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    Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure
    Unavailable
    Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure
    Unavailable
    Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure
    Ebook283 pages4 hours

    Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure

    By Maria Coffey

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Maria Coffey's Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow is a powerful, affecting and important book that exposes the far reaching personal costs of extreme adventure.

    Without risk, say mountaineers, there would be none of the self-knowledge that comes from pushing life to its extremes. For them, perhaps, it is worth the cost. But when tragedy strikes, what happens to the people left behind? Why would anyone choose to invest in a future with a high-altitude risk-taker? What is life like in the shadow of the mountain? Such questions have long been taboo in the world of mountaineering. Now, the spouses, parents and children of internationally renowned climbers finally break their silence, speaking out about the dark side of adventure.

    Maria Coffey confronted one of the harshest realities of mountaineering when her partner Joe Tasker disappeared on the Northeast Ridge of Everest in 1982. In Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow, Coffey offers an intimate portrait of adventure and the conflicting beauty, passion, and devastation of this alluring obsession. Through interviews with the world's top climbers, or their widows and families-Jim Wickwire, Conrad Anker, Lynn Hill, Joe Simpson, Chris Bonington, Ed Viesturs, Anatoli Boukreev, Alex Lowe, and many others-she explores what compels men and women to give their lives to the high mountains. She asks why, despite the countless tragedies, the world continues to laud their exploits.

    With an insider's understanding, Coffey reveals the consequences of loving people who pursue such risk-the exhilarating highs and inevitable lows, the stress of long separations, the constant threat of bereavement, and the lives shattered in the wake of climbing accidents.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2007
    ISBN9781429977425
    Unavailable
    Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure
    Author

    Maria Coffey

    Maria Coffey is an internationally published and award-winning author of twelve previous books. Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest won two awards in Italy, including the 2002 ITAS Prize for Mountain Literature; Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow won the Banff Mountain Film Festival Literature Prize in 2003 and a National Book Award in 2004. For these titles, along with Explorers of the Infinite (2008), Maria was awarded the 2009 American Alpine Club H. Adams Carter Literary Award. She has also written extensively about her worldwide travels and expeditions with her husband, Dag Goering, who is a veterinarian and photographer. Together they founded Hidden Places (hiddenplaces.net), a boutique adventure travel company, and its conservation branch, Adventures for a Cause, which fundraises for endangered species. Maria and Dag are based in Victoria, British Columbia, and in Catalonia.

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    Reviews for Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Maria Coffey's deceptively simple style works perfectly in this book allowing the reader insight into the deeply personal and often profound emotions experienced by the families of High Altitude climbers. She perfectly encapsulates the obsessions of the mountaineer, yearning for the mountains from home and yearning for home in the mountains. The dilemma facing their loved one, do they try and stop the climbing and change the person they love forever, or do they live with the fears and let them climb. Coffey, whose boyfriend, Joe Tasker, disappeared on Everest, sensitively explores her own grief and that of others who have lost loved ones, or part of themselves in the mountains.. But she also tries to get to the heart of what drives these men and women to leave hearth and home to risk frostbite, mountain sickness and possible death. This is a superb companion book to the testosterone filled climbing canon.
    • 5/5
      Disarming, disillusioning and distressing. Where The Mountain Casts Its Shadow is all of these and more. It is a saga of human endurance, of the complicated dynamics of our relationships and of the embers that are left simmering long after the fire is gone. Maria Coffey's simple yet stark style of writing disarms one upfront and makes one plunge into the lives of the families of High Altitude Mountaineers. One sees them torn between two loves - their's for the mountaineers, and the mountaineer's for the mountains. The mountains are jealous lovers, yet the mountaineers go back to them leaving everything behind and the ones who love them are left waiting...sometimes forever. This side of the story of the celebrities of mountaineering is disillusioning - the stardom comes with a price, only the price is paid by the families. And the distressing part is to see the families and friends caught between the two loves with nowhere to go. Yet, the book somehow does not make extreme sports repulsive...somewhere it only exposes and hence eases the acceptance of the choice made by our loved ones. Helen Keller had said, "If you keep your eyes to the sun, you won't see the shadow". This book turns your attention towards the shadows - the reality of brightness. And the hard truth is, for someone looking at the far away sun, it is only the shadow that is closer. Highly recommended reading.