Item - Mountain Survival

Mountain Survival was a childhood favorite of mine, and holds up on reading it again. Well-written Young Adult books can appeal to adults when they are written "for" a young audience, but not "down" to them. The concept is simple: your plane crashes in the mountains and you must seek help for the injured pilot who remains behind. The storyline is realistic and believable throughout, and the reader must make reasoned choices, all while dealing with the vagaries of chance. The emotional impact is higher, as you are not just fighting for your own survival, but that of your friend, the pilot. Every set-back fills you with dread, such as slipping into an icy stream, soaking your clothes and matches as nightfall approaches. Every lucky find brings relief, whether its shelter, food, tools, or a working radio. Excellent writing and artwork earns this gamebook 5 out of 5 stars.

More reviews by auximenes

This is an enjoyable adventure. In addition to being fairly well-written and exciting, the book is aided by the fact that many of its choices require a bit of thought and actually make sense logically.

More reviews by Demian

Great mountain climbing book! Through it has many loops, the book is still enjoyable. Page 71 (or the book's back) is the best place to start. Will you get help for Jake, or will you be in over your head? Choose carefully! You may get hypothermia!

8/10

More reviews by Good

Choose Your Own Adventure had been going strong for nearly thirty books when Mountain Survival hit stores in the early 1980s, and Edward Packard was as responsible as anyone for shaping the personality of the series. This book puts you in a small airplane above the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where a snowstorm forces your pilot, Jake McKay, into a crash landing. Jake's ankle is severely damaged and so is the radio; your only hope of rescue is to hike alone toward a ranger station nine miles away. That's nine miles of heavy snow, jagged terrain, and predators stalking their next meal. You haven't trekked more than an hour when you hit a towering rock wall. You could follow an animal trail uphill around it, but this would delay your arrival at the ranger station; or, you could cross the swift, swirling creek ahead and hope not to fall into its icy depths. Which way will you choose to gamble your life?

The animal trail seems safer, but after ascending to the plateau a subarctic squall blasts you. Press on against it and you may wind up completely turned around, having to resort to crazy tactics to draw a rescue plane's attention. You might even accidentally trudge back to your crashed plane, but all isn't lost; Jake has had time to repair the radio and summon assistance. The helicopter that comes can only take one of you at a time, and if you elect to be the one, an extreme storm triggers a second crash. As the only survivor, you have time to grab one of three different emergency items as you evacuate the helicopter, and choosing wisely can mean all the difference. If you let Jake go on the helicopter first, you may have a long wait before the men come back for you, but at least you can hole up in the crashed plane.

You might stumble onto other paths to adventure; if you seek shelter in a cave when the winter surge hits atop the plateau, afterwards you wander until spotting a cabin in the snow. Peeking inside you see a man armed with a knife and shotgun, and a boy tied to a chair. Chauncey Van Dyne is a year younger than you, and the man, Gino, abducted him to collect a ransom from Chauncey’s wealthy father. If Gino catches you he'll tie you up too, but you can try to talk him out of more serious violence. If you get the jump on Gino you can hold him at gunpoint until the Mounties you call on the radio get there, but any lapse in vigilance on your part and Gino will kill you. If you bypass the cabin without ever entering, your situation turns grim when you slip while crossing a creek. Your left foot is soon icy and numb. You find a cabin to rest in, but is it better to treat your frozen limb now or resume hiking to get professional care as soon as possible? The danger of losing your foot is real.

Did you cross the creek instead of following the animal trail at the book's first decision? You do your best to hop across the stones with caution, but a shaky one sends you into the frigid water, and when you drag yourself out, you're in trouble. You want to migrate toward the ranger station immediately, but if you build a fire here you'll dry out within hours. Once you get to the plateau, confusion sets in. Your gut says you should follow the meandering creek, but if you trust conventional markers instead, you run into a ranger station...one without a radio. For a station that has one, you need to hike eight miles more. It's a one-way radio, though...are your SOS messages getting through? You could hike toward a road that the station wall map indicates isn't far off, or take some of the food from the station back for Jake, but either plan risks the safety you have here. If you continued following the creek at the plateau, you run afoul of a grizzly bear, but if you live through that, you make it to an abandoned cabin and a detailed map. It's still easy to wander off into the subarctic storm and never be seen again, but you may find a small pool where a trapper lives. He has a radio, but do you remember the map well enough to guide the Mounties to Jake and the plane? Wherever your adventures lead, death or salvation waits at the end.

Because you spend this book lost in the mountains, there's little by way of character interaction. That might be the reason for Chauncey; without him these pages would feel a little barren. Internal continuity is pretty solid overall with a minor exception or two. Be warned: poor choices made by the reader tend to receive no pity. A few decisions require accurate study of maps shown in the illustrations, a more game-like element than usual for Choose Your Own Adventure, but I ended up going in the exact opposite direction I intended, every time. I'm not skilled at interpreting maps, so I'll grant this book the benefit of the doubt and assume they were sound. Mountain Survival is a decent outdoors action adventure with enough story variety to keep you guessing when you pull it from the shelf for a reread.

More reviews by KenJenningsJeopardy74

Ringing in at no. 28, Mountain Survival's premise is simple enough: you and your pilot, Jake McKay, become marooned in the Canadian Rockies after a snow squall causes your plane's crash landing. Since Jake's injuries render him immobile, it falls upon you to traverse through the harsh wilderness for a number of days until you are finally able to reach help.

