Manaslu is an 8,162-meter Himalayan peak whose place in the book is defined by two linked but distinct episodes: a Kazakh expedition planned for fall 1995 that was postponed for lack of funds, and an earlier ascent remembered for a night rescue that ended in a fall and temporary frostbite for Anatoli Boukreev. The mountain represents both the precarious material circumstances of high-altitude climbing and the risks that can persist after a summit has been reached.

The postponed expedition

Boukreev had been invited to join a Kazakh team attempting Manaslu in fall 1995. The expedition was planned in memory of several Kazakh climbers who had died during a 1990 attempt on the mountain. Boukreev had not climbed Manaslu and wanted to climb all the world’s 8,000-meter peaks; he accepted the invitation and trained for the expedition.

The plan depended on funding that Kazakhstan’s mountaineering program struggled to secure after the country’s independence from the USSR. Ervand Ilinski, the expedition leader, told Boukreev that the team had not found the money it needed and would have to delay its Manaslu attempt until spring 1996. The postponement interrupted Boukreev’s immediate goal, but not his ambition to continue climbing in the Himalaya.

Boukreev learned of the cancellation shortly before leaving for Nepal. Rather than wait in Almaty for another opportunity, he flew to Kathmandu hoping to find guiding work or join another expedition to an 8,000-meter peak. He found no guiding jobs there, though he encountered Georgian friends with whom he had previously climbed in the Pamir and Tien Shan ranges.

The summit and the missing climbers

The book also recounts a Manaslu expedition in which Boukreev and nine Kazakh climbers reached high camps in extreme cold. On December 6, the team advanced to 6,800 meters and endured a night when the temperature fell to minus forty degrees centigrade. The following day they established Camp IV at 7,400 meters, crowding five climbers into each of two four-person tents. Winds approached sixty miles an hour, and the temperature rarely rose above minus twenty degrees.

The ten climbers began preparing for a summit attempt at 4:00 A.M., but the cramped tents made it impossible for everyone to get ready together, so departures were staggered. Eight climbers reached the summit between 10:00 and 11:30 A.M.; Michael Mikhaelov and Demetri Grekov had tired early and turned back. By 2:00 P.M. the eight who summited had returned to Camp IV, where the two who had turned around were waiting. After a short pause to warm themselves, the group began descending.

On the descent toward Camp III, Boukreev saw that the climbers were moving slowly after their exposure to cold and altitude. Eight reached Camp III by 6:00 P.M., but Mikhaelov and Grekov were missing. People at base camp had seen them through binoculars and telephoto lenses sitting in the snow on a steep face below Camp IV. Boukreev could only surmise that they had misjudged their strength and exhausted themselves.

Night rescue and fall

Boukreev and the young Kazakh climber Shafkat Gataullin turned back up the mountain without first warming themselves or taking a hot drink. They conserved the batteries in their headlamps by switching the lamps on only when needed. After three hours they found the missing climbers down on the ice. One had somehow come out of his crampons and lacked the strength to fasten them back onto his boots. Boukreev and Gataullin got both climbers upright, tethered them to Boukreev’s harness, and began a descent through night fog and near-arctic cold.

Above Camp III, other Kazakh team members saw the descending headlamps and climbed up to meet them with hot tea. The missing climbers relaxed at the sight of the lit tents below and eagerly drank. Distracted by the tea and reassured by the proximity of shelter, one lost his balance on the ice. As he tumbled, he pulled the other climber and Boukreev over a fifteen-meter ice wall and onto the mountainside.

Boukreev was torn from his ice ax, which he had been using to belay the pair. A rope he had fixed to an anchor stopped the three after they had slid more than twenty meters. No one was seriously injured, but Boukreev lost his gloves in the fall. The short walk to the tents at Camp III took about fifteen minutes, enough for his hands to become frostbitten; his exposure was brief, and he suffered no lasting damage. The rescue’s ending turns on a sudden reversal: the warmth and safety of the tents were close enough to promise relief, yet the moment of relief itself preceded the fall.

Place in Boukreev’s climbing history

Manaslu’s two appearances in Boukreev’s account illuminate different limits on an expedition. The 1995 plan was checked before the climb began by the absence of money; the rescue account shows how, even after a successful summit, altitude, cold, darkness, and exhaustion could leave climbers in need of help. Boukreev’s move from the postponed expedition toward Kathmandu also shows how dependent his professional future was on finding opportunities beyond his home climbing program.

The mountain therefore enters the narrative not only as a summit objective but as a setting for decisions made under constraint. The postponed attempt leaves the intended memorial ascent unrealized in the account, while the night rescue gives Manaslu a harsher afterlife: reaching the summit did not end the expedition’s danger, and helping others down exposed Boukreev himself to a potentially serious fall and cold injury.