Survival is Not Assured: The Life of Climber Jim Donini
We talk to author Geoff Powter and include a review of the highly-anticipated new book
Survival is Not Assured: The Life of Climber Jim Donini is a new book written by Canadian author Geoff Powter and published by Mountaineers Book. The following is conversation between Gripped’s editorial director David Smart and Powter, followed by a book review by Tom Valis.
David Smart: Your writing has a common thread of delving into the reasons why climbers do what they do at a deeper, more personal, or perhaps psychological level. How did this influence your choice to write about Jim Donini?
Geoff Powter: While I am interested in stories of outstanding athletes who accomplish great things in climbing thanks to a combination of skills, genes, and fortunate upbringing, I’ve always felt that we can learn more from stories with clouds and shadows in them, because there are better lessons to be found in hardship than in luck, and from the first time that I met Jim I’ve always felt that his story offered such a fascinating mix of both sun and shadows. Exceptional talent just seems to run in his marrow, and he has a drive that has helped him excel in every arm of the climbing game for decades, but a more compelling part of his story comes from the challenges that he’s faced, and learned from, away from the mountains. It took incredible resolve to get up his mountains, but even more to deal with the terrible tragedies he’s faced in the valleys.
DS: In an age of popularization of climbing, gyms, safety, responsible climbing and living and so on, it almost seems rebellious to write this book, in the best possible way. Is it?
GP: It’s an interesting question, because the versions of climbing at the core of this book—exploratory, high-risk alpinism and trad rock climbing—are arguably the roots of the modern era’s safer climbing. The majority of climbers today might never embrace the kinds of climbing that Donini has been a master of, but I think most of us understand that those two practices are central to what climbing is and shouldn’t be controlled any more than sport climbing should be. That’s appreciation and respect of tradition, not rebellion.
DS: Much of the energy of the book comes from the way that we see Jim traversing extreme alpine terrain and the terrain of everyday life, which also has its hazards for him. The book is populous, and not just with climbers. There are no minor characters in life, and you honour everyone who appears in the story. What is lost when climbing literature pushes the most influential people in the life of climbers off-stage?
GP: The texture, and truth, of lives are both lost. Despite how powerful our adventures may be in shaping us, our lives are much more than just our adventures. The lives we return to, and sometimes run away from, are the truer fabric of our stories, the adventures just interesting threads that add colour. But it’s easy to understand why adventure books sometimes marginalize the characters from the world of the valleys: it can be difficult to weave the powerful, dramatic experiences of adventures into the more everyday world—difficult to share, difficult to explain, difficult to understand, and difficult to match—and many adventurers, and adventure books, consequently, keep the two separate, and do neither full justice. I really wanted to address that gap in this book, and really needed to, to tell Jim’s complicated story.
DS: Despite all the emotional and life-realism in the book, climbing writers name and describe what matters to us, which I became at once joyously and painfully aware of as I read. When I closed the book, I was devastated to be leaving Jim Donini’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody gets in a plane and flies to Patagonia or Alaska to do an epic route on a whim. Are epic tales a spent force in climbing, or do we need them more than ever?
GP: I’ll happily follow Jim’s lead here: he has an ardent faith that adventurous, exploratory climbing, ripe for seeding epic tales, is absolutely still out there: you just have to be willing to go looking—and at 80, he’s still finding rivers, peaks and far-away valleys that are just as unknown and untouched as the places that thrilled him in his 30s, and out there, he still happily has epics.
Survival is Not Assured review by Tom Valis
One afternoon, biographer Geoff Powter asked Jim Donini if the vagaries of alpine new routing frustrated him: inconclusive attempts owing to weather, features that led nowhere, intransigent snow conditions. Without hesitation, the legendary climber replied “Absolutely not! That’s mountains at their best. The best lines are those whose solutions are not apparent from the outset. The fun is to be had in the totality of the experience.” These words, this ethos strikes deep into the consciousness of Donini. Each venture up uncharted faces on the world’s biggest mountains gave him the sense that this was he belonged, that this is what he was meant to do. A flaring offwidth crack high up a route in Alaska offering scant protection was something that Donini dispatched with preternatural skill.
Jim Donini’s commitment to the pursuit of alpine climbing forms the narrative backbone of Survival Is Not Assured, a book that takes its subject from his days as a US Special Forces member (specializing in medicine — a skill that would prove useful in the Karakoram) to his years as a Valley resident (whose first ascent record ranks highly) to his genre-defining ascents in Patagonia and Alaska. He and Gunks local John Bragg were the first to stand atop Torre Egger, a route that took the Yosemite school of big wall climbing the granite towers that pierce the stormy skies of southern Chile. Along with the best American climbers of the day, he climbed the North Ridge of Latok 1 (almost to the top) to lay claim to a route uncompleted to this day despite two dozen attempts. These accomplishments gave Donini entry into the emerging outdoor industry of the 1970s and allowed him to pursue expedition climbing for decades.
Powter describes the time that he and his partner set off in the pre-dawn cold of a November morning to climb Utah’s Castleton Tower. Each previous attempt had been thwarted by parties already on the route. As the first traces light caught the surrounding desert spires, and they approached their intended route knowing they had made a concerted start; they heard the tell-tale tinkling of gear and saw a leader making his way to the first belay through tricky crack moves of the crux pitch. Having placed but a single piece of protection down low, the leader called for slack with a deep, gruff bark. It could only be Donini, they realized, the stuff of legends. He and his partner had either bivied at the base of the route or had been willing to get up even earlier than Powter had.
Survival Is Not Assured peels back the layers of the man they saw in those early morning shadows, then well into his sixties. It’s the story of a man who made it down to safety from some of the most complex and demanding first ascents ever climbed. A man who wholly encouraged newcomers to Valley to climb some of their best routes and brought a warmer tone to a sometimes-distant Camp 4 scene in days when the Nose-in-a-Day was first done. Tragedy of the most visceral form stalked Dononi from the time he survived a high-school car accident in which his best friend was killed, to the unfathomable pain of having both his children predecease him. Powter doesn’t flinch in presenting these events — how they unfolded — to the reader. Surface impressions would mock the story of Jim Donini’s epic life. Powter brings all his accumulated skills as both a storyteller and a (professional) psychologist to gain connection with the man. As a reader, we feel we’ve lived with him — perhaps feeling burn marks on our fingers from the manifold must-complete rappels made off single knife-blade pitons.
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