From the Ocean to the Sky

Dust jacket notes: "'For more than five years I had dreamed of a new adventure,' writes Sir Edmund Hillary, 'to travel with a group of friends from the mouth of the Ganges River upstream against the current as far as we could go...up into the mountains where the river had its beginnings.' In 1977 the 'Ocean to Sky' expedition turned that dream into reality; this is Hillary's own dramatic record of that journey. The 1500-mile-long trek provided as many challenges as the conqueror of Everest and his crew had imagined, from powering jet boats up treacherous rapids to the ultimate test of climbing Akash Parbat, above which, according to Hindu tradition, the lord Shiva received the celestial stream of Ganga into the matted locks of his hair. Hillary's narrative, supplemented with excerpts from his crew's journals and many photographs, captures the excitement and danger of the expedition...."