Kim Rangiaonui Logan, Ugly Hill Press, $50, November 3
Kim Logan had the sort of childhood where he was so hungry he’d sneak dog biscuits at night. Once, after accidentally starting a fire in their treehouse, he and his brother hid under the family home for three days, thirsty and hungry, but determined to avoid a beating.
“I can see now this desperately lonely and painful part of my life leads me to the beauty of the mountains,” he writes in this memoir. “I seek escape in an environment I can trust where boundaries are clear… I climb harder, higher, pushing myself to the extreme, beyond my limits, climbing away from my past.”
Much of the book is spent cold and exhausted. Logan (Ngāti Kahungunu) climbs Everest, K2, Aoraki/Mount Cook, every other mountain he can get to. He has so many close shaves; often, it seems that what saves him is the vigilance and sense of self-preservation he learned as a child. “I feel euphoric,” he writes, about calling off an attempt at summiting K2. “I made the right decision.” The mountain kills seven of his climbing companions on that trip, their falls leaving parallel tracks in the snow. One friend manages a touch-and-go descent back to camp but dies hours later, tucked up warm in his sleeping bag.
Back home, Logan works culling goats; guiding climbers; scouting locations for Sony and Paramount, and keeping film crews safe in the mountains. He is heavily involved in search and rescue. During the 1982 rescue of Phil Doole and Mark Inglis, the Iroquois that Logan is in crashes upside down above a 300-metre vertical drop; within four seconds he gathers himself and gets out. When a sightseeing plane goes down on the Blue Duck Glacier in 1989, he leads a team pulling nine bodies out of the snow.
In his 70s now, and living in Queenstown, Logan still tramps, conscious in new ways of the “body management” he deployed to stay safe at altitude. And he’s still poring over maps, plotting new routes. Some feasible, others not. “I’ll keep the dreaming until I’m really, really old,” he writes.
