Winter 8000: Climbing the World’s Highest Mountains in the Coldest Season

Product Description

2020 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist in Mountain Literature

Recounts some of the most dangerous feats in mountaineering history
Insights into the human attraction to danger and suffering
Award-winning author
While you wouldn’t expect climbing an 8000-meter peak in winter to be a popular activity, there have been 178 expeditions (as of 2019) to the Himalaya and Karakoram during the cruelest season to do just that. Polish alpinist, Voytek Kurtyka, termed the practice the “art of suffering.” The stories here range from the French climber Elisabeth Revol’s solo winter attempt of Makalu, to American Cory Richards and his dramatic effort on Gasherbrum II with famed Italian alpinist Simone Moro and Kazakh hard man Denis Urubko. Award-winning author Bernadette McDonald traveled extensively to interview many of the climbers featured in this book–including Revol, the climbing partner of Tomek Mackiewicz, and Anna Mackiewicz, his widow, meeting them just a few months after Mackiewicz’s death on Nanga Parbat. McDonald’s many personal relationships with profiled climbers and her ability to tap into emotions and family histories lend
Winter 8000 an intimacy too often lacking in mountaineering histories.

These accounts prove the point: Nature is not subservient to man.

Review

There are no stories more terrifying, dramatic, and tearful than the abundant struggles, frequent tragedies, and rare successes in winter Himalayan climbing. — Steve House, author of Beyond the Mountain

Bernadette McDonald has done it again. She has chronicled the first winter ascents of the fourteen highest peaks on Earth by men and women who pushed the limits of mountaineering to glorious new extremes at a terrible cost. Rich in character and conflict, Winter 8000 never turns its back on the central question: Is it worth the risk? — David Roberts, award-winning author of Mountain of My Fear

[Winter 8000] doesn’t flinch from examining the dark sides. It probes the motivations, the past experiences that drove the climbers’ decisions, their feelings toward the mountain and their partners and finally, the oft-neglected postscript. What came after turns out to be an essential part of the story, even if we didn’t realize we were missing it. — Angela Benavides,
ExplorersWeb

With this book, Bernadette McDonald burnishes her already shining reputation as one of our great climbing historians. These accounts give us a fascinating portrayal of the few alpinists who are willing to endure winter ascents of the world’s highest mountains. — Steve Swenson, author of Karakoram: Climbing Through the Kashmir Conflict

A harrowing tale of the history of winter ascents and what challenges are left to face in the world of 8,000-meter climbing.,
Adventure Sports Podcast

Bernadette McDonald’s clear-eyed portrayal of the men and women who embark on these ferocious adventures reveals their addiction to the cruel, rarefied beauty of the high Himalaya, and how intense ambition pushes them to risk destroying their lives and shattering the hearts of those who love them. — Maria Coffey, author of Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow

In Winter 8000, Bernadette McDonald demonstrates once more her essential contribution to mountaineering history. With vividness and keen insight, she evokes a world that few experience firsthand: the landscapes of black ice, thin air, and searing cold–as well as the haunting inner realms of people drawn to the isolation of the highest peaks and the darkest months. — Katie Ives, Editor in Chief,
Alpinist

About the Author

Bernadette McDonald is the author of eleven books on mountaineering and mountain culture, including
Brotherhood of the Rope: the Biography of Charles Houston (Mountaineers Books, 2007) and
I’ll Call You in Kathmandu: the Elizabeth Hawley Story (Mountaineers Books, 2005). McDonald has won numerous awards, including her second Boardman Tasker Prize and the Banff Award for Mountain Literature for
Art of