The Ledge by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan
“An adventure story of friendship and survival on Mount Rainier”
Summary
“In June 1992, best friends Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood atop Washington’s Mount Rainier, celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate mountaineers. Then their triumph turned tragic when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevasse—the pitch-black, ice-walled hell of every climber’s nightmares.
An avid adventurer since youth, Davidson was a seasoned climber at the time of the Rainier ascent. But the harrowing free fall left him challenged by nature’s grandeur at its most unforgiving. Trapped on a narrow frozen shelf, deep below daylight, he desperately battled crumbling ice, snow that threatened to bury him alive, and crippling fear of the inescapable chasm below—all the while struggling to save his fatally injured friend. Finally, alone, with little equipment and rapidly dwindling hope, he confronted a fateful choice: the certainty of a slow, lonely death or the near impossibility of an agonizing climb for life. A story of heart-stopping adventure, heartfelt friendship, fleeting mortality, and implacable nature, The Ledge chronicles the elation and grief, dizzying heights and punishing depths, of a journey to hard-won wisdom.”
-From Amazon.com
Review
In all honesty, this book stressed the hell out of me. It was just things went from good to bad to worse. And I had to read this book over a few days to be able to make it. It’s not a long book at all, only about 253 pages or so and I’m used to reading that and way more in a shorter period of time, but with this book, I just couldn’t do it because of the content.
It is a true story and I would never have read this book if it hadn’t been the college wide book for next year but in all honesty, it was a really, really good book and had some fabulous lessons in it.
The main one that was said in the ending was, while the author literally fell into a trench while coming down from the mountain, life can make you fall into trenches, like a turn of your health for the worst or financial problems, and you cannot give up, even if you are left alone and it seems like you have no where else to turn to. You have to at least try because you never know, you just may come out of it alive and survive as a stronger person.
Essentially this book was just about this man who was hiking with his friend and there are trenches and if you fall into them, they are usually only about 30 feet deep so your partner can save you, but this one was way worse, about 100+ feet deep and he was dragged in along with his partner and it was about the story of how Jim was trying to get out.
I’m not a huge fan of the cold, nor confined spaces, and this mixed all of those ‘I do not likes’ together into one book and I had to take it bit by bit because of how it was written. Because it was in first person, you felt like you were with Jim during the entire experience and I just found it really quite stressful and upsetting.
But, while it is all that, it was a fabulous book because of the lessons you can learn in it. The perseverance was fantastic and it was incredible that he was able to do as well as he did.
I highly recommend this book! It’s not a hard read at all, as some non-fictions are. And it’s not boring. It’s sometimes a little monotonous with the talking about the climbing gear and such since I don’t really have any knowledge of those kinds of things, but even if you don’t know about it, it really doesn’t make that much of a difference and you can read it perfectly fine.
Please do check this book out. But I tell you now, prepare for an emotional rollercoaster.
Let me know what you think and happy reading!
