Minus 148 Degrees: First Winter Ascent of Mount McKinley

In February 1967, eight men attempted Denali in winter, which nobody had done. Three of them reached the summit late in the day, then got pinned at Denali Pass by a storm that lasted six days — no tent, in a shallow ice cave, with the wind reading beyond the instruments and the number in the title as the estimated chill. One man died lower on the mountain in a crevasse fall. Davidson was one of the three and wrote it from his own notes, and what makes it last isn’t the cold but the interior of it: The bargaining, the hallucination, and the odd calm of men waiting to find out.