326 pages, Sierra Club Books, ISBN-13: 978-0871561848
Galen Rowell’s In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods was first published in 1978 and is an account of the 1975 American K2 Expedition’s attempt on the northwest ridge of that peak, interspersed with the history of mountaineering in the Karakoram Range of the western Himalayas and with earlier accounts of K2 attempts (some successful; most not). Be advised, though, for almost the entire book deals with the myriad problems and disputes between the members of the climbing team, their porters and so forth; as stated in the Foreword, “the book is about the personalities of those who climb” and not about the climb itself.
This is itself ironic, for after all the team discussions about the possibly negative implications of having a woman – Dianne Roberts, the wife of the leader, Jim Whittaker – on the team, she really figured very little in the disputes and quarrels; it was also ironic that there was still a lot of dissention and miscommunication amongst the team members on the actual expedition, even after the team expelled Alex Bertulis, due to lack of confidence in his ability to be a team player. After a while one finds these (overly detailed) accounts of bickering to be boring and welcomes the interspacing of the historical accounts and those of the more interesting concurrent expeditions.
But all is not lost, for the excellent color plates and black-and-white photographs help the reader to forget his unhappiness with the detailed personality problems of the 1975 expedition. Looking at these images of the highest spot on the planet is enough to make one forget that the humans clinging to the sides of K2 were pretty miserable. In fact, after reading about the latest dust-up between this or that unhappy person I often just flipped through the book for the pictures, the people be damned. So if you find In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods someplace cheap – like I did – by all means pick it up, for the pictures and nothing else.
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