MOUNTAINEER RAPPELS INTO CLIMBERS' PSYCHE.

Byline: Rich Martin Daily News Staff Writer

Mountain climbers are a stoic lot. Reading their memoirs, it's hard to escape the sense they're leaving too much out. What sort of conflicts arise on Himalayan treks, and why risk life and limb for airy visions of glory above the clouds?

This makes Jim Wickwire's achievement all the more remarkable. A world-class climber, Wickwire, with writer Dorothy Bullitt of Seattle, has told the full epic story in ``Addicted to Danger: A Memoir About Affirming Life in the Face of Death'' (Pocket Books; $24). Included are not just the heroic parts but also passages that reveal less-than-noble motives and behavior.

The Seattle attorney has seen more than his share of death. On a climb via a risky, untried route on Mount McKinley, Wickwire's climbing partner falls headfirst into a crevasse, along with their sled with supplies. Wickwire hurts his shoulder in the accident and is unable to rescue his buddy, who becomes delirious and sings childhood hymns before dying. Wickwire then has to worry about his own survival; with little food and water, he endures nearly two weeks in the arctic wilderness alone before he's sighted by a plane.

Other friends die off one by one. A woman along on a training climb on McKinley makes a mistake tying a rope around herself and falls down a cliff. Other climbing partners die in avalanches and hypothermia.

Wickwire admits his obsession is much like an addiction and sees in it a kind of arrested adolescence, and reflects on the effect on his marriage - which somehow survives - and family. After his epiphany on McKinley, he sees climbing as an affirmation of life, not a death wish. Later he would start to scale down his climbs to family treks rather than several-month affairs that consume spirit as well as energy.

More revelations follow in the 322 pages. Expeditions ``can forge friendships, strengthen character and foster heroism,'' Wickwire notes. ``They can as easily sour relationships, expose human weakness and humble the arrogant.''

The accompanying photos are terrific, though it's a pity only the cover shot is in color. Not so ironically, that photo - of Wickwire on Oregon's Mount Hood - was shot by one of the author's climbing partners who later died. Our rating: Four Stars.

In every grab bag, there's usually a few goodies and some items you wouldn't touch unless you were starving. It's an appropriate analogy for ``The Outdoor Getaway Guide'' (Foghorn Press; $14.95) by Santa Monica's Steve Hymon and Julie Sheer.

This is really 340 pages of lists - a few fascinating but many more doomed by poor choices with data about as helpful as a down jacket in Death Valley during the height of summer.

Provided are some entertaining tidbits, such as a top-10 scenic-hike list, great-eight geology treks and best places to watch the sunset. And any outdoor guidebook that goes to the trouble of listing Newcomb's Ranch restaurant on Angeles Crest Highway deserves some praise.

But the authors are trying too hard. In amassing information listed by activity and by area, they have neglected such matters as maps (poor) and directions (skimpy; don't depend on them without a good look at a real map). Our rating: One and one-half Stars

At first glance, ``Climbing California's Fourteeners'' (The Mountaineers; $19.95) by Montana's Stephen F. Porcella and Cameron M. Burns of Colorado seems like yet another of the triathloner-type mountaineering books. But a closer look reveals the authors have crammed more than just routes while stressing hazardous options.

Not only do they examine 183 routes - which are smartly drawn on photos to make them easy to follow - they tell the climbing history of each peak, profiling pathfinders such as Norman Clyde, John Muir and Clarence King.

Muir, for example, was caught in a storm while climbing Mount Shasta in 1875. He wrote: ``The wind, rising to the highest pitch of violence, boomed and surged amid the desolate crags; lightning flashes in quick succession cut the gloomy darkness; and the thunders, the most tremendously loud and appalling I ever heard, made an almost continuous roar, stroke following stroke in quick, passionate succession, as though the mountain were being rent to its foundations and the fires of the old volcano were breaking forth again.''

The 272 pages are not aimed at the novice. Details on the routes, complete with maps and mileage logs, are as exhaustive as the climbs sound. Our rating: Two and one-half Stars

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Gus Ruelas/Daily News