Climbing & Mountaineering

At the beginning of his memoir Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map, Rick Ridgeway tells us that if you add up all his many expeditions, he’s spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents....

Before climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates were able to reach the unclimbed West Face of the remote Siula Grande, disaster struck....

At 28,251 feet, the world's second-tallest mountain, K2 thrusts skyward out of the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan. Climbers regard it as the ultimate achievement in mountaineering, with good reason....

Ant Middleton is no stranger to fear: as a point man in the Special Forces, he confronted fear on a daily basis, never knowing what lay behind the next corner, or the next closed door....

The first comprehensive biography of Louise Arner Boyd - the intrepid American socialite who reinvented herself as the leading female polar explorer of the 20th century....

The Color of Everything is a thrilling tale of risk and adventure, written by a man who has done it all: he’s stood at the top of the world, climbed imposing mountain faces alone in the dark and become the only American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter....

Edmund Hillary - A Biography is the story of the New Zealand beekeeper who climbed Mount Everest. A man who, against expedition orders, drove his tractor to the South Pole....

Hans Florine holds the speed record on the Nose route of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite cliff in Yosemite Valley that's considered the Everest of the rock-climbing world. But Florine's story is not one of super-human athletic prowess; it's one of persistence and dogged determination....

How can an average climber do the hardest route in the world? Dave MacLeod wasn’t even the best among his fellow rock climbers in Glasgow, until a sequence of key decisions and influences catalysed his progression from an unremarkable intermediate to one of the best all-round climbers in the world.

On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes....

This is a stirring, vivid book about one of the most compelling and dangerous of all human pursuits....

John Burns takes you on a journey of more than 40 years from the hills of Britain to adventures in the Rocky Mountains of the US and Canada. This is an audiobook about the people who love mountains and whose journeys amongst them enrich their lives....

Sandy Stott, the "Accidents" editor at the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club, delivers both a history and a celebration of the search and rescue workers who save countless lives in the White Mountains....

Through the seventies and into the mid-eighties, a cohort of young climbers challenged the siege mentality of their seniors on high mountains in the Greater Ranges with fast moving, lightweight expeditions run on a shoestring. Brian Hall was one of them....

This gripping and triumphant memoir follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at a time....

In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest via the South Col route.

Renowned rock climber Beth Rodden’s inspiring memoir about overcoming devastating trauma, refusing to be held hostage by fear, and taking a leap toward healing....

The Last Great Mountain tells the story of the first ascent of Kangchenjunga the third highest but reputedly the hardest mountain in the world. It was an astonishing achievement for a British team led by Everest veteran Charles Evans....

Reaching the top of the world in 1953 was one of the most significant achievements in the history of human endurance.

Much has changed on Mount Everest. A mountain's ability to reduce climbers to their essential selves is