"Itās a preposterous plan. Still, if you do get up it, itāll be the hardest thing thatās been done in the Himalayas."
Thus spoke Chris Bonington when Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker presented him with their plan to tackle the unscaled West Wall of Changabangāthe Shining Mountaināin 1976.
Boningtonās was one of the more positive responses; most felt the climb impossibly hard, especially for a two-man, lightweight expedition. This was, after all, perhaps the most fearsome and technically challenging granite wall in the Garhwal Himalaya, and an ascentāparticularly one in a lightweight styleāwould be more significant than anything done on the Everest at the time.
The idea had been Joe Taskerās. He had photographed the sheer, shining white granite sweep of Changabangās west wall on a previous expedition and asked Pete to return with him the following year. Tasker contributes a second voice throughout Boardmanās story, which starts with acclimatization, sleeping in a Salford frozen food store, and progresses through three nights of hell, marooned in hammocks during a storm, to moments of exultation at the variety and intricacy of the superb, if punishingly difficult, climbing.
It is a story of how climbing a mountain can become an all-consuming goal, of the tensions inevitable in 40 days of isolation on a two-man expedition, as well as a record of the moment of joy upon reaching the summit ridge against all odds.
First published in 1978, The Shining Mountain is Peter Boardmanās first book. It is a very personal and honest story that is also amusing, lucidly descriptive, very exciting, and never anything but immensely listenable. It was awarded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for literature in 1979, winning wide acclaim. His second book Sacred Summits was published shortly after his death in 1982.