Above all, he is singularly obsessed, like so many people before and after him, with the mountains. As a character, Filippi has many facets here: doting but distant father, loving but distracted partner, striving but troubled son. It's a recurring sentiment in The Escapist, Filippi's first book, a memoir co-written by award-winning journalist Brett Popplewell, who was, until recently, a senior writer at Sportsnet magazine. All this, after guzzling supplementary oxygen and surviving a bout of food poisoning and possible edema on the way up. 'I think we're fucked,' he says to his friend after he watches, on his attempt to conquer Everest's North Face and become one of the few mountaineers to climb the mountain from both sides, his tent tumble over the side of a cliff, in the dark, in a -25 C snowstorm, in the Death Zone, the area above 8,000 metres where there's not enough oxygen in the air to sustain human life. The following day, those same horses would carry some of the climbers on our team higher still while I shook and shuddered in my tent, utterly drained.įor Gabriel Filippi, one of the most accomplished alpinists in Canadian history, the stakes are higher, the brushes more ominous. Feet turned to sludge, stomach thrashing, lungs constricting, I slipped in and out of consciousness before vomiting under the watchful (read: judgmental) eyes of the horses tied up in the rubble. For me, it was altitude sickness, which I felt, acutely, for the first time two years ago at 13,000 feet, high in the Peruvian Andes. No aspiring alpinist ever forgets their first brush with mountain danger.

The Escapist by Gabriel Filippi