Читать книгу Edge of the Map. The Mountain Life of Christine Boskoff онлайн

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Picking it up, she found herself looking at an image of soft snow covering the tops of a mountain she recognized instantly. Unnaturally blue skies framed the edges of the postcard. At the bottom, just one word: Everest. The metered stamp indicated it had been mailed several weeks earlier, no doubt carried out of base camp and sent from Kathmandu long before the ascent. She’d later learn the postcard had actually been mailed by Jane Courage, who’d said goodbye to Scott and left the mountain before he began his final climb.

Turning it over, she saw Scott’s bold handwriting, filling the postcard with just a handful of words. Reading them, her heart swelled with elation, then took a dive not unlike the plunge of a roller coaster on its last loop.

Geri,

You should have been here. It’s a good one!

—Scott

FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF EIGHT climbers received unimaginable news as a result of the storm on Everest in May of 1996. Four others had died on the mountain that year, making it Everest’s deadliest season to date. Stories from survivors packed the pages of books, most notably Into Thin Air, an account by journalist Jon Krakauer, who had been embedded with the New Zealand expedition that was also on the mountain at the time. His retelling of the disaster became a bestseller. The book resonated within the climbing community, most notably in Seattle, where Mountain Madness lay in turmoil, its leader, for the first time, not coming back.