A memoir of friendship, climbing, acceptance, and perseverance to the very last summit. 

Climbing partners and close friends Jim Keany and Dick Myers were a match in skill, passion, and attitude. They had been climbing together for barely two years when Dick’s doctor said the words “brain tumor,” “inoperable,” “incurable,” and “twelve years to live.” 

Braced with determination and teamwork in the face of an uncertain but terminal diagnosis, Jim and Dick ended up getting seventeen more years together, and they spent many in the mountains. For eight of them, they climbed; they took on Patagonian rock towers and Cascade glaciers, weathered unplanned nights on ledges, and witnessed a condor passing close enough to touch. Then Dick called to ask whether Jim wanted his climbing rack—a signal that his climbing days were coming to an end. What followed was slower and just as hard: Climbing turned to hiking and biking, and finally the two friends shared a last summit in the season’s first snow, all the while doing the long work of letting go by degrees. 

When the Outcome Is Uncertain is a book about male friendship, tenacity, grief—and what the mountains give back when nothing can be fixed.