The climb

The Climb came out in 1997, and it was written by the mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev with the freelance journalist G. Weston DeWalt. Boukreev was one of the guides on the 1996 expedition that ended with eight climbers dead on the mountain.

DeWalt was not part of the expedition. His contribution to the book is to gather accounts from other members of the team and to bind them together with Boukreev's own logbook, so that the narrative is built from more than one person's memory of a night that several survivors described differently.

Part of the purpose of the book was to answer Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which had been published earlier the same year and which was critical of what Boukreev did and did not do on the mountain. After The Climb appeared, DeWalt publicly challenged Krakauer's version of events, and Krakauer answered him in a postscript to a later edition of his own book. Boukreev himself died in an avalanche on Annapurna in 1997, the year The Climb was published.