The 2006 climbing season on Mount Everest was almost as deadly as the 1996 season. Eleven people died from various expeditions attempting to summit Mt Everest, and Lincoln Hall did, for a night, become the twelfth casualty. Unlike British climber David Sharp however, Lincoln survived his night on the mountain at 8,700 metres, and was found and rescued the next morning by a combined effort from other climbers and sherpas.
As an experienced high-altitude climber who had climbed on Everest in 1984 as part of the first Australian expedition, Lincoln Hall admits he had unfinished business with the mountain. After turning back very close to the summit 22 years earlier, he jumped at the chance to accompany another group of Australians as they joined the commercial 7Summits-Club expedition.
Both a climber and a writer, Hall enables the reader to experience his journey from Base camp up through ABC and Camps 2 and 3 and his summit climb. The author describes in great detail life at Base Camp, and the acclimatisation process that all prospective climbers endure as they wait for that small window of perfect weather each year in May. You get a rare and sometimes harrowing look at the realities of mountain climbing, and the philosophical way a lot of climbers accept death or disfigurement in their quest to conquer Everest. There are also a lot of opportunities to consider the price of that achievement against the mounting body count, and the evidence of human litter which remains on the mountain each year after the expeditions have packed up and left.
Dead Lucky is above all a survivor's story, much like 1996 survivor Beck Weathers' Left For Dead. Hall's story whets your appetite to uncover as much as you can about this series of events, and try to understand what drives people like Lincoln Hall to risk their lives for such a transitory moment. Whether inner strength and resilence, or plain luck, Lincoln Hall came back from the dead and this is a tale worth telling. - © 2007 ABC Australia
