The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone - Hardcover

A colorful history of humankind's relationship with a natural disaster explores Hannibal's loss of eighteen thousand men to an avalanche, Austria's use of avalanche's as a weapon during World War I, and a recent tragedy that buried five young climbers in Glacier National Park.

r Christmas 1969, five robust young men set out to climb the imposing north face of Mount Cleveland in Glacier National Park. One of the highest vertical walls in the United States, the face had never before been scaled--and certainly not in winter, when it was bound with ice.

But the mountain was to become a memorial for the boys. After they failed to return to their families, an aerial search found the boys' tracks dead-ending at the jagged edge of a colossal avalanche. A massive search effort turned up little until the spring thaw, when searchers recovered a camera, dragged a half mile down the mountain. Its film, miraculously intact, eventually pointed the way to the boys' bodies, suspended upside down in a cave of snow and ice.

In The White Death, McKay Jenkins unfolds a gripping natural history of avalanches, framed by the story of one of the worst avalanche disasters in mountaineering history. Ranking among the most destructive natural phenomena on earth, ava-lanches h