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A Day to Die For - Graham Ratcliffe

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A Day to Die For - by Graham Ratcliffe

Trail Testers Recommended 93%

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SRP £11.99

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“A Day to Die For” by Graham Ratcliffe, the first Englishman to summit Mount Everest twice, details the events that led up to the disaster on May 10, 1996 when eight climbers from the Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants teams perished on Everest and claims to have new evidence of how the disaster might have been avoided.

I have read a number of books about Everest and various climbs to the summit, including Jon Krakauer's Into thin Air and Matt Dickinson’s The Other Side of Everest, both which also talk about the tragic events in May 1996.

So it was with a certain amount of anticipation that I started reading this book in the hope that Graham Ratcliffe could finally explain what had gone wrong.

The book runs to 334 pages and as such I imagined it would be a gripping read, but I very quickly found that it was full of unnecessary padding and in my opinion was not really that well written. Consequently, I found the book rather slow and plodding in style and felt it could have been at least 100 pages shorter.

However, Ratcliffe does detail the events of May 10, 1996 in great detail and supports his findings with well drawn maps and photographs, showing where the various teams were on the mountain and how the events unfolded.

His motivation for writing the book, albeit many years after the events occurred stems from his team being camped on the South Col and his seeing distant torches through

the storm, which he took to be other teams returning from the summit, without realizing at the time, that he was in fact witnessing climbers in trouble and had he been in possession of the facts, he might have been able to conduct a rescue. As it was, he stepped into his tent and closed the flap on a disaster unfolding, just a few hundred metres away..

It is clear that these events have haunted him ever since and became the catalyst for the book.

Like many other authors he gives his reader an insight into who he is, his climbs and how he comes to be on Everest on that fateful day. However, he gives so much background and the story wanders here and there, that at times I had forgotten that I was in fact reading about the events on Everest in May 1996.

In order to write the book Ratcliffe conducted a long investigation into the events of May 10 and felt early on that the disaster could have been avoided if more attention had been paid to the weather forecasts that the teams had been receiving.

The idea that experienced climbers Rob Hall and Scott Fischer had disregarded vital weather forecasts and had knowingly placed themselves and their clients in mortal danger as a result, are difficult to imagine, but Ratcliffe felt this to be the case.

Further, he suggests that his own team, organised by Henry Todd, had been deliberately delayed from their planned summit attempt by the other two teams, who in order to get their large number of clients to the summit had asked Todd to delay his summit attempt to the following day. Ratcliffe suggests that this delay had knowingly placed him and his fellow climbers in danger on the mountain.

A large part of the book details his investigation into the existence of the weather forecasts that Rob Hall, Scott Fischer and the IMAX team were receiving and whether or not, his own expedition leader Henry Todd was privy to these forecasts.

His investigation is long and slow, rather like the book and he meets one obstacle after another, gleaning a snippet here and there, sending emails but getting few replies.

Then when the weather forecasts seem to be about to be revealed, he drops the whole thing and goes out to Kathmandu with his wife for a holiday and a buying trip for their new business.

Needless to say, the events of May 96 gnaw away at Graham and after a long detour he does get back on the case and the investigation resumes its original course.

As part of his investigation he details how other climbers who were on the mountain had also written books about the events and had not mentioned the significance of the weather reports in their accounts. In fact he suggests a sort of cover up, that what seems to him a critical factor, was in fact overlooked, or omitted by the other authors.

As I was reading the book I did feel a little uncomfortable with these accusations that were being made against the other climbers and their books, many of which had been critically acclaimed. At times I felt that Ratcliffe was somehow trying to assuage his own guilt when what he should have been doing was establishing the facts, so that lessons could be learned to prevent these tragic events from happening again.

His quest for the truth about the weather forecasts becomes an all absorbing passion and the reader must go through the highs and lows of this investigation page by page, all the time hoping for the revelation that the title of the book offers.

However, the highs are few and the lows are many, but the book does eventually reach a conclusion, though I felt I was not really any the wiser for reading it! - Dawn Smith

ISBN-10: 1845966384 ISBN-13: 978-1845966386