In the Shadow of Denali: Life and Death on Alaska's Mt. McKinley
Rising more than 20,000 feet into the Alaskan sky is Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. In this collection of exhilarating and stunning narratives, Jonathan Waterman paints a startlingly intimate portrait of the white leviathan and brings to vivid life the men and women whose fates have entwined on its sheer icy peak.\ “Stratospherically the finest in the genre. With this book, Waterman has earned a place alongside such great modern American mountain writers as David Roberts and...
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Jonathan Waterman paints a startlingly intimate portrait of the white leviathan and brings to vivid life men and women whose fates have entwined on its sheer icy peak.
"Because we live in a technological age, we are often insulated from our deeper emotions, such as understanding death or perceiving the earth as an animate form. But the time I spent on and around Denali were years in which I abandoned much of the modern world and perceived the mountain and its surrounding wilderness as a living, breathing entity. This sounds half-crazed, I know. But it may have been a necessary means for absorbing these intense experiences about death.\ \ Perhaps my preoccupation on Denali with death curtailed normal romantic interactions. For ten years, I may have allowed myself to become intimate with a mountain. I make no apologies for this; it is more exposure than literary pretense affords, and I now feel fortunate to have lived a portion of my life as intensely as I did." —from the preface\
