Lincoln Hall (1955–2012)

Excellent book! I've read quite a few mountain books about quite a few disasters, but this one stands out because it's about someone who went through shit that's unthinkable ... and lived to tell the tale. Usually when people survive to tell their story it's because they were never in that much danger, or got out of it in time, but not Lincoln Hall. He fucking died and then still came back to tell the tale.

Compared to, say, Beck Weather's Left for dead, it takes us RIGHT with him, through everything. We get to see the event as he experienced at the time, including the hallucinations that are - at times - presented almost as fact, even though you as the reader understands that he probably didn't get up to find a small hut with a fire going after being left by the sherpas. But of course, he wouldn't have realized that at the time, and it gives you a greater understanding of what was going on up there.

I'm definitely gonna pick up some of his other books about mountaineering!… (más)

I am prompted to go back to this book, thinking of the recent death of Lincoln Hall. The newspapers, as best I recollect, managed to resist the temptation to headline ¨No, really.¨ But it´s true, asbestos claimed him earlier this year, sitting dormant in his lungs all that while. Mountaineering is one of my interests - reading about it anyhow. I was already following the stories from Everest when Lincoln Hall did the most unusual thing possible in the circumstances, that is to say (like the fictional boy), he lived - surviving a night exposed on the mountain at 8600m.

Following the story then, and reading Lincoln´s account of it some time later it seemed to me that the most interesting people in the story were Dan Mazur (whose team found Lincoln and then gave up their summit attempt to stay with him until help arrived) and Lincoln´s wife. Lincoln himself comes across as very normal. A regular guy with a hobby, who might not have attracted so much attention, but for that time when he was hallucinating that he was sitting in a boat while actually half naked 5 miles up and inches from a ten thousand foot drop.

For those with an interest in Himalayan mountaineering this book is a good read, for anyone interested in high altitude survival it´s a must read. But for those that are looking for inspirational mountaineering stories I´d recommend starting somewhere else, and perhaps come back to this later - because oddly enough, the more you know about Everest the more extraordinary the story of Lincoln´s survival becomes.… (más)

A fascinating and personal account by Lincoln Hall of the events on Everest in May 2006. I particularly liked how Hall tries to show the non-climber how being in the Death Zone confuses the mind and the body. He also tries to put the controversial death of David Sharp into context with his own survival against the odds, which leads to an exploration of how he feels that Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques may have contributed to his survival of a night at 8,600 metres. He is changed by all of his experiences, as he comments, 'My scrape with death had shaken me free of some of those restrictions. I now find myself in a space where judgements are fewer, where habits don't seem as necessary.'… (más)