From Forever on the Mountain
courtesy of Gayle Nienheuser
© Bill Babcock

Thursday, November 1
Daytime Program
10:30 – 11:40 a.m.
Max Bell Auditorium

James Tabor

Forever on the Mountain

James Tabor’s Forever on the Mountain tells the story of North America’s greatest expeditionary mountaineering disaster. In the summer of 1967, an arctic storm hit an expedition of 12 young men headed toward the summit of Alaska’s Mt. McKinley. For ten days the storm raged with no official rescue attempted, leaving over half the team trapped at 6,096 metres. In the end, only five men returned alive.

What actually happened, and why, has remained a bitterly debated question. In the controversial aftermath, some critics pointed to poor leadership, while others pointed to Park Service bureaucracy. None of the victim’s bodies were recovered, and no cameras, diaries, or films were retrieved to shed light on the events. A hasty and biased investigation was followed by conflicting versions of the catastrophe. Now, 40 years later, in Forever on the Mountain Tabor reveals the truth behind one of mountaineering’s most tragic and contentious disasters. Through two years of interviews, unpublished correspondence and diaries, and government documents, Tabor has pieced together the complete and untold story of this expedition, the survivors, and the valiant rescue efforts made by another civilian team on the mountain.

James M. Tabor is a former contributing editor to Outside and SKI magazine. His work has also appeared in Time, U.S. News, the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, the Washington Post, and numerous other national publications. Tabor was the writer and on-camera host of the popular national PBS series “The Great Outdoors.”

Tabor has taken great pains to understand one of American climbing’s great disasters. He tells a gripping story, and he tells it with authority and with compassion for its victims-the living as well as the dead.

— Clint Willis, author of The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and
the Tragedy of Climbing’s
Greatest Generation