In a fascinating new book, climber and author Michael Wejchert tells of two couples and a tragedy in remote Alaskan mountains
“It’s beautifully overwhelming,” says Michael Wejchert of the rock, ice and alpine routes he has climbed all over the world. “There’s a moment that anybody who’s climbed in a remote part of the Alaska range can remember where the plane flies away and suddenly the sound of the engine fades and you’re completely alone on a glacier, miles and miles from anywhere and that silence, especially at first, is deafening. It’s an incredible environment.”
But the pristine beauty comes with a hint of menace, perhaps most famously captured in Touching the Void, Joe Simpson’s gripping memoir of a fight for survival after falling from an ice cliff, breaking his leg and being “left for dead” in a storm in the Peruvian Andes.
