Why You'll Love This
An 11-year-old alone on an icy mountain after a plane crash — and the only thing keeping him alive is the memory of his father.
- Great if you want: survival memoir fused with a complicated father-son portrait
- The experience: tense and emotionally raw — past and present braid together relentlessly
- The writing: Ollestad cuts between timelines with precision, building dread and love simultaneously
- Skip if: you prefer a single linear narrative — the structure demands patience
About This Book
When Norman Ollestad was eleven years old, a small plane carrying him and his father crashed into the San Bernardino Mountains in dense fog. His father died on impact. What followed was a solo descent of nearly nine thousand feet through snow, ice, and brutal cold — a boy alone on a mountain, fighting to survive. But this book isn't simply a survival story. It's about the complicated, electric relationship between a father and son, and how the lessons a daring, sometimes reckless man pressed into his child became the only things that kept that child alive.
Ollestad structures the book by weaving between two timelines — the harrowing hours on the mountain and the years of childhood that shaped him — and the technique is more than a device. It creates genuine suspense in both directions, making the reader urgent for rescue and hungry for the next memory simultaneously. His prose is clean and physical, rooted in sensation rather than sentiment. The result is a book that earns its emotional weight not through grief performed on the page, but through the quiet accumulation of a life lived at full intensity.