Born in Nottingham in 1941, Doug Scott began climbingin Derbyshire when he was thirteen and without any obvious plan in it was soondiscovering the cliffs of Snowdonia, Scotland, the Alps and the Dolomites. Hecompleted his first Alpine season at the age of eighteen. In 1965, agedtwenty-three, he went on his first organised expedition, to the TibestiMountains of Chad. It was to be the first of many trips to the high mountainsof the world. On 24 September 1975, he and his climbing partner Dougal Hastonbecame the first Britons to reach the summit of Mount Everest, via theformidable South-West Face, and they became national heroes. In total, Scott made forty-two expeditions to the high mountains of Asia, reaching thesummits of forty peaks. With the exception of his ascent of Everest, he made all his climbs in lightweight or alpine style and without the use ofsupplementary oxygen. Scott was made a CBE in 1994. He was a president ofthe Alpine Club, and in 1999 he received the Royal Geographical SocietyPatron’s Gold Medal. In 2011 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award bythe Piolets d’Or, during the presentation of which his mountaineering style wasdescribed as ‘visionary’. In 1995 he founded Community Action Nepal (CAN), aUK-based registered charity whose aim is to help mountaineers to support themountain people of Nepal. Up until his death in December 2020, Scott continuedto climb, write and lecture, avidly supporting the work of CAN. He is theauthor of six books, including Up and About and The Ogre. Kangchenjungais his final book.

• PrefaceIntroductionPART I1. The Mountain2. Ancient History of Exploration3. European Interest in the Region4. The East India Company5. Scottish Contribution to Empire6. The Blanks on the Map7. Early MountaineeringPART II8. The Climbers9. March to Base Camp10. Climbing the Ogre11. The Epic Descent12. The Final StretchAfterwordAcknowledgementsFurther ReadingThe Author

'One of the greatest mountaineering survival stories never told.' – The Sunday Times.