Ed Douglas has a list of his ten best mountaineering disaster writeups. I'm not sure about "best" here: I would view any expedition where at least one of the team members didn't return a failure, rather than rate it on "bestness". Touching the Void is good here. Heinrich Harrer's "the white spider" a bit bleaker, but then he was documenting all the failures to climb Eigernordwand before he and the others did it. Harrer went on the german expedition to Nanga Parbat, got imprisoned in India when war broke out, and escaped over the Himalaya, writing Seven Years in Tibet about his time there, the best description of Tibet before China moved in/re-occupied historical Chinese territory.
The flags on the snowfield in the photo are to tell people not to walk on that bit; our snow cave 3/4 of the way up Mount Hood was underneath, and having someone fall through the roof would be inconvenient. For anyone who hasn't snowholed, they are very quiet, just a bit, well, damp. No wind though -better than a tent in the English Lakes.
I've never had anything major go wrong on any of my trips, though people I know haven't come back. That's what the mountaineering disaster corner of a book shop doesn't cover: finding out your friends have died in the mountains/
As I've stated before, nobody has yet to make mountain biking literature as mainstream as mountaineering literature, and it really needs some dramatic equivalent of Touching the Void to do this. I am still trying to recruit someone expendable to come with me on an MTB trip across Wales to provide the subject matter for such a book -and the helmet camera filmed DVD.
I was over in Chepstow last weekend interviewing one possible candidate, but he didn't seem enthusiastic about the idea. More work needed.
