cover image The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm

The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm

Matt Dickinson. Crown Publishers, $23 (233pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-3159-4

Although Dickinson's work follows in the tracks of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb, it is anything but a ""me too"" book about climbing Mt. Everest during the spring of 1996, when a storm killed eight climbers. Dickinson has his own story to tell, and he tells it very well. A filmmaker by trade, he was hired by a British production company to film an attempt to scale Everest from the North Face (as opposed to the southern route taken by Krakauer and Boukreev). Dickinson's party--which was led by guides from an outfit called Himalayan Kingdoms and included British actor Brian Blessed--arrived at Everest in the first week in April. Dickinson recounts how his team heard about the tragedy that was unfolding on the south side, as well as how word filtered down the mountain that three Indian climbers had been lost on the North Face. It wasn't until May 15 that the Himalayan Kingdoms team set out for the summit, but it quickly became apparent that Blessed would never finish the climb, forcing Dickinson to change the focus of his film from the actor to his cameraman. After several harrowing hours, the two men reached the summit, and Dickinson, who had not originally intended to go above base camp, had his 47-minute documentary, Summit Fever. If Dickinson doesn't write with the haunted urgency of Krakauer, that's because he isn't trying to exorcise any ghosts. Nor is he intent, as Boukreev was, on rebutting Krakauer. ""I am not an authority on mountaineering,"" he writes, but his descriptions of climbing are careful and informative, taking nothing for granted. His forceful narrative makes a worthy addition to the growing Everest library. Author tour. (May)