On 30 April 1985 Dick Bass became the first person to climb the highest mountain on every continent. Seven Summits, written with Frank Wells and Rick Ridgeway, is the story of two businessmen in their fifties who set out to do it in a year and took five, and the book that turned the idea into a list people still count by.
On 30 April 1985 Dick Bass stood on the summit of Everest and became the first person to have climbed the highest mountain on every continent. Seven Summits, written with his partner Frank Wells and the climber Rick Ridgeway, tells how two businessmen in their fifties got there. It is also the book that turned the idea into a list people still count by.
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Two amateurs with day jobs
Bass was a Dallas oilman who had co-founded the Snowbird ski resort in Utah in 1971. Wells was a lawyer and a former Rhodes Scholar who had run Warner Bros. and went on to become president of the Walt Disney Company in 1984. In 1981 the two agreed to try all seven summits within a single year. Neither was an experienced climber, and Bass was 51.
The year became five. The book is honest about what that meant: hiring guides, chartering planes, fitting expeditions around work, and going back to Everest after each attempt failed. Wells reached six of the seven and stopped after three attempts on Everest, keeping a promise to his family. Bass kept going and got there with David Breashears and Ang Phurba Sherpa, aged 55.
What the book is like
It moves peak by peak through the campaign, from Aconcagua and Denali to Vinson and Kosciuszko, with the money and the logistics in plain view. It is as much about the partnership between the two men as about the climbing, and it shows what two determined amateurs managed over five patient years.
His list used Kosciuszko for Australia. Reinhold Messner argued for Carstensz Pyramid instead, which is why there are two lists today, and Bass or Messner explains how they came apart.
Warner Books, 1986. The edition on the card has 336 pages, ISBN 9780446385169.
Dick Bass and Frank Wells
Bass was born in Tulsa in 1929 and died in Dallas in 2015, still associated with Snowbird. Everest made him, for eight years, the oldest person to have stood on its summit. His climber page has his seven dates. Wells died in a helicopter crash in 1994, on the way back from a heli-skiing trip in Nevada. The Library also holds the 2000 photo book that shares the title.
The third name on the cover
Rick Ridgeway was a professional climber who climbed alongside Bass and Wells. In 1978 he had been one of the first Americans to stand on top of K2. His later book The Shadow of Kilimanjaro is in the Library too.
All parts of Book of the week
- Part 1: Book of the week: Into Thin Air
- Part 2: Book of the week: Seven Summits by Dick Bass and Frank Wells (you are reading this)