Upon that Mountain

Book excerpt: Upon that Mountain is the first autobiography of the mountaineer and explorer Eric Shipton. In it, he describes all his pre-war climbing, including his Everest bids of the 1930s, and his second Karakoram survey in 1939, when he returned to Snow Lake to complete the mapping of the ranges flanking the Hispar and Choktoi glacier systems around the Ogre. Crossing great swathes of the Himalaya, the book, like so many of Shipton's works, is both entertaining and an important addition to the mountain literature genre. It captures an important period in mountaineering history - that just before the Second World War - an ends on an elegiac note as Shipton describes his last evening at the starkly-beautiful snow lake, before he returns to a 'civilisation' about to embark on a cataclysmic war.