Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest

Herein, you'll find no clients being towed by their guides, no tourist routes, no bottled oxygen, no climber traffic jams, and no Sherpas hauling the author's gear. This book is about the ultimate climb: the hardest route up the highest mountain. Finally, the author and his partners completed the climb for love rather than money.

In Snow in the Kingdom, Ed Webster is a photographer above all else. Like others before him (Lito Tejada-Flores, James Balog, Galen Rowell) Ed knew that publishing his photo-intensive book with a conventional publisher would not allow him to obtain either the clarity or quantity that he needed to properly tell his story So Ed spent a decade rounding up the money, hired the best editors/designers/scanners that money could buy in Colorado (subsequently going into debt), and laboriously began self publishing his own book. We should be thankful that he's been down the road of self publishing before, because this is no amateur's tome. The end result: 150 pages of color photos in five separate signatures! Not counting 582 pages of textand even then you can't turn the book more than four pages without being arrested by a new black and white photo! All printed sharply on a 70-pound stock that does the photographer's work justice. If this isn't enough, the author has obtained unpublished photographs of Noel Odell's from Mallory's Everest expeditions, along with a host of pictures taken by other well-known Everest climbers and photographers. If you were to buy such a beautifully laid-out book like this from a conventional photo-book publisher, say Abrams or Chronicle, you'd pay twice as much and get half the text (eg, Bradford Washburn's elegant Mount McKinley opus).

Because Snow in the Kingdom is not just breath-taking photographs of culture and history and real climbing. You will, and I would like to emphasize will, buy this book because Ed Webster gives us his heart and soul on a platter. His is a deeply personal story about loss. The loss of Lauren Husted, a woman he once loved, who died with her head in his lap after their climbing accident in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. Loss of his fingers and toes to Everest. And loss of his ability to climb--a talent that sustained Ed Webster for nearly thirty years. Or to put it in one of his fondest quotes (by Elizabeth Knowlton): "To those men who are born for mountains, the struggle can never end, until their lives endto them it holds the very quintessence of livingthe fiery core, after the lesser parts have burned away."

This is also a story about climbing the Kangshung Face of Mount Everest in 1989. The route is menaced by hanging glacier avalanches and technical climbing difficulties (famed alpinists Alex Lowe and David Breashears returned to the Kangshung several years later and found that they could not drag up their wealthy client, who later became famous in Into Thin Air for being dragged up the tourist route) and remains the territory of only world-class alpinists. On the way, the reader is given both an in-depth tour to Ed's emotions and the climbing history of Everest, including two of Ed's earlier attempts on the mountain. Through text and pictures, you meet many of the personalities of Everest and luminaries of climbing: Reinhold Messner, Sir John Hunt, Jim Bridwell, Audrey Saukeld, Peter Athens, rock star Billy Squier (one of Ed's clients), Sir Chris Bonnington, Joe Brown, Roger Marshall, Tenzing Norgay (and his son), Jay Smith, Sir Edmond Hillary, Fritz Wiessner; and Ed's Kangshung teammates: Paul Teare, Robert Anderson, and Stephen Venables.

Of course, by the end, we learn the specific price for the 1989 Kangshung Face Team's boldness. Ed escorts his partners, more dead than alive, back down the face. No one is really unscathed, but Ed in particular will never be the same again. I'm not going to spill the denouement here, so the best I can do is encourage you to read the book and find out for yourself what happens, in the most handsomely crafted Everest book ever produced.


Incredibly Beautiful Book!   May 8, 2001
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Snow in the Kingdom by Ed Webster is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. The writing is precise and perfect, the photography stunning beyond belief, and the quality of the book is excellent. To not read this book would be like missing out on some important part of life.


Awesome photos, moving story   March 9, 2001
 13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Webster's Snow in the Kingdom is different than, and better than, the many Everest books that have come out in recent years. The stunning photography--literally hundreds of photos, many in color and many appropriately in black and white--come at a great price for Webster and are worthy of a more expensive coffee table book themselves. Add to that a fascinating, moving text that goes far beyond the usual "we climbed, we almost died, we made it out" adventure saga. Webster talks about excursions and experiences that made him the person who wanted to climb a new route up Everest. He humanizes Himalayan moutaineering in a way that not even Krakauer does. It's an exciting story, but it's much more than an adventure yarn. This is one of the best text-photo combination books on any subject I have seen.


Gets more powerful as it goes on   March 6, 2001
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Webster's writing is not especially evocative, but it gathers power as the book goes on, rather like a Kangshung avalanche. This story of three Everest expeditions, the last one involving a new East Face route, is also a story about someone pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits and paying for it. The book left me feeling as if I had read a tragedy, not a triumph. The photos, as other reviewers have mentioned, are gorgeous, though unfortunately all were not reproduced in color.