Utter Compulsion

There is something utterly compelling about books like Trekking in the Everest Region, Living Arctic, Into Thin Air, Icebound, the Arctic Grail, The North-West Passage by Land, Ice: Stories of Survival From Polar Exploration, and The last of His Kind. They grip the imagination, holding the reader spellbound in fascination for the daring, foresight and courage of the human will to explore this world we inhabit.

Humankind's curiosity to know as much as possible about the world's far frozen reaches and the majestic heights, the geological formations, hostile and forbidding, but irresistible, leading people from northern nations to discover, explore and engage with the realities of raw nature never fails to amaze.

Those intrepid explorers who set out with faith in their capacities and abilities to survive the most formidable existential odds; man against nature at its most unpredictable, inclement. Where indeed, humankind and even other forms of animal or bird life avoid being trapped in an environment they will never be able to extricate themselves from alive. These relatively few who set out with mountain conquest in mind, intent on summiting the most impossible heights must be imbued with a special gene rendering them immune to the fears that usually grip others far less adventurous.

That they do fear the unknown but yet convince themselves that the draw of their will to survive equalling the wish to discover and to know, along with the perceived integrity of their search far outweighs the potential for disaster places them in a very special category. To read about their adventurous exploits is to experience a wan reflection of what it is they face against the imperious contours of the Earth's crust, the hostile environments that nature has bestowed upon vast, isolated areas of this Planet we call our home.

The ferocity of their dedication to searching out the mysteries of Earth's natural formations, mapping them, surviving countless ordeals to bring back news to the more timid of us - which describes the huge majority of people - is matched only by nature's own ferocious determination to demonstrate, time and again, her imperial mastery over humankind's ingenuity and stolid perseverance.

The book I've just completed reading, by a master American mountaineer, David Roberts, writing of his mentor, Bradford Washburn, in The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America's Boldest Mountaineer; The Last of His Kind, is a lesson in the stubborn resolve and fascinating life-work of one such man. As an explorer extraordinaire, master alpine photographer, geologist, and science museum curator, Bradford Washburn was indeed one of a kind in his huge sense of curiosity, his perfectionism, his assurance that determined will would conquer all.

Leaving behind a legacy comprised of new methods of mountain exploration, concise mountain, glacier and icy-canyon photographs, and detailed instructions to match his experiences with the new generation of enterprising, committed young men and women who are compelled to repeat his, his climbing peers', their predecessors' and successors' fabulous exploits.