Rocky Mountain Books

David Smart's biography of the Italian climber who pioneered big-wall climbing in the Dolomites in the 1930s. Comici's routes were decades ahead of their time. His life — tangled with fascism and tragedy — was as dramatic as his climbing.

Bernadette McDonald's history of Polish mountaineering during the Cold War. Behind the Iron Curtain, Polish climbers developed an approach to the Himalaya — winter ascents, new routes, alpine style — that was bolder than anything the West was doing. Many of them died. This book is their monument.

Born in 1939 in rural Japan, Junko Tabei became the first woman to climb Mt. Everest in 1975 and complete the Seven Summits, and she continued to climb big, scary peaks until she passed away in 2016. Who was this 4’9” mountaineer behind the Tokyo Ladies Climbing Club (slogan: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.”), who balanced a home with a beloved climber husband and two kids and was renowned for her superhuman strength and gentle giggle? Honouring High Places is Tabei’s first book in English, a translated collection of memoirs and photographs filled with the details of post-WWII culture, groundbreaking expeditions, and a life fully enraptured by mountains. In addition to her long list of remarkable firsts, it’s arguable that in the history of world climbing Tabei should also win for “best smile,” and Honouring nearly reads like a series of meditative love letters—to the alpine, to lost climbing partners, to family, to life itself.

In 1991, wearing racing flats and little more than his signature lion’s mane of red-gold hair, with neither a GPS watch nor a trainer to set pace, Canadian Al Howie blazed two world records back to back: one for a 1,300-mile race, finishing in sixteen days, nineteen hours, and one for a 4,533-mile cross-Canada race, averaging sixty-three miles a day for over two months. Yes, two months. Ultra, shmultra—and now we think a fifty-miler is tough. In this moving biography of an obscure legend, screenwriter Jared Beasley sketches a soulful portrait of an embattled figure who, fueled by fish n’ chips and beer and instinct, won dozens of mega-distance races in the 1980s and ’90s, inspiring many with his working-class heroism and singular devotion to mileage. In Search of Al Howie will leave you yearning for a recent yet distant unplugged era in human-powered adventure, when a free spirit kindled righteous pursuits of endurance as a way of life.

Geoff Powter's history of Canadian mountaineering — from the railroad surveyors to the modern alpine elite. The Rockies and the Coast Range as seen by the people who climbed them first.

Biography of the Austrian climber who insisted on climbing without pitons in the early 1900s — a purist whose ethics were fifty years ahead of the clean climbing movement. He fell to his death at 27.

Biography of the greatest alpine climber most people have never heard of. Kurtyka's ascents in the Himalaya and Karakoram were decades ahead of their time, and McDonald's portrait captures both the climbing and the philosophy behind it.