19 books
Piers Paul Read
You know the story. Maybe you saw the movie. In October 1972, a chartered plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team, their families, and friends clipped a ridge in the Andes and went down at 11,500 feet on a glacier. Sixteen…
Aaron Rolph
In the hands of Europeans, a mountain hut is more than shelter. It’s an expression of centuries of culture and intimate knowledge of life in the continent’s highest peaks. The photo-dense Alpine Refuges offers a tour of some of these…
Gabriel Tallent
Gabriel Tallent’s second novel, Crux, feels as if it’s trying to squeeze every possible metaphor out of every possible climbing term, and, like his hyper-loquacious protagonist Tamma, it’s a lot to take—at first. But you settle in, or maybe buckle…
Jack Kerouac
Kerouac wrote this right after On the Road, and it’s the calmer and better book. Ray Smith is Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder is Gary Snyder, who was then a young poet in Berkeley translating Han Shan and heading for a…
Jeremy Collins
Collins was shivering in a cave under Fitz Roy in Patagonia when he got the idea: Go out from home in each of the four directions, climb something new, and fill sketchbooks doing it. He told his friend and mentor…
Thomas Hornbein
Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld were on the 1963 American expedition, the one that put the first Americans on top by the regular route. The two of them wanted the West Ridge instead, which nobody had climbed and nobody knew if…
Katie Ives
In 1962 a climbing magazine ran a photo of an impossible range of granite spires called the Riesenstein, said to be in British Columbia, and climbers went looking for it. It was a hoax — the picture showed the Kichatna…
Wade Davis
Wade Davis’s monumental history of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s — and the World War I trauma that drove them. The climbers who went to Everest were survivors of the trenches. The mountain was where they went to…
Jon Krakauer
Krakauer was sent to Everest by a magazine to write about the commercialization of the mountain and summited on May 10, 1996, the day a storm caught multiple teams high on the peak. Eight people died that day, including both…
Kate Harris
Harris is one of the few authors whose writing stops me in my tracks (in a good way, of course). She grew up wanting to be an explorer, decided the planet was fully mapped, and went into science instead —…
David Roberts
Written after a cancer diagnosis at seventy-three, and it’s Roberts taking stock of a life of risk and asking what exploration was ever for. He goes through the history — polar travel, the Amazon, the great cave systems, first ascents…
Art Davidson
In February 1967, eight men attempted Denali in winter, which nobody had done. Three of them reached the summit late in the day, then got pinned at Denali Pass by a storm that lasted six days — no tent, in…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Portraits of the great mountaineers — Mallory, Shipton, Tilman, Hillary and Tenzing, Bonington, Messner, Boardman and Tasker, Lynn Hill, Steve House, and a long list besides — each with photographs, a short life, and a passage in their own words.…
Andy Kirkpatrick
Kirkpatrick spent twelve days alone on the Reticent Wall on El Capitan, one of the hardest aid routes in the world, hauling everything himself, sleeping in a portaledge, terrified most of the time. The climb runs through the book pitch…
Brendan Leonard
Leonard got sober at twenty-three after an arrest and a night in a cell, and then had to work out what a life looks like without the thing that had organized it. What he found was climbing. The book runs…
Nan Shepherd
British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when…
Lionel Davidson
The time is the early 1950s. The place is Central Asia. The backdrop is geopolitics, with the great powers of Britain, China, and others wrestling in the shadows for influence over India, Tibet, and Nepal. Into this cauldron stumbles fictional…
Cassidy Randall
Yes, gender is critical to the story of the 1970 Denali Damsels expedition on North America’s tallest summit. The six women just wanted to climb mountains, and in the late 1960s they had to fight male misogyny and suspicion to…
Joe Simpson
Simpson and Simon Yates climbed the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the first ascent, and on the way down Simpson shattered his leg. Yates lowered him a thousand feet at a time until Simpson went over…
