Ice & Snow

Floyd Schmoe's account of a year spent at Mount Rainier's Paradise Inn in the 1920s, reissued with an introduction by Gail Storey. A quiet, observational book about living inside a mountain landscape through all four seasons.

Huw Lewis-Jones presents the photographs from Wally Herbert's 1968-69 crossing of the Arctic Ocean by dog sled — the last great journey of polar exploration. The images of ice, light, and endurance are extraordinary.

David Roberts tells the story of Douglas Mawson's 1912 Antarctic expedition, in which Mawson lost both his companions, most of his supplies, and the soles of his feet — then walked 100 miles back to base camp alone. It may actually be the greatest survival story in the history of exploration.

Michael Smith's biography of the Irish seaman who served on three Antarctic expeditions — with Scott twice and Shackleton once — and performed some of the most extraordinary feats of endurance in polar history. Crean walked 35 miles alone across the Ross Ice Shelf to save his companions. Almost nobody knows his name.

If anyone can transport us into the soul of the White Continent, it’s photographer Sebastian Copeland. A professional polar explorer, Copeland has made several human-powered expeditions in frozen extremes, including the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica from east to west via two of its poles, traveling on skis with kites for twenty-five hundred miles. Drawing from his on-foot experiences as well as seasons on a scientific research icebreaker, Antarctica: The Waking Giant is more than a decade in the making, and Copeland ground-truthed his pictures the hard way: breaking ribs, losing parts of his toes to frostbite, scuba diving under icebergs. The book holds one hundred fifty staggering photographs, from the vast, otherworldly interior to the wildlife-rich coasts, where whales break the surface and migrating birds and penguins mob the shorelines. In our rapidly changing, melting world, Copeland’s work is both celebration and warning, a potent reminder that no matter the distance, we are all in this together.

Barry Lopez spent five years traveling in the Arctic, and the book he wrote about it is one of the great works of American nonfiction. It's about ice and light and musk oxen and Inuit hunters, but it's also about the nature of imagination — how a landscape this extreme remakes the people who enter it.

Chris Burkard's photography book documenting glaciers and the landscapes they've shaped — Iceland, Patagonia, the Alps, Alaska. The images are monumental. The subtext is elegiac: this is what's disappearing.

Childs again, this time tracing the routes of the first Americans across a continent of glaciers, megafauna, and landscapes that no longer exist. Part archaeology, part adventure, part thought experiment about what it meant to walk into a world no human had ever seen.

Yvon Chouinard's technical manual and manifesto from 1978 is part how-to, part philosophy, and part visual document of the golden age of alpine climbing. The gear innovations he describes here became the foundation of both his climbing career and Patagonia.

Andy Kirkpatrick's account of climbing the hardest winter routes in the Alps — alone, underfunded, and frequently terrified. Kirkpatrick writes about fear better than any climber alive. Funny in a way that makes the danger feel more real, not less.

Not Lansing's book but Frank Worsley's — the navigator of the Endurance tells his own version of the story. The 800-mile open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean, narrated by the man who navigated it with a sextant and dead reckoning. The seamanship alone is worth reading.

Alfred Lansing's account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is the gold standard of survival literature. When Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, he kept 27 men alive through an Antarctic winter, an open-boat crossing of the Southern Ocean, and a traverse of South Georgia Island that had never been attempted. Lansing tells it in prose as spare and relentless as the ice itself.

Gregory Crouch's memoir of climbing in Patagonia's granite towers — Cerro Torre, Fitz Roy, and the rest of the Chaltén massif. Wind, ice, and vertical rock described with the intensity of someone who spent years getting beaten down by all three.

Polar explorer, historian, professor, and writer Huw Lewis-Jones is so prolific you will be forgiven for thinking there are two of him. In 2010, he published this book, an admiring sweep of ocean pioneers, along with a similar, companion book of mountain folks called Mountain Heros: Portraits of Adventure. Face to Face honors modern water people like surfer Kelly Slater and swimmer Lynne Cox while also plucking historical badasses from obscurity, like beloved Sir Thomas Lipton, who lost the America’s Cup five times. 500 words or so of each person’s biography are interspersed with intimate and action-oriented portraits, and Lewis-Jones’s British perspective brings a much more worldly array of personalities than you’d get from an American author. Flip through or plunging dive—either way, you’ll come away longing for the briny deep.

