In 1967, seven young men, members of a twelve-man expedition led by twenty-four-year-old Joe Wilcox, were stranded at 20,000 feet on Alaska’s Mount McKinley in a vicious Arctic storm. Ten days passed while the storm raged, yet no rescue was mounted. All seven perished in what remains the most tragic expedition in American climbing history.

Revisiting the event in the tradition of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, James M. Tabor uncovers elements of controversy, finger-pointing, and cover-up that make this disaster unlike any other.