Higher Than the Eagle Soars: A Path to Everest

Higher Than the Eagle Soars distills “the intense essence” of his Everest climb, concentrating on the drama of the final climb and nightmarish descent. It is an intimate and epic account of an event that confirmed Venables as the greatest British climber of his generation.

I have been wanting for some time now to revisit the Everest climb. Although the book I wrote about it [Everest: Alone at the Summit] was very successful and has appeared in four different editions, it conformed superficially to an “expedition book,” telling the whole story from beginning to end, with considerable technical detail. It would be good to go back and extract the intense essence of the story, concentrating on the drama of the final climb and nightmarish descent, making a grand finale to the book.

Although Everest wasn’t the end of my climbing career, it was a big turning point: it had quelled the demon of ambition and I sensed that I would probably never do anything quite so extreme in the mountains. And, although we didn’t go seeking deliberately an epic near-death experience, it did turn out that way — the ultimate endurance test for which all the previous adventures seemed, retrospectively, to be a preparation.

Stephen Venables is best known as the mountaineer who in 1988 became the first Briton to climb Everest without oxygen. He has written eight books about his mountain travels, winning the Boardman Tasker Prize, the King Albert Medal and the Grand Award at Banff International Mountain Literature Festival.