Searching for a Northeast polar passage from Europe to China, sixteenth century Dutch navigator William Barents and his crew of sixteen made a few attempts to sail through the Arctic, going farther than any Europeans had before. Proving that the third time is not always the charm, in the winter of 1596 they became stranded, stuck hard in the sea ice off of Nova Zembla, two hundred miles north of Siberia. Barents and his men built a cabin from their boat’s salvaged lumber—ominously, their sole carpenter perished before construction had even begun—and hunkered down for a year of desperate survival, keeping the constant threats of polar bears, frostbite, hunger, and one another at bay. Journalist Andrea Pitzer ventured to the Arctic more than once to track this story, studying Barents’ ship log and other direct accounts from his crew. Icebound is an engrossing, bone-chilling history, an open porthole into the dreams and nightmares of the great Age of Exploration.

Huw Lewis-Jones on the visual culture of Arctic exploration — the paintings, photographs, maps, and illustrations that shaped how the world imagined the north. A history of seeing ice.

Huw Lewis-Jones's visual history of Antarctic exploration — the maps, photographs, paintings, and artifacts of the heroic age and beyond.

Roger Mear and Robert Swan retraced Scott's route to the South Pole in 1985 — on foot, without resupply. A modern expedition in the shadow of the most famous failure in polar history.

Leave it to Hampton Sides to resurrect the almost-forgotten tale of the USS Jeannette, a harrowing story that details Captain George De Long’s ill-fated 1887 voyage to the North Pole. Wrongly convinced by several of the world’s leading scientists of an unfrozen, open-polar sea, De Long and crew sailed into directly into a disaster of their own making that included an ice-crushed vessel, heavy casualties, and permanent relegation to the “failures” chapter of maritime history.

Doug Peacock connects the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions to the modern biodiversity crisis. The sabretooth is the metaphor — we killed them, and we haven't stopped killing. Peacock at his angriest and most urgent.

Intense, unyielding, unapologetic, and at times straight-up angry, world-renowned alpinist Mark Twight holds nothing back in this collection of essays about life in the cold, deadly mountains. Whether recounting his first-ascent exploits in the Alaska Range or sharing his thoughts on nonconformity, Kiss or Kill gives readers the opportunity to spend a few hours inside Twight’s head—and emerge either tougher and more committed to their craft….or perhaps intimidated and looking for a comfy romance novel to cleanse their mental palette.

Buddy Levy's account of the 1881 Greely expedition to the Arctic — 25 men went north, 6 came back. Starvation, mutiny, cannibalism, and one of the most controversial rescue operations in American history.

Alison Fell's novel set against the backdrop of Alpine climbing — ambition, desire, and the Chamonix aiguilles. Literary fiction on ice.

Art Davidson's account of the first winter ascent of Denali in 1967 — when temperatures dropped to minus 148 degrees with wind chill. Three climbers survived a storm that should have killed them. The cold is a character in this book.

Nando Parrado's own account of the 1972 Andes crash — the companion to Piers Paul Read's Alive, told by one of the survivors who walked out. More introspective than Read's version, and haunted by what it took to survive.

Lindsay McCrae spent a year filming emperor penguins in Antarctica for the BBC. His account of the experience — the isolation, the cold, the extraordinary behavior of the birds — is a memoir of attention at the bottom of the world.

“Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.” Like a sled dog nose down on the trail, Ordinary Wolves pulls you without hesitation into a life different from what most will ever know—sub-freezing “no-sun winters,” the smell of seal oil at dinner, worrying about whether a moose could crash through the ground-level skylight of your sod igloo. But this wild world is the only one young Cutuk Hawcly has ever known. Raised on the Alaskan tundra with his brother, sister, and idealistic father a day’s sled-drive from neighbors, Cutuk has grown up fishing, hunting, and everyday living on the remote Kuguruk River. He aspires to the on-the-land intuition of hunter Enuk Wolfglove, yet when 12-year-old Cutuk visits the closest village—with its snowmobiles and bright nylon jackets—the native kids choke him in a headlock because he is white and “hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners…” As Cutuk grows up, the Arctic old ways and the modern world clash over and over. Which path to follow? Ordinary Wolves is fiction, but author Seth Kantner is no tenderfoot. His parents moved to the northern Alaska wilderness in the 1950s and his dad apprenticed to an Iñupiaq couple in Arctic survival, decades earlier than today’s many reality show survivalists (and yes, even before Dick Proenneke got fish-hungry). Cutuk’s story is at times funny and other times brutally raw, inspired by real people and real emotions in a landscape often overly romanticized. It shines firelight on the true, unapologetic Last Frontier we’ve been seeking since Jack London was just a wolf pup. The book earned some moose-sized praise when first published, yet many don’t know Ordinary Wolves outside of the Northwest. It’s up for statewide Alaska Reads programming this year, and we’ve heard from friends who’ve read it six-plus times and counting. A tenth anniversary edition is now out—it’s howling to be rediscovered.

