skopia
Antarctic pack ice crushes their ship in 1915, leaving twenty-eight men on a drifting floe. Shackleton sails an open boat eight hundred miles for help. Lansing reconstructed it all from the crew's diaries.
At Mann Gulch in 1949 a wildfire turned uphill and killed twelve smokejumpers and a fire guard in minutes. Maclean, past seventy, walked that Montana slope for years to learn what happened.
Herzog and Lachenal reached Annapurna's summit in June 1950, the first men atop an eight-thousand-meter peak. Frostbite cost Herzog every finger and toe during the descent. No mountaineering book has sold like it.
Krakauer climbed Everest on assignment for Outside magazine, summited on May 10, 1996, and came down through the storm that killed eight climbers. He is hardest on his own conduct.
Three men hauled sledges through five weeks of Antarctic winter darkness to fetch penguin eggs, in cold that cracked Cherry-Garrard's teeth. That was before Scott's polar party failed to come back.