The Shameless Diary of an Explorer (Annotated)

So you've read lots of stories and watched movies and think you'd make a great explorer? Think again. This true tale of an early attempt to not only climb Mount McKinley (Denali), but to just get to it, will leave you exhausted. I fly over this terrain every day in my job as a bush pilot and I can not imagine what these men went through. After reading this book I don't have to imagine it. I can easily say that no one today would willing attempt to do so much with so little as these men did. It's like Shackleton's journey but with swamps and mosquitoes instead of the sea.

This book was written almost a 100 years ago - so it takes a bit to get the pace and grammar - but the story is a good one if you like stories of people trying to do something never done before with lousy equipment and no real maps. The author is blunt about his and his fellow group’s foibles. They were the first non Natives to hike around Denali - they tried to get to the top - but as the sub title notes - it was a failed attempt.

This is one of the great real-life adventure stories of early 1900's and perhaps of all times. An adventure written so well you will feel the cold, rain, ice, mosquitos and the despair of horses left behind. The story of the valiant attempt and failure on Mt. McKinley. Also the story of the determination of a small band of explorers, the first to circumnavigate the great mountain.Up there with Into The Silence, Alone on the Ice, Into Thin Air, and the Endurance among others.

Among adventure narratives this one is exceptional for its literary values. Dunn does not portray himself as anyone except a horse packer. No quasi heroic heroic struggle against mighty odds here. His descriptions of the country he passed through are often quite poetic.

Expected a good read - instead got a cure for insomnia. Not much of interest, with descriptions that could have been written by an informed ten year old.Very disappointing. Affirmed my 30 page rule: Stop reading if not engaged by the first 30 pages, (which I did).

You can find something better to read than this uninspiring book. The expedition recounted by the author can be divided into three parts: (1) Yelling at the horses carrying the expedition's gear, and getting them unstuck from mud, day after day after day, (2) Climbing attempt of Mt. McKinley, (3) Returning from McKinley to civilization. Part 1, by far the longest, was by far the worst. Spoiler alert: Horses are ill-suited to the tundra. Part 2, the climbing section, could have been good, but there was so much mountaineering jargon -- never explained -- that it was never clear exactly what they were doing. Part 3 was mercifully short and, even so, I skimmed it because I wanted badly for the book to end. The maps were too small to be informative (Modern Library edition) -- it wouldn't have killed the publisher to put a couple more in. As for the claim that this shows the real side of exploring: yeah, ok. It is a tale of going unprepared and under-equipped into an unforgiving environment -- the outcome is pre-ordained. Gets a second star for a few interesting sentences about caribou... but don't expect a naturalist's eye from this writer.

Hard to read but what an adventure!

If you've read Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" you can only come away from reading "The Shameless Diary...." thinking how it must have been the model for the frankness and criticism he wrote of himself and his fellow climbers in his blockbuster Everest disaster story. Besides the no holds bared frankness of the author's daily reflections of the events of this expedition the reader is let into the authors inner mind as well as the levels of, what can only be considered, animal brutality required to actually complete such a journey, and, which could have only been common, yet previously unexposed, to all such expeditions of it's age.Throughout the reading I was constantly contemplating how I could have stood up to the rawness of nature that these men withstood. My own meager climbs of the major peaks of the White Mountains of Vermont, and the high peaks of the Adirondacks and Catskill Mountains of New York all paled in comparison to what these men accomplished during any one day of this expedition. A recent winter day hike to Windham High Peak, NY now seems like a child's day in the sun in reflection.This is the sort of book that forces one to be constantly making those sorts of comparisons.