Upon That Mountain – Eric Shipton (1943)

S$56.00

Upon That Mountain – Eric Shipton (1943)

S$56.00

Title: Upon That Mountain

Author: Eric Shipton

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1943. Reprinted from the first edition published the same year.

Condition: Hardcover, no dust jacket. Good. Hinge cracked at title page, slight dents to edges of cover. Covers bright, text clean, binding tight. With black-and-white photographic plates. 222pp., app 8″ x 5″.

SKU: shipton-mountain Categories: , ,

A mountaineering autobiography of Eric Shipton, a prominent mountaineer of the early 20th century, and one of the first climbers to summit Kamet. He went on multiple Everest expeditions in the 1930s, all of which are detailed in the book, including leading the 1935 expedition which gave Tenzing Norgay (who would later climb Everest with Edmund Hillary) his first taste of mountaineering. In Upon That Mountain, Shipton takes us through his childhood, his first forays into the Alps, settling down in Africa where he climbed Mt Kenya, and then the Himalayan expeditions where he made his name. A large chunk of the book is dedicated to Everest, with chapters on Nanda Devi, the Karakoram, and smaller expeditions.

About Shipton (from Wikipedia):

Eric Earle Shipton, CBE (1 August 1907 – 28 March 1977), was an English Himalayan mountaineer.

Shipton was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1907 where his father, a tea planter, died before he was three years old. When he was eight, his mother brought him to London for his education. When he failed the entrance exam to Harrow School, his mother sent him to Pyt House School in Wiltshire. His first encounter with mountains was at 15 when he visited the Pyrenees with his family. The next summer he spent travelling in Norway with a school friend and within a year he had begun climbing seriously.

In 1928 he went to Kenya as a coffee grower and first climbed Nelion, a peak of Mount Kenya, in 1929. It was also in Kenya’s community of Europeans where he met his future climbing partners Bill Tilman and Percy Wyn-Harris. Together with Wyn-Harris, he climbed the twin peaks of Mount Kenya. With Frank Smythe, Shipton was amongst the first climbers to stand on the summit of Kamet, 7756 metres, in 1931, the highest peak climbed at that time. Shipton was involved with most of the Mount Everest expeditions during the 1930s and later, including Hugh Ruttledge’s 1933 Mount Everest expedition and the follow-up in 1936, the 1935 Mount Everest expedition which was Shipton’s first as leader and the first for Tenzing Norgay, and the pioneering 1951 Mount Everest expedition which chalked out the now famous route over the Khumbu Glacier. Shipton and Tilman also discovered the access route to the Nanda Devi sanctuary through the Rishi Ganga gorge in 1934. Their shoe-string budget expedition operated in the Kumaon-Garhwal mountains continuously from pre-monsoon to post-monsoon, and set a record for single-expedition achievement that has never been equalled.

During the Second World War, Shipton was appointed as HM Consul at Kashgar in western China, where he remained from 1940 to 1942, then after a brief spell in England was assigned to work in Persia as a “Cereal Liaison Officer” for 20 months during 1943–44. Next he was posted as an attache to the British Military Mission in Hungary as an “agricultural adviser” which position saw him through until the end of the War.