, too. But love conquers all and it's a great and well written book. I highly recommend it.

In addition to this book, I am concurrently reading Into Thin Air by Krakauer, and one thing that surprised me was that the prose of Beck Weathers's book seems at least as good as Krakauer's. Some of his descriptions, as when he describes Everest’s Khumbu Icefall, struck me as being even better. The more intimate passages, discussing his physical and mental state, are similarly vivid. Of course, this was written with Stephen Michaud, but the voice and tone -- when Beck and not the other people in his life are commenting -- is so full of character that this is certainly not a project farmed out extensively to someone else. This is Beck's tale, even as it is also his wife's, children's, and to a certain extent, friends' tale. Does it get a bit too granular in the autobiographical stretches, at times? Perhaps: that's a matter of taste. But the outstanding fact is that B. W. is someone I feel I would be happy to know. In fact, I came to this book (and Krakauer's) in the first place because I'd seen the 2015 docudrama, Everest, and the Beck character impressed me as the best of the bunch.Many reviewers remark on how 'flawed' Weathers is. He certainly, in manly fashion, fesses up to having let himself and his family down by allowing outside pursuits to dominate his time (not always mountaineering, but other risky sports through the years as well). Yet what stands out for me is Beck's charisma, and when a friend comments near the end of the book that Beck has a 'great heart', I agree with that on the evidence. There are millions of men (and very many women) that give themselves over to thrill-seeking and materialism in an effort to divert their attention from the spiritual-emotional-intellectual hole at the center of their lives. Then again, many of them are shallow instead of seriously depressed. Beck should be given credit for at least or even heroically attempting to grasp life -- in the ways that he could at the time -- rather than put his head in the oven, like Sylvia Plath, or hang himself, like L'Wren Scott. But Beck seems always to have been a fundamentally good soul and a thoroughly if not perfectly good-natured man. That's an achievement all by itself. The fact is, in the end he shed his depression and found a whole new outlook on life. If Beck is flawed, what does that say about the rest of us? He was never a philosopher, and has suffered all his life till recently because of that. But something in his ordinary life was not good for him, was suffocating him, and made him what we call ‘depressed’. And that very depression points to the fact that his soul was hungering for something more than the material professional success his parents wanted for him.Beck Weathers wasn’t flawed because he wanted a kind of highness (ironic, as he’s afraid of heights) and refused to be satisfied with the ordinary. He wouldn’t have been happy if he’d tried harder to embrace it. To the contrary, the kind of 'ordinary' that had been given to him was killing him from the inside out. In his confused groping way, he had to reject the ordinary to grab at what really felt like living -- beyond mundane constraints, shallow standards, and invalid judgements. His real problem was that he rejected these ordinary standards of success incompletely. He was still concerned with status, with rating himself. This is why Everest is so meaningful, and this is why its painful repercussions had a kind of emotional logic. It was the near loss of his life on Everest that got him to complete the project of rejecting the definition of 'success' that had done so much to hurt him. This is the lesson of the book: on the one hand, Everest nearly got him killed and was apparently disastrous and foolhardy. On the other hand, and more importantly, the man survived and even thrived after the crisis had passed. What Everest really killed off was his attachment to an illusion. To the extent that most of us still believe in that illusion and live with it every day, Beck Weathers is well ahead. Wiser than most -- and funnier -- is my judgement of him. At the end of this greatly touching and compelling book I had rather an emotional moment, and narrowly avoided shedding tears.

I bought this book thinking it would be largely about the author's amazing self-rescue on Everest or at least more about climbing, but at least half is a long biography of the author, his wife, and their large group of relatives.It does show the benefits of being wealthy and connected when the author's wife can enlist senators and George W Bush for rescue support.

This read took me to laughter and to tears. What an amazing story of survival!Hard to put down once I started.

Very emotional. This book is not only a report of would be a personal tragedy, it is a screenplay about how you can face your problems, your demons, and take your second chance. Amazing example.

How Beck managed to survive, alone, frost bitten and given up for dead is a testimony to a will to survive and think clearly against huge odds. It’s also a story of how his wife marshalled emergency services and never gave up. There has been a number of accounts of the climb and this is right up there for readability.

最初にヤマケイ文庫の「空へ」を読み、次にアナトリ・ブクレーエフの「デス・ゾーン」を図書館から借りて読み、映画をAmazonビデオで借りてみて、最期にこの本に到達。　ベック・ウェザースがどんな人なのかというのはかなり興味深く思っていたので、彼自身の著作でようやく様々なことが氷解してきた。山そのものもさることながら、商業登山に加わる人たちの内面が垣間見えたのが興味深かったので、苦労して入手して良かった。これほど一気に読んだ本は最近の私には珍しい。

People who are driven to do insane things like risk their lives to climb mountains fascinate me. This story however is actually more about the man himself and what drives his depression which I found interesting and honest. That being said, his survival on Everest is nothing short of a miracle.

ずっと探していた一冊でやっと手に入れることが出来とてもうれしかったです。実体験の貴重なお話です。