The Big Year, a book about birders, has been made into a movie.
http://www.markobmascik.com/the-big-year
Every year on January 1, a handful of people abandon their day-to-day lives to join one of the world’s quirkiest sporting contests. With few rules and no referees, there is one goal: to see and identify the most species of birds in a single year. The few who commit to the full year – known to its participants as a Big Year – will spend a grueling, exhaustive year traveling hundreds of thousands of miles and spending thousands of dollars. In a good year, the contest offers passion and deceit, fear and courage, a fundamental craving to see and conquer mixed with an unstoppable yearning for victory. In a bad year, it drains savings accounts and leaves people raw.
In THE BIG YEAR: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession (Free Press; publication date: February 4, 2004; $25.00), prize-winning journalist Mark Obmascik chronicles the 1998 North American Big Year, the greatest – or perhaps the worst – birding competition of all time. With engaging humor and a sharp wit, Obmascik captures the enthusiasm of the birders themselves, taking readers on a rollicking 275,000-mile odyssey, as each of the three main competitors fight for the title of champion.
The three contestants were perhaps the unlikeliest set of competitors ever to meet. A wise-cracking industrial contractor from New Jersey, a newly-retired executive vice-president of a multi-million dollar company from Aspen, and a painfully divorced software engineer who continued to work full time at a nuclear power plant in Maryland while pursuing his Big Year; they were all passionate about birds.
As they traveled on the grueling, 365-day potholed road to glory, they faced broiling deserts, roiling oceans, bug-infested swamps, rising debt, and a disgruntled mountain lion. From the island of Attu in Alaska to the Florida Keys, from the deserts of Arizona to the Pacific Ocean off the coast of northern California, they crossed time zones and, occasionally, paths on their quests to see once-in-a-lifetime rarities that could mean the difference between winner and second place. Perhaps the most intense birding competition ever, by December 31, one of the contenders had set a record so gigantic – identifying an extraordinary 745 different species by official year-end count – it is unlikely ever to be bested.
Mark Obmascik is the bestselling author of Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled — and Knuckleheaded — Quest for the Rocky Mountain High, winner of the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, and The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, which received five Best of 2004 citations by major media. The Big Year movie, starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson, is being released in October 2011 by 20th Century Fox. Obmascik was lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for environmental journalism. He lives in Denver with his wife, Merrill Schwerin, and their three sons, Cass, Max, and Wesley.
Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can’t resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, addled by thin air, Obmascik decides to keep his head in the cloud and try scaling all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners – and to finish them in less than one year.
The result is Halfway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik’s rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing, often poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife adventure that is now walk in the park, although sometimes it’s A Walk in the Woods – but with more sweat and less oxygen. Half a million people try climbing a Colorado Fourteener every year, but only 1,200 have reported summiting them all. Can an overweight, stay-at-home dad become No. 1,201?
With his ebullient personality and sparkling prose, Obmascik brings us inside the quirky, colorful subculture of mountaineering obsessives who summit these mountains year after year. Honoring his concerned wife’s orders not to climb alone, Obmascik drags old friends up the slopes, some of them lifelong flatlanders tasting thin air for the first time, and lures seasoned Rockies junkies into taking on a huffing, puffing newbie by bribing them with free beer, lunches, and car washes. Among the new friends he makes are an ex-drag racer trying to perform a headstand on every summit, the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down four beers and a burrito.
Though danger is always present – the Colorado Fourteeners have killed as many climbers as Mount Everest – Mark knows his aging scalp can’t afford the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and his quest becomes a story of family, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik’s summer of climbing, he loses fifteen pounds, finds a few dozen man-dates, and gains respect for the history of these storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of the nation’s most famed religious shrines.) As much about midlife and male bonding as it is about mountains, Halfway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can survive them all as they reach for those most distant things – the summit of mountains and a teenage son. And as one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth, he discovers that age – like summit height – is just a number.
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