The Last Step: The American Ascent of K-2, by Rick Ridgeway. Seattle: The Mountaineers, Washington, 1980. 352 pages, including 32 pages of color photos $25.00.

Take fourteen people of varying personality, profession and inclination; add an extended stay in a foreign country, mediocre diet, a healthy dose of bad weather and high altitude and the morass of problems one would expect from being confined with the same fourteen people for three months without respite, and presto, you have the classic ingredients for an expedition book. The Last Step is a classic expedition tale, not in the stoic sense of pre-war British accounts, or even in the nationalistic/ heroic mold of Annapurna. This is an intimate look at life on a large, modern expedition, as Ridgeway sums up in his final chapter:

“I asked myself if on this expedition there were any heroes, and I realized the answer was no. We had no gallant knights conquering new worlds. Instead we had fourteen people overcoming their all-too-human frailties to achieve a goal. In that sense maybe we were heroes— modern-day ones—anti-heroes. Not larger than life, but ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses.” (p. 296).

The look at times gets too intimate. Ridgeway is not the first person to delve deeply into the motivations and psyches of his companions, to explore the murkier aspects of intra-team politics. Indeed, he finds himself in distinguished company: Bonington Hornbein, Rowell, and even himself in the previous Everest book, to mention but a few that come to mind. What seems different, and hence unique about the present work is the sheer scope of the drama, from the subtle competitive urgings of one’s peers, through what seem to me to be almost embarrassingly personal details. Ridgeway is to be congratulated for his honesty, and, to his credit, he uses many excerpts from diaries and letters to provide as balanced a view as seems possible. Nevertheless, he doesn’t paint a pretty picture of expedition life, and in many ways the mass of personal observation presented is tedious and gets in the way of the story itself.

And the story is a good one. The route is long and dangerous, if not extremely technical; and it is to the credit of all participants that the summit is reached despite considerable bad weather and the very long siege involved. In addition, no one gets killed (a real relief), and three of the four summit climbers make it without oxygen

This last fact is significant: whereas Messner and Habeler have been looked upon as some sort of superhuman hardmen/fanatics, the Americans seem more down to earth, and their performance on K-2 makes the whole arena of high-altitude climbing seem that much more accessible to mere mortals. On the other hand, Roskelley comes off as fairly low-key in the book, but one wonders just how mellow he can be with the incredible pace he has kept up over the past several years!

Included in the book is a single 32-page section of color photos which show the team, the route and the progress of the climb. One can only guess at the task involved in their selection, but overall the photos are excellent, both in quality and in production. This graphic section is intended to stand on its own, separate from the text, and in this it is remarkably successful; the captions are a blend of strict information and quotes from the text, and the editors have been gracious enough to let the photographs speak largely for themselves.

In conclusion, then, The Last Step is a good book, well worth reading and owning; but, like the climb itself, and the people whose story it is, the book is also flawed. It is this human quality that makes the book valuable.

Michael Kennedy