Wretched Recommendations: White Death

The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone

I actually got this book by accident. I meant to order The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis by Thomas Dormandy. Unsurprisingly, I put this book aside and ignored it for a few years to punish it for not being the book I wanted to read. Finally, running out of unread material, I rescued it from oblivion and took it with me as my in-flight read last month. And, apart from a couple of chapters that absolutely DARE you to skip them, it was a pretty interesting read.

The story centers on a group of mountaineering friends who, like all young men, think they’re invincible. In December 1969, they attempt to do something that had never been done before: climb Mt. Cleveland in Montana’s Glacier National Park in wintertime. Well, the reason it had never been done before is because the geography of Mt. Cleveland makes it an ideal avalanche zone. And I think you can probably guess from the title what happens.

The biography of each climber and the story of that fateful final climb is stretched out over the course of the book, intermingled with some interesting historical accounts of avalanche death and some less-than-interesting detailed analysis of various types of snow and what makes certain types more conducive to avalanches than others. Although I guess some of that stuff was kinda interesting: whenever we get snow that doesn’t stick together at all, I know to call it “sugar snow” and I know that a layer of sugar snow that is later covered over by additional snowfall is called “depth hoar” and is the ultimate avalanche-inducing nightmare for anyone journeying through the mountains. However, the author does go a bit too far in discussing the technical details of snow. I admit one chapter was nearly skipped in its entirety.

Still, this is a very good read for anyone interested in mountain tragedy. (And who isn’t?) Not as good as “Into Thin Air,” the masterpiece of this genre, but pretty interesting nonetheless. (4/5)