Forever on the Mountain: The Truth Behind One of the Most Tragic, Mysterious, and Controversial Disasters in Mountaineering History »

James M. Tabor, a writer in Waitsfield, Vermont, and a former contributing editor to Outside, hosted the national PBS series The Great Outdoors. He has attempted Mt. McKinley and summitted Mt. Sanford.

In July 1967, seven young men—members of Joe Wilcox's twelve-man expedition—died on Mt. McKinley, North America's highest peak.

Ten days passed with no rescue attempt, while more than half an expedition was stranded and dying at 20,000 feet during a vicious Arctic storm. The bodies were never recovered. And, for reasons that have remained cloudy, there was no proper official investigation of the catastrophe.

This book begins as a classic tale of men against nature, gambling—and losing—on one of the world's starkest and stormiest peaks. Reckoning by lives lost, it was history's third-worst mountaineering disaster when it occurred—but elements of finger pointing, incompetence, and cover-up make this disaster unlike any other. James M. Tabor draws on previously untapped sources: personal interviews with survivors and those involved in the aftermath, unpublished diaries and letters, and government documents. He consults not only mountaineers but also experts in disciplines including meteorology, forensics, and psychology. What results is the first full account of the tragedy that ended a golden age in mountaineering. Maps; 8 pages of illustrations.

Publishers Weekly

Tabor's exhaustive look at the doomed 1967 expedition to scale Alaska's Mt. McKinley is an often gripping, detailed account of the infamous climb that remains controversial. Only five of the 12-man team survived the ascent to the 20,320-foot summit, making it one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in North America. The journey was fraught with tension from the beginning: the National Park Service (NPS) required a group of nine men, led by Joe Wilcox, to merge with a three-member party of Coloradoans, led by Howard Snyder. Wilcox and Snyder clashed almost immediately. Both men survived and went on to retell the trip in books: Snyder in his 1973 version that mostly blamed Wilcox's leadership; Wilcox's account in 1981 cited an overpowering storm as the culprit in the deaths. Tabor (who hosted PBS's Great Outdoors) shows that the NPS was very slow to react and might have saved the climbers with quicker response. His writing about the brutal difficulties of climbing Mt. McKinley in subfreezing temperatures with hurricane-like wind in blizzard conditions is breathtaking, although he lapses into minutiae and repeats details, particularly regarding the accident's investigation. His profiles of the expedition's survivors 40 years later make for a strong conclusion to the book. (July)