Everest, Guns & Money – Book Review
Everest Guns & Money Book Review – Glenn Tempest
When I started out rock climbing, back in the mid 1970s, there were a handful of leading Aussie climbers who immediately captured my admiration and fed my teenage inspiration. Chris Dewhirst was one of those climbers. Dewhirst had established some of the hardest climbs of the 1960s and early 1970s and his name is still linked to hundreds of routes that litter the pages of Victorian climbing guidebooks. In 1966 he freed Werewolf at Mt Arapiles to create Victoria’s first grade 20, a major milestone. In 1969, at Mt Buffalo, he and Chris Baxter overcame enormous psychological hurdles to climb the first ascent of Ozymandias over three long difficult days. Two years later, also at Mt Buffalo, Dewhirst teamed up with Peter McKeand to establish Lord Gumtree, Australia’s longest and most difficult aid route of the time.
It wasn’t surprising that Dewhirst’s thirst for adventure saw him drawn to the huge granite walls of Yosemite Valley in the United States. In 1973 Dewhirst climbed the Salathe Wall on El Capitan, one of the best climbs on one of the biggest and most impressive chunks of vertical granite on the planet. Chris Dewhirst was at the top of his climbing game, but other, unforeseen events, were soon to take place that would see Dewhirst getting dragged into a dangerous maelstrom of drugs, guns and murder.
Everest, Guns & the Money tells an extraordinary story of how a plane, carrying Mexican marijuana and Colombian cocaine, crashed into a frozen Yosemite lake killing both the pilots. How Dewhirst and his climbing buddies not only enriched themselves of drug cash, but how Dewhirst managed to find himself in the employ of the CIA running guns to Santiago in support of Chile’s General Pinochet’s junta. This is also the story of Colonel Al Morgan, a distinguished but disillusioned US Air Force pilot who confided in Dewhirst during multiple helicopter runs in the autumn of 1973. Dewhirst has taken Al Morgans facts and combined them with his own to write the book in the first person. He’s also condensed the multi-year time frame into three months. Dewhirst makes no apologies for the dramatising of events. Upon reading Everest, Guns & the Money I was constantly wondering as to just how much was Morgan’s story and how much was Dewhirst’s. In the end it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t put the book down. It’s a crazy rollarcoaster ride of a story that will appeal to not only climbers but to anyone with even a passing interest to the far-reaching events occurring in Central America during the early 1970s.
Everest, Guns & the Money is published by One Tree Press HERE.
ISBN: 9780645907209
Author: DEWHIRST, CHRIS
Format: Paperback
RRP: $39.00
Pages: 384
73 photographs