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\\u2018It\\u2019s a preposterous plan. Still, if you do get up it, it\\u2019ll be the hardest thing that\\u2019s been done in the Himalayas.\\u2019

So spoke Chris Bonington when Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker presented him with their plan to tackle the unclimbed West Wall of Changabang \\u2013 the Shining Mountain \\u2013 in 1976. Bonington\\u2019s was one of the more positive responses; most felt the climb impossibly hard, especially for a two-man, lightweight expedition. This was, after all, perhaps the most fearsome and technically challenging granite wall in the Garhwal Himalaya and an ascent \\u2013 particularly one in a lightweight style \\u2013 would be more significant than anything done on Everest at the time.

The idea had been Joe Tasker\\u2019s. He had photographed the sheer, shining, white granite sweep of Changabang\\u2019s West Wall on a previous expedition and asked Pete to return with him the following year. Tasker contributes a second voice throughout Boardman\\u2019s story, which starts with acclimatisation, sleeping in a Salford frozen food store, and progresses through three nights of hell, marooned in hammocks during a storm, to moments of exultation at the variety and intricacy of the superb, if punishingly difficult, climbing. It is a story of how climbing a mountain can become an all-consuming goal, of the tensions inevitable in forty days of isolation on a two-man expedition; as well as a record of the moment of joy upon reaching the summit ridge against all odds.

First published in 1978, The Shining Mountain is Peter Boardman\\u2019s first book. It is a very personal and honest story that is also amusing, lucidly descriptive, very exciting, and never anything but immensely readable. It was awarded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for literature in 1979, winning wide acclaim. His second book, Sacred Summits, was published shortly after his death in 1982.

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