Mountain Survival is different from many of the other gamebooks that I've hitherto read in the sense that your teenage character does not intentionally go out seeking thrills or excitement. Instead, your character is suddenly, unexpectedly, and outside of all calculation thrust into an ordeal, deliverance from which requires the summoning of extraordinary courage and tenacity. It is precisely for the reason of your character's desperation that I'm reluctant to say that your character embarks on any adventure per se in this particular Choose Your Own Adventure book. Rather, the more appropriate characterizations of what your character undergoes are various trials, tribulations, and travails. In most endings you end up, someway somehow, a victim of nature dying either at the hands of hypothermia, wildlife, or unforgiving heights. In others you end up not only surviving but also saving the lives of others who by happenstance become reliant on you for their own mountain survival.

Given Mountain Survival's excessively realistic backdrop, devoid of any science fiction or fantasy elements, the book can only ever be as creative as the narrow parameters that contain it. Notwithstanding the scope set by Edward Packard, he does manage to inject a few imaginative, albeit muted, instances in the various branching storylines. Examples include coming across the kidnapped Chauncey Van Dyne, leaping out of a crashed rescue helicopter moments before it explodes, and stumbling onto what may be one of the richest gold ores in the world.

Something that should be mentioned in a review is that potential readers, going by the blurb on this entry's back cover, can be easily misled into thinking that the storyline about Chauncey being held for ransom by Gino and his accomplice constitutes the central thesis of this book. However, not only did this storyline not constitute a major part of the narrative but is actually a relatively minor portion of the book. This was a lost opportunity because this storyline was promising enough whereby it, if done well, could offer plenty of action and engaging storytelling.

This branching narrative was reminiscent of the 1988 thriller Shoot to Kill starring Sidney Poitier, Tom Berenger, and Kirstie Alley which revolves around the two male protagonists navigating the snowy mountains in Washington State (but filmed on location in the same Canadian Rockies that are the subject of this book) to save Kirstie Alley's character who has been taken hostage by an armed and dangerous man. Those who enjoyed Mountain Survival for its Rocky Mountains setting are likely to also enjoy Shoot to Kill for the same.

With respect to the storytelling, Edward Packard, at opportune moments, impressively opened the door into the exploration of the psychology of select characters. Of course, mention of your own character's guilt, fears, and concerns are strewn throughout. But, the thing that makes Mountain Survival significantly more compelling is that Edward Packard touches on more complex psychological conditions. For example, your character's discussion with Gino on page 77 reveals the otherwise unobvious fears and anxieties of an unseasoned criminal and would-be killer. The excavation of Gino's dread of being betrayed by his accomplice, getting caught by the authorities, or having to kill you and Chauncey are powerful in imbuing Gino's character with humanistic depth.

This was delightful because it elevated the storyline from simple binary divisions of good and evil, something at least somewhat expected of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, into shades of gray. It impels the thoughtful reader to consider that the oft-presented caricature of criminals being singularly monstrous is flawed. Reality is inherently much more complex. Human beings, often due to bad decisions, desperation, manipulation, or other factors partially or completely out of their control end up in abject situations that forever alter their lives for the worse.

A bit later in the same storyline, page 84 points to the Stockholm Syndrome, a proposed psychological disorder whereby captives develop an emotional bond with their captors, that both you and Chauncey experience when hoping for Gino's escape. This is emotionally engaging storytelling as the reader transitively senses his or her character's sentiments.

Edward Packard's writing, as usual, is consistently very good throughout the book but during the more intense scenes he manages to dial the quotient higher with his superb use of evocative language. In this regard, consider the following passages as examples:

1. "You keep moving. Your senses blur. Your brain clouds as if you were on the edge of a drugged sleep. But you are still conscious when your right foot comes down on nothing but air—air that fans your face as you plunge over a twelve-hundred-foot-high cliff." (page 63)

2. "You are alone in utter darkness. The suddenness, the horror of it, sends shivers through your spine. You feel as if the furies of doom have been loosed upon the earth, and there is no more hope for you than for the two brave pilots now entombed at the bottom of the lake." (page 72)

3. "… the helicopter explodes in a fiery convulsion that breaks the rotten spring ice. A few seconds afterward it plunges toward the bottom of the lake. You shine the flashlight on the hole in the ice and say a prayer for the brave pilots who gave their lives to save you." (page 80)

Overall, I don't think it's debatable that Mountain Survival contains moments of quality writing. The fact that Mountain Survival, despite its overwhelmingly ordinary setting, does not read like a documentary is attributable to Edward Packard's superior storytelling and Leslie Morrill's illustrations. Notwithstanding, I—in contrast to what the other reviewers have offered—can't say that this is a superlative work. Though the Choose Your Own Adventure franchise commendably caters to many varied tastes, books such as this one have a scope narrow enough to inevitably limit their range of possibilities, which undoubtedly contributes to their quality of ordinariness.

Rating: 6.5/10.0

More reviews by tonylachief

This is a neat little adventure, written with realism and the occasional splotch of grisly death. In a way, it's the ideal CYOA book: choices aren't random guesses; you have enough information to make measured estimations. I survived the first play-through and had fun watching myself perish in blizzards or avalanches or at the hands of an armed thug. The writing is nothing special (details are scant) and the world building is minimal (you spend most of your time alone, wandering mountain passes), but it clicks along like clockwork.

More reviews by williamtuttlewho