Within Reach: My Everest Story

The world's most famous teenage mountain climber offers an extraordinary personal account.

In May, 1996 the media scrambled to document the gripping and inspirational story of sixteen-year-old Mark Pfetzer's expedition to Mount Everest. Not only was he the youngest climber ever to attempt the summit, but he bore witness to the tragedy documented in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, in which eight climbers perished in a sudden storm. Within Reach is Mark's extraordinary personal account of this experience, and of his triumphs over several other challenging peaks. In this suspenseful, moment-by-moment, first-person narrative, Mark takes the reader past the ever-shifting Khumbu Icefall, over three-hundred-foot crevasses, and up into the high-altitude "Death Zone" of Everest. By turns triumphant, by turns tragic, this story will be an inspiration to climbers, athletes and armchair enthusiasts young and old.