Mountaineer, National Geographic correspondent, and author.
EVENT: Ridgeway reads from his newest real-life adventure story, Below Another Sky: A Mountain Adventure in Search of a Lost Father at REI.
WHY YOU SHOULD GO: Ridgeway's newest is an interesting take on the tragedy-in-the-mountains genre: When his good friend dies in his arms after a freak avalanche, Ridgeway vows to keep the friend's memory alive for the man's daughter, Asia. Years later, Ridgeway and Asia travel to the site where Asia's father is buried, in a journey that makes both of them re-examine their lives.
So, I'm sure you've been asked this a million times, but why the heck is mountaineering literature so popular these days? "Well, obviously its popularity points to a gap in our culture and society, a disconnectedness between our culture and the wild country and wildness that is in all of our roots. The further away we get from these things, the more acute our yearning is to return to them.
"Another thing may be the simple fact that these stories are dramatic and the public is drawn to them as dramatic stories. But you have to ask yourself what's up if Alfred Lansing's Endurance--the Shackleton story published in the '50s--is suddenly a bestseller even though it's been around for 50 years. Why now?"
Has Asia read the book, and how has she responded? "She not only read it, but responded to it in the manuscript phase. She provided a good sounding board for me, letting me know what stories would resound with the reader. That was a big challenge. I knew that one of the ways I could teach her who her father was was to tell her who I was. If he hadn't died, we would have been on many of the same trips, would have brought home the same stories. Then, once we returned, the challenge was recounting the stories to the reader and making them as meaningful to the reader as they were to Asia."
There is definitely a theme of stories in the book, stories lost by the Tibetans, stories lost by the Chinese.... "The goal of the trip was to fill the gap for Asia as much as I could, to try and teach her what kind of man her father was and provide her with an adventure, with a trip like something he would do if he were alive. For me, recounting these stories allowed me to focus on what is most important--knowing that I have to appreciate every moment I have, because we rode that avalanche together and he's lying there and I'm here."
