One Mountain More

The Book

What makes a person sacrifice their life for a summit? We all climb for different reasons, but loss of life is the price you pay for not getting away with it.

I wanted to share the story of living a life of adventure, the part where I felt most alive, most intense, the strongest, smart, carefree and out of my mind – beyond the pale – wild with enthusiasm, doing what I wanted and getting away with it. Climbing the highest mountains, finding the right lover, living the biggest lie, I set out to conquer the world from desperate poverty and lived to tell about it with the fear I would be caught, or the disappointment I would hurt someone I loved. Or wind up dead like Dave Besh or Tom Taplin, both victims of the passion that killed them.

Stuggling to summit Mt. Everest, Denali, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, Mt. Blanc, the Matterhorn and Mt. Cook, you can go around the world and laugh at the irony. A thought provoking, romantically charged tale by a first person confidant. Focused on adventure, he uses the metaphore of climbing six of the highest mountains on the seven continents — leaving him one mountain short.

The Wild meets Richard Halliburton’s New Worlds to Conquer.

This unexpected cultural history spans 45 years, from Viet Nam to Obama’s global warming, from the cocaine trade, to making love on Mt. Kilimanjaro. It’s an expose on life that is timeless because the hard tales of mountain climbing last forever, only the stories change.