Climbing Boulder's Flatirons with his friend Gabe Lee on July 9, 1961, 18-year-old David Roberts watched helplessly as Lee plummeted to his death.

"A sound I had never heard before seized my ears, yet I knew at once what it was," recalls Roberts, who would later go on to join the first expedition to climb Mount McKinley's massive north face. "It was the sound of cloth sliding against rock.

" 'Dave!' Gabe screamed.

"Gabe's cry came to me, even as his body accelerated away: 'No! Oh, no!' He began to bounce, the terrible arc of his trajectory longer after each impact. Four hundred feet below, he sailed upside down through the empty air, hit the cliff headfirst, and was flung into the treetops at the base of the Flatiron."

Thus begins On the Ridge Between Life and Death, Roberts' vivid and suspense-filled reexamination of his climbing life, which included two more fatal mountain accidents before he turned 22. Today, the trailblazing climber and adventure writer continues to scale mountains - and to question whether the thrills outweigh the terrors.

In the 1980 Outside magazine essay "Moments of Doubt," he thought he knew the answer.

"Some of the worst moments of my life have taken place in the mountains . . ." he wrote in the article that is his best known and most anthologized work. "But nowhere else on earth, not even in the harbors of reciprocal love, have I felt pure happiness take hold of me and shake me like a puppy, compelling me, and the conspirators I had arrived there with, to stand on some perch of rock or snow, the uncertain struggle below us, and bawl our pagan vaunts to the very sky. It was worth it then."

Now, the former Boulderite draws an entirely different conclusion, but not without first expounding on what mountain climbing has meant to his life.

The son of a Harvard-educated astronomer and an overprotective homemaker who craved intimacy, Roberts first turned to mountain exploration to get away from what he saw as a stale life, and later to escape the specter of his girlfriend's abortion. With abortion illegal in the United States at the time, Roberts' father had arranged for her to have the procedure done in Japan.

"Lisa and I had failed spectacularly, and only a Japanese abortion had saved us from the tawdry tragedy of premature parenthood. Now, more than ever, I needed to taste the forbidden wine of escape."

Throughout this well-written and moving memoir, Roberts - a self-described "hard man" - slowly comes to acknowledge his emotions.

Learning in 1973 that his early climbing partner Don Jensen had died, Roberts recalls weeping inconsolably.

"The sadness that enveloped me was darker than anything I had felt after Gabe's (death)," he writes. "Dimly, I recognized that it was not simply the loss of Don that I was mourning. . . . I grieved for the loss of the limitless future Don and I had dreamed for ourselves at the age of twenty, for the climbs all over the globe that now we would never share, for the fading of the illusion of perfect friendship that we had glimpsed. . . ."

Almost all of Roberts' expedition tales include at least one hair-raising moment. Despite the drama, those who aren't mountain climbers may find the book tedious at times.

Also, Roberts' critical view of his parents and childhood comes across as arrogant and selfish. So he grew up with Boulder's version of Ward and June Cleaver? It could have been much worse. Spare us the teenage angst, please.

In the end, Roberts admits that "climbing was always about transcendence. In the spell that risk and fear, barely tamed by skill and nerve, cast over me, I found a blissful escape from the petty pace of normal life, from the death-by-banality of Boulder High and Bluebell Avenue. . . .

"Yet in the hectic impatience I have carried with me throughout life, in the fact that lasting contentment has eluded me all these years, I would judge that, in the long run, my quest for transcendence failed."

As for whether the risk of mountain climbing is worth it, time has changed Roberts' opinion. "Today, at age sixty-two I am far prouder of my best climbs in Alaska than anything else I have done in life," he concludes. ". . . In the human heart, however, there are nobler feelings than pride. And there are more important things in life than joy."

Spoken by a true trailblazer, one has to believe that he knows what he's talking about.

Karen Algeo Krizman is a freelance writer living in Littleton.