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In The Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent On The Edge
In The Ghost Country A Lifetime Spent On The Edge Author:Peter Hillary and John E. Elder In the Antarctic summer of 1998-99, Peter Hillary and two companions skied to the South Pole -- each man pulling a 440-pound sled 900 miles across some of the most forbidding country on earth. The plan was to complete the tragic journey of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to the pole and back. But under the pressure of a relentless media spotlight... more », fatal team chemistry, and food and fuel stores, the expedition fragmented into hostile isolation. Instead of completing Scott's journey, they found they were repeating it.
For Peter Hillary, this was the loneliest trek of his life. Estranged from his companions, tortured by the sensory deprivation of 'the great white everywhere', Hillary's journey became a hallucinogenic pilgrimage through a country where 'he could see the dead and the places of the dead': the ghosts of too many friends who had perished at his side in the mountains; and, most powerfully, the ghost of his beloved mother, who it seemed 'had turned up on the ice to keep me company.'
IN THE GHOST COUNTRY is the story of that trip, a chronicle of profound isolation, grief and loneliness. It is a meditation on a lifetime spent on the edge, a compelling contemplation of adventure and a joyful tribute to 'the rapture' of getting 'out there' in the wilderness.