In our salad days when our children were in their mid-teens we enjoyed challenging ourselves by mountain climbing, to view the exquisite landscapes of towering mountains marching off into the distance once we had summitted to a mountain top. We were in fact spurred on by the immense curiosity and sense of adventure of our youngest son. We climbed Mounts Moosilauke, Clinton, Eisenhower, Little Haystack and Franconia in the White Mountain Range. Later, we did alpine camping with our younger son in the Rockies in British Columbia, and climbed in the Great Smokies as well as some mountains surrounding Tokyo.

Those were, for us, extreme adventures testing our physical capabilities, endurance and determination. Nothing like the exploits of those whose ambition it is to climb the great mountains of the world, more than five times the height of the tallest mountain we ever climbed, in extreme weather and geological conditions we couldn't even begin to imagine. People whose imaginations and ambitions are fired by the prospect of meeting new challenges, and surmounting difficulties that would make most people blanch with fear at the danger to life and limb inherent in those extreme altitudes, geologic formations, and weather patterns. With storms fierce enough to simply blow people off the sides of precipitous mountain sides.

Joe Simpson's account of his own trials and tribulations in his finely detailed, incredible first-hand account of  mountaineering skill, trust, hope and survival in an Andean climbing expedition he shared with climbing companion Simon Yates in the Cordillera Huayhuash of the Peruvian Andes is a classic in survival against all odds. They undertook the mounting of a 1985 first-time summit, undeterred by their many previous experiences that had sometimes turned deadly for other climbing companions.

They had decided to climb the west face of Siula Grande. On their descent, things went badly wrong. "I hit the slope at the base of the cliff before I saw it coming. I was facing into the slope and both knees locked as I struck it. I felt a shattering blow in my knee, felt bones splitting, and screamed. The impact catapulted me over backwards and down the slope of the East Face. I slid, head-first, on my back. The rushing speed of it confused me. I thought of the drop below but felt nothing. Simon would be ripped off the mountain. He couldn't hold this. I screamed again as I jerked to a sudden violent stop.

"Everything was still, silent. My thoughts raced madly. Then pain flooded down my thigh -- a fierce burning fire coming down the inside of my thigh, seeming to ball in my groin, building and building until I cried out at it, and my breathing came in ragged gasps. My leg!
"I hung, head down, on my back, left leg tangled in the rope above me and my right leg hanging slackly to one side. I lifted my head from the snow and stared, up across my chest, at a grotesque distortion in the right knee, twisting the leg into a strange zigzag. I didn't connect it with the pain which burnt my groin. That had nothing to do with my knee. I kicked my left leg free of the rope and swung round until I was hanging against the snow on my chest, feet down. The pain eased. I kicked my left foot into the slope and stood up. 'I've broken my leg, that's it. I'm dead. Everyone said it ... if there's just two of you a broken ankle could turn into a death sentence ... if it's broken ..."

Through extraordinary devotion to aiding his climbing partner, Simon Yates was able to eventually manage to lower Joe Simpson through extraordinary discipline, strength and manoeuvring despite impossible impediments. Until, finally, he 'lost' him when Joe fell into a deep, dark crevasse and Simon was forced to descend on his own, convinced of his companion's death - to survive himself against all odds. Yet Joe managed, through determination, despite the anguish of pain and despair, to exert himself beyond all normal human striving, to save himself.

In the Andes, a specially chartered Uruguayan military plane carrying a passenger load of civilians comprised in part of a young Uruguayan rugby team en route from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile for a competition game, crashed into a mountain in the cordilleras in 1972, with 45 people aboard. Some of the passengers, seated in the rear of the Fairchild twin-engined turboprop were sucked out of their seats as the plane's tail end broke off the body.

The fuselage continued after the wings broke off, hitting the rocky edge of a mountain, carrying with it most of the terrified passengers, as the plane hurtled into the mountain, landing on its belly in a steep valley, sliding on the sloping surface of an extraordinarily deep snow pack, hitting the ground at 200 knots. In the desolation of a mountain slope packed with snow, the passengers slowly roused themselves, the injured in horrible pain, all of them in dreadful shock. The pilot was dead, the co-pilot, crushed beside the pilot by the control panel, died more slowly.

Their story, told by writer Piers Paul Read in his book Alive, and the following film, is one of human hope, perseverance, courage and integrity of purpose. After the devastating crash that miraculously left the bulk of the passengers alive, some critically wounded who would die of the morbid injuries they sustained in the crash, those who were sound of body and strong in mind, set out to save themselves and others from the slow agonizing decline that would lead to death. Their energy, inventiveness and dogged determination led finally to the rescue of the remaining 16 Uruguayan youth who survived two months of grim deprivation and agony, to rejoin their grieving families.