Mountaineers Books

Lionel Terray's autobiography is one of the great mountaineering memoirs. From the Alps to the Andes to the Himalaya, Terray climbed everything with a joy and ferocity that makes most modern adventure writing seem cautious by comparison. The title alone is worth the cover price.

Reinhold Messner soloed Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1980 — an achievement so audacious it still doesn't seem possible. His account of the climb is characteristically intense and interior. Nobody has ever been alone at that altitude before or since.

Johanna Garton's biography of Christine Boskoff, one of the most accomplished female mountaineers in history, who died in an avalanche in China in 2006. A story about ambition, love, and the mountains' indifference to both.

Peter Steele's biography of the British mountaineer who explored more of the Himalaya than anyone of his generation. Shipton was the anti-expedition leader — small teams, light packs, no oxygen. His approach to mountains was a philosophy before it was a style.

“I love the cold. I love the struggle, the realness, the ridiculousness, and the tenderness of it. Rescue missions are not actually work, not a career; money, power, and prestige mean nothing out here.” Set in the wild, craggy peaks of Washington’s Cascades, Found is a deeply drawn memoir about volunteer mountain search and rescue. There are epics and gory injuries, yes, yet this story burns brightest when describing the motley volunteer community: individuals united by their will to abandon cozy beds at 2 a.m., risking real jobs and angry families, not to mention their lives. With 20 years of experience in picking up bloody boots and hauling fully loaded litters down scree fields, Loewen is an SAR rarity as a young mom. A wry sense of humor—body bag for a birthday present, anyone?—spliced with compassion creates an achingly true picture, scene after scene, of the raw grace we find in the outdoors.

Messner's autobiography — from the Dolomites to the fourteen 8,000-meter peaks to his post-climbing life as a museum builder and politician. The full arc of the most important mountaineer of the twentieth century.

Leif Whittaker's account of climbing Everest while reckoning with the legacy of his father Jim, the first American to summit. A son's story about following — and not following — in a famous father's footsteps.

What it's actually like to work as a climbing ranger on Mount Rainier — rescues, body recoveries, crevasse falls, and the strange normalcy of living on a glacier. Unglamorous and gripping.

Growing up in a violent household in Hull, then finding salvation on the hardest winter routes in the Alps. The connection between the two is never stated and never needs to be. Fear as a constant companion, on the wall and off it.

The autobiography told in interview form — every expedition, every controversy, every mountain. The most important mountaineer of the twentieth century in his own words, unfiltered.

The 1986 Everest summit via the West Ridge — the hardest route, without supplemental oxygen, told by the first North American woman to stand on top. No fanfare, no self-mythology. Just the climb and what it cost.

The first complete traverse of Comb Ridge in southern Utah — 100 miles of sandstone monocline, packed with Ancestral Puebloan ruins. Archaeology on foot, in one of the most remote landscapes in the Lower 48.

What do you do after landing with a thud at an alcohol-soaked rock bottom? If you’re Leonard, you poke around down there for a bit, then grab a climbing rope and head for higher ground. Trading in his popular Semi-Rad charts and graphs—but retaining his trademark self-deprecating humor—for something a tad more serious, Leonard’s memoir traces a personal redemptive arc that speaks to the power of friendship and fresh air.

Life in bush Alaska — subsistence hunting, extreme cold, and the slow encroachment of the modern world on a place that resists it. Kantner grew up in the Arctic and writes about it with the authority of someone who never left.

The untold story of the 1961 first ascent of Denali's Wickersham Wall — one of the most audacious climbs in North American history, buried for decades by a dispute between the climbers. McCartney finally tells his side.

Messner's account of the 1970 Nanga Parbat expedition that killed his brother Günther. For decades, Messner was accused of abandoning his brother for the summit. This book is his answer. The mountain is the jury.

Freeman Dyson designs starships at Princeton; his son George builds a kayak and lives in a treehouse in British Columbia. A book about two kinds of exploration — one into space, one into the wild — and the father-son rift between them.

It took Heather “Anish” Anderson 60 days, 17 hours, and 12 minutes to set a speed record on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail in 2013, but the physical and emotional reckoning that followed lasted quite a bit longer. Her chronicle of that incredible feat and its fallout offers a glimpse into not only what it takes to earn a Fastest Known Time on one of the world’s most famous trails, but also what it can take out of you in the process.

A season with a wildfire crew — the work, the risk, the culture, and the increasingly impossible conditions that climate change is creating for the people who fight fire.