Skills & Survival

Piers Paul Read's account of the Andes plane crash and the survivors' 72-day ordeal is one of the most harrowing survival stories ever told. The survivors' decision to eat the dead to stay alive is presented without judgment, in prose that earns the right to be that restrained.

A teenager who strolled away from a deadly plane crash in the jungle. A sailor who was rescued after spending two months adrift on the Atlantic. An alpinist who dragged his injured body to safety across an unforgiving landscape. Sure, luck played a factor for all of them, but Gonzales mashes up hard science with adrenaline-splashed anecdotes to suggest that some people are just hard-wired for survival—while explaining how the rest of us can still tip the odds in our favor.

“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.

Gary Paulsen is one of the all-time masters of children’s literature, and Hatchet is arguably his magnum opus. Ask any adult who read the book as a child and they’ll recount the violent plane crash in the rugged Canadian wilderness, 13-year-old Brian’s realization that he is the lone survivor, his panicked struggle to build a fire, and his ensuing fight for survival armed only with his wits and a trusty hatchet.

Peter Potterfield's collection of mountaineering survival narratives — the moments when everything goes wrong and the only option is to keep moving. Gripping and well-curated.

Peter Stark's collection of essays about how the body fails in extreme environments — hypothermia, altitude sickness, dehydration, drowning. The science of dying, told with narrative precision.

Yossi Ghinsberg's account of being stranded alone in the Bolivian Amazon for three weeks after a backpacking trip went wrong. Starvation, parasites, hallucinations, and a rescue that came just in time. Raw survival narrative.

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.

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.

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.

A year embedded with Aspen's search and rescue team — the rescues, the body recoveries, the volunteers who show up in the middle of the night. The unglamorous reality of mountain emergencies.

A backcountry ranger disappeared in the Sierra Nevada in 1996. This investigation into his life and disappearance is also a portrait of the kind of person who chooses to live alone in the mountains — brilliant, difficult, and drawn to places where the maps end.

Seven prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Siberia and walked 4,000 miles to India. Through the Gobi Desert, over the Himalaya, on foot. The authenticity has been questioned. The story is extraordinary regardless.