The Falling Season: Inside the Life and Death Drama of Aspen's Mountain Rescue Team

An inside view of the dangers, emotions, and politics of a mountain rescue group, detailing what it is like to be on a rescue and covering one of the most publicized mountain rescue operations of the decade: Express Creek.

In an engrossing read, Hal Clifford takes you behind the scenes of Aspen's mountain rescue squad. This isn't simply a journalist's view, Clifford had to join the team to get his story.

In The Falling Season you'll be introduced to people from all walks of life who bond into extraordinary teams and who, on a moment's notice, will put themselves directly in harm's way to save you in the mountains. The season Clifford covers was a time of great change in the Aspen team, and he writes about the cohesiveness and the conflict with balanced insight. In a series of incisively written stories, he discusses some particularly difficult rescues; the death of one of their own; the Sheriff's attempts to control their operations; and a dramatic rescue operation that made national news for three days. Clifford gets you inside a mountain rescue team you won't soon forget.

Hal Clifford lives what he writes. As a member of Mountain Rescue-Aspen, an elite group of volunteers dedicated to helping those lost, injured, or worse in the rugged terrain surrounding one of America's favorite alpine playgrounds, he knows what it means to risk one's own life to save another. He understands the excitement that lures people to the mountains and has witnessed the deadly consequences of ill-conceived, or just plain unlucky, outings.

In The Falling Season, Clifford opens a window on the cliquish world of the "adrenaline junkies" drawn to the dangerous and heroic work of mountain rescue and offers first-hand accounts of actual emergencies. "I keep climbing, up toward a pile of rocks that is the 12,430-foot summit. I look up again and see a body, 50 yards ahead. It is lying head downhill, face turned up to the sky...." In crafting his story, Clifford reconstructs tension-filled events and mixes them with a chronicle of the team's long and colorful history. He focuses on the formerly unfettered group's ongoing struggle with the constraints of a litigious society, increased media exposure, and ballooning government bureaucracy. He attempts journalistic impartiality, but his personal involvement and emotional attachment show through, giving the story a powerful sense of urgency. Clifford possesses the technical skills, conditioning, and experience it takes to belong in Mountain Rescue-Aspen; fortunately for the reader, he happens to be a compelling writer as well. --George Laney