Monday, June 1, 2026

Dark Summit

Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season by Nick Heil

This is the chronicle of the 2006 season on Everest. Another year with a lot of fatalities. Also included is some history of Himalayan climbing, back to Mallory. This will be familiar ground to those who have read about other tragedies about climbing, which sometimes seems like the only kind.

The author does provide a nice summary list of the books published about the 1996 season “Before long a small library of firsthand accounts emerged, most notably Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb, Beck Weathers’s Left for Dead, Kenneth Kamler’s Doctor on Everest, and Matt Dickinson’s The Other Side of Everest.”