The bestselling writer of No Shortcuts to the very best and K2 chronicles his three attempts to climb the world’s tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak, Annapurna in the Himalaya, while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of other people who have made — or attempted – the ascent, and what these exploits teach us about facing life’s greatest challenges.

As a high school college student in the flatlands of Rockford, Illinois, where about The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Goal to Climb Annapurna–the World’s Deadliest Peak the highest items on the horizon were drinking water towers, Ed Viesturs go through and was captivated with the French climber Maurice Herzog’s famous and grisly account of the first ascent of Annapurna in 1950. When he started his own campaign to climb the world’s 14 highest peaks in the late 1980s, Viesturs looked ahead with trepidation to starting Annapurna himself. Two failures to summit in 2000 and 2002 made Annapurna his nemesis. His successful 2005 ascent was the triumphant capstone of his climbing search. In The Can To Climb Viesturs brings the extraordinary challenges of Annapurna to vibrant existence through edge-of-your-seat accounts of the greatest climbs in the mountain’s history, and of his very own failed tries and eventual achievement. In the process he ponders what Annapurna reveals about some of our most fundamental moral and religious questions–questions, he believe, that people need to answer to business lead our lives well.

‘Of all fourteen from the world’s highest mountains, which I climbed between 1989 and 2005,’ writes Viesturs, ‘the one which came the closest to defeating my greatest attempts was Annapurna.” Although it was the first 8,000-meter top to be climbed, Annapurna is not as well referred to as the world’s highest mountain, Everest, or second highest, K2. But simply because Viesturs argues, Annapurna, without technically the most difficult from the 8,000ers, may be the most challenging because it has no route–no ridge or face on any aspect of the mountain–that is normally relatively free from what climbers contact ‘objective danger’-the threat of avalanches, above all, but also of collapsing seracs (large ice blocks), falling rocks, and crevasses. Since its 1st ascent in 1950, Annapurna continues to be climbed by more than 130 people, but 53 have died attempting. This high fatality price makes Annapurna one of the most dangerous from the 8,000-meter peaks.

Viesturs and co-author David Roberts chronicle Ed’s three tries to climb Annapurna, aswell as the attempts of others, from the two French climbers who all made the landmark initial ascent of Annapurna on June 3, 1950, through the daring and tragic campaigns of such world-class mountaineers while Reinhold Messner and Anatoli Boukreev. Viesturs’s accounts and analyses of the extraordinary adventures provide as a spot of departure for his exploration of designs vividly illustrated by Annapurna expeditions, including obsession and dedication, dread and fulfillment, failing and triumph–issues which have been neglected in the normally very rich books of mountaineering, and that may inform the lives and actions of everyone.