Seven Summits
By
Dick Bass
Frank Wells &
Rick Ridgeway

Their dream was to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents--an exciting prospect for any world-class mountaineer. But Bass and Wells, businessmen in their early 50's, were rank amateurs. With Ridgeway, one of America's foremost climbers who accompanied the pair on some of their expeditions, they tell their story here. It is a gripping tale of adventure and embraces courage, disappointment, joy and commitment. The process of getting to Mt. Vinson in the Antarctica was a marvel of logistics. For their third and final attempt on Mt. Everest, Wells had to choose between the summit try and his family; Bass completed the seventh summit to become the oldest man to stand on top of the world, and the first to reach the highest point on each continent. The two were lucky enough to have the money to fulfill their dream; they also had guts. In mountaineering lingo, they proved themselves "real animals." - Publishers Weekly

While some of us are theorizing about mountains, others are scaling them. The co-authors of this book were both in their well-established fifties - Dick Bass the entrepreneur of the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah, Frank Wells the president of Warner Brothers Studios - when via mutual friends they discovered they had a mutual dream. They hoped to accomplish a mountaineering first, climbing the highest peak on each of the seven continents: Acnocagua in South America, Everest in Asia, McKinley in North America, Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe, Vinson in Anarctica, Kosciusko in Australia.

Never mind their being novices on the slopes. They insinuated - and bought - their ways into other expeditions and learned fast. By the time Bass capped their agenda on his third try to conquer Everest, they were bona fide members of the climbing elite.

With Rick Ridgeway - himself a climber and the author of The Boldest Dream, about his own Everest Adventures - Bass and Wells tell a story riddled with close calls and come-from-behind victories over weather. After it was over, their record nearly foundered on the shoals of imprecision. A surveying recalculation deleted several hundred feet from the supposed altitude of Mt. Vinson, possibly relegating it to second place behind another Antarctic peak, Mt. Tyree. Luckily Mt. Tyree also turned out shorter than it used to be, and Bass' first was assured. Wells later went on to become president of Disney. In 1994 he died tragically in a helicopter accident while on a ski vacation.