That same girlfriend asked Filippi to remove Ziebarth’s corpse from the well-known path to the summit.įilippi writes, “Exhausted and with little time and oxygen left, I put my arms around his body and tried to move him. Ziebarth had slipped into a coma and died as a result of high-altitude cerebral edema. The atmospheric pressure is so low at this height that all life begins to die.Ī year earlier, Ziebarth told Filippi that he planned to stand on the summit with a banner above his head, asking his girlfriend to marry him.įilippi is making his descent from the summit and finds Ziebarth exactly where he left him, hours later. He had managed to summit without oxygen, but on his descent sat down to catch his breath. To make matters worse, his friend and countryman Frank Ziebarth is resting in the snow at the base of the last true obstacle to the summit. He writes, “My blood was turning to sludge my brain and lungs were slowly swelling as my heart pounded against my chest. The title, too, The Escapist, is very befitting because Filippi repeatedly cheats death.īut the cost of survival comes at a price.įilippi recalls navigating the Death Zone on Mount Everest in the Himalayas, following in the footsteps of his hero Sir Edmund Hillary (one of the first recorded climbers to have reached the summit in 1953), when he starts feeling the terrible effects of altitude sickness. This memoir is about one man’s desire to follow his wildest dreams, but it will also make the reader think twice about life, about family, and about the simple things we often take for granted.
It could be said that Filippi pushes himself to the edge of death and back as a subconscious way of trying to accomplish something greater than what anyone expected of him, especially his father. For twenty years the mountains become his “oxygen” determining his worth. He finds himself looking for an escape from a lonely existence, and discovers his calling in climbing. Then a young man, still reeling from the collapse of his marriage, learns his father died of cancer just four days after Christmas.
The story begins with a young boy desperately trying to please an angry and unpredictable father, haunted by his military past. I tell them the truth: that up there, life is precious and sometimes terrifying, and I can’t wait to get back,” writes the author, Filippi, in the opening chapter. They ask about the bodies that litter the mountainside, about the friends I’ve lost trying to get to the summit, or about the avalanche that almost took my life. “People ask me about the terrible things I’ve seen at the top of Everest. This gripping memoir follows Gabriel Filippi step-by-agonizing step to the highest summits in the world, while thrilling and terrifying the reader at every turn of the page.
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