The navigator's account of the 800-mile open-boat crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia — the most dangerous small-boat voyage in history. Where Lansing gives you the panorama, this gives you the tiller.

Growing up Iñupiat in the Alaska bush — subsistence hunting, snowmachines, and a childhood measured in seasons rather than school years. A memoir of a life lived closer to the land than almost anyone in modern America.

Shackleton's own account of the Endurance expedition. Less polished than Lansing's version but more immediate — the voice of the man making the decisions, not the historian reconstructing them.

Is it a cookbook? A field journal memoir? A photo album with cool archives, like a scan of a 1912 polar menu featuring “Plum Pouding Union Jack” and penguin? Yes, yes, and yes. But, cooking and cleaning...in Antarctica? Two young women, one an activist, the other a backcountry cook, organized a remote island cleanup project to pick up man-made litter. They cajoled 54 volunteers and constructed one makeshift kitchen to feed everyone for a summer. The experience is told by scrapbook: journal entries, maps, 40 recipes, menus, and to-do lists. Photos historical and modern show the characters drawn to the austral extremes over the last century, from Shackleton to today’s international scientists and adventurers. Maybe it’s the honey oatmeal bread, musings of Russian and Chilean researchers, or dreamlike images of icebergs and whale flukes, but taken together, in what would seem by the title to be the least likely compelling read, it’s a surprisingly hearty chronicle of the bottom of the world.

If you’ve studied outdoor education, you’ve learned about heuristic traps: human factors like leadership trust or summit fever that affect decision-making. Should you make a move in the storm or wait it out? And if you can only choose one, do you eat your friend’s heart, liver, or brains? Hmmm. Many think of the Donner Party as a distant textbook chapter, but historian Michael Wallis brings new life—and death—to the survival saga. As the 1846-47 winter snowdrifts pile up to twenty-two feet in the eastern Sierra, you’ll feel like you’re there, shivering under wool blankets, eating through the rations until it’s live mice on the menu, then shoe leather, then pet dogs, then…Samuel Shoemaker’s arm. Out of the eighty-seven migrants who started, only forty-six survived. Would you have done anything differently? With maps, photos, and diary excerpts, this full-bodied chronicle invites you to jump on the wagon train and consider the question for yourself.

Winter climbing in the Himalaya — the coldest, most dangerous pursuit in mountaineering. Moro has made more winter first ascents above 8,000 meters than anyone alive.

Growing up rough in the Canadian Rockies, becoming one of the best alpinists in the world. Blanchard's memoir is unflinching about the cost — the broken relationships, the dead friends, the moments when climbing asks for everything.

Belmore Browne's account of three attempts on Denali in the early 1900s — including the expedition that came within 200 feet of the summit before a storm turned them back. The heartbreak of almost.

Photographs from the 1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition — the crossing Shackleton died trying to complete. Hillary drove tractors to the South Pole; Fuchs crossed the continent. The images of ice and machinery are surreal.

Kolbert curates the best polar writing — from the heroic age to the climate crisis. Nansen, Cherry-Garrard, Lopez, and contemporary scientists, all gathered at the poles.

Ehrlich on the Arctic — glaciers, climate change, and the dissolution of the frozen world. Written with a poet's grief and a naturalist's precision.

London's Yukon stories — gold rush desperation, Arctic cold, and the brutal Darwinism of the frontier. The raw material that became The Call of the Wild.

The other half of the Endurance expedition — the men who were supposed to lay depots on the opposite side of Antarctica, whose ship blew out to sea, leaving them stranded. Less famous than Shackleton's crossing, equally harrowing.

This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who are unprepared for the frontier’s harsh demands. One day on a whim they build a childlike snowman; overnight the snowman vanishes, and a mysterious little girl appears from the woods. She is skittish around people yet sure-footed as a mountain goat in the snow, trapping animals for food with a wily red fox as her hunting companion. Named after alpenglow, she is fearlessly at home in the very wilderness that threatens the homesteaders. Where is she from, and why does she disappear at night? Is she a fairy tale come to life? The Snow Child shifts between the fantastical and the real, an immersive, haunting fable about finding hope in wildness that stays wild.

