In the Ghost Country

In the Antarctic summer of 1998-99, Peter Hillary began a walk to the South Pole, across some of the most forbidding country on earth. Under the pressure of a bizarre and relentless media spotlight, his team broke apart and descended into madness. For Hillary, a veteran of major expeditions in the Himalayas, the Andes, the Karakoram, the Arctic and the Antarctic, this was the loneliest trek of his life. The expedition became a hallucinogenic journey through a country populated by ghostly images: ghosts of friends who perished while Peter survived, and the ghost of Peter's still-living father, Sir Edmund Hillary, the last of the legends from the great age of exploration. In The Ghost Country, informed by a strong literary sensibility, is Hillary's story of that trek, as well as a joyful tribute to the craft of mountaineering, written by one of the most gifted climbers of his generation.