The Stowaway starts in 1928 with 18-year-old Billy Gawronski, a first-generation New Yorker from a Polish Catholic family, jumping into the Hudson River at night as he tries to sneak aboard Admiral Richard Byrd’s ship. The Eleanor Bolle is bound for Antarctica and the South Pole—the most sought-after final frontier at the time, and certainly a hell of a lot more exciting than the Gawronski family upholstery business. The backdrop is Jazz Age America—think Rockefellers, flappers, and early years of The Explorers Club—when the U.S. careened forward with heady optimism. Using original Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times expedition footage and historical photos, documentary filmmaker Shapiro weaves a downright plucky true tale of polar fever. Beneath the romance, though, is a thoughtful take on an age-old question: Just what is it that emboldens some to knock down barriers in order to chase a dream? Stowaway is a well-researched and entertaining coming-of-age story of a boy, a country, and an era of exploration.

Two winters back, over a lunch of dried caribou along the Arctic’s Noatak River, Alaskan writer Seth Kantner told me I had to read Sherry Simpson’s The Way Winter Comes. First published a decade ago and awarded the Chinook Literary Prize, this little-known collection of essays immerses readers in short scenes of northern wilderness, animals, and people. Juneau-born Simpson’s journalistic accounts of everyday Alaska—“I ride behind a North Pole trapper named Phil on his Tabasco-red snowmachine”—intertwine with graceful lyricism—“In winter the flat, frozen surface of the upper Chena River becomes a boulevard for wildlife, where tracks inscribe a calligraphy of motion in the snow. Everything is going somewhere.” Seth was right. If this book had a spirit animal, it would be the wolverine: small in stature and surprisingly badass. Get the original hardcover if you can, or wait for the forthcoming version from Shorefast Editions.

Harrer's history of climbing the Eiger Nordwand — from the first attempts in the 1930s through his own first ascent in 1938. The definitive account of the most famous wall in the Alps.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard's memoir of Scott's Antarctic expedition is widely considered the greatest polar narrative ever written. The winter journey to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs is suffering on a scale that defies comprehension. Cherry-Garrard writes about it with devastating understatement.

Six journeys to Greenland across six years — dog sleds, hunters, ice, and the Inuit culture shaped by the most extreme environment on earth. Ehrlich writes about cold the way she writes about everything: with a poet's precision and a survivor's authority.

Joe Simpson fell into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes with a shattered leg, was cut loose by his climbing partner, and crawled back to camp over three days. Simon Yates, the partner who cut the rope, tells his side too. The result is the most gripping survival story in mountaineering — and an unflinching exploration of a decision that haunted both men for decades.

Frazier drove across Siberia — the entire width of it — and wrote about what he found: emptiness, history, mosquitoes, and the ghost of the gulag. Thousands of miles of road that barely qualifies as road, rendered with Frazier's signature deadpan.

Worsley sailing in Arctic waters — the navigator of the Endurance on his own, in the ice, doing what he was born to do.

A tiny outpost in the Norwegian Arctic and a dogsled camp fixed on a remote slab of Alaskan ice serve as frigid twin sirens for Braverman, who spends several years cycling through both places in an effort to harden her exterior and untangle her insides with equal measures of cold, isolation, and manual labor. In the process, she discovers a valuable truth—that sometimes it’s the suffering you choose that helps you work through the trauma you didn’t.

The inverse of The Call of the Wild — a wolf-dog hybrid moves from wilderness to domestication. London exploring the same territory from the other direction.

Lopez's short fiction — spare, mysterious stories set in landscapes where the natural world presses against the human. Each story is a small window into a larger wilderness.

“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter living with nomadic Kazakh herders. Who knew wrangling camels could be laugh out loud funny? Li, from northwestern China’s Altai Mountains, struggles to find anyone willing to take her on their journey to the remote and windy tundra. But her mother remembers a family that owes them money, and they quickly agree; Li will be free labor and an easy way to cancel the debt. With several hundred camels, sheep, horses, and cows, together they venture by foot and horseback into the frozen steppes, where the night temps dip beyond twenty below and shelter is a tiny underground burrow. Li is a darling guide, and she writes candidly, evoking the beauty and harshness that comes with this close-to-the-earth way of life. A bestseller in China recently translated into English, Winter Pasture is the most delightful book I’ve read all year.

Bass's journal of a Montana winter — wood-cutting, snowshoeing, and the particular silence of the Yaak Valley under snow. A small book about a cold season in a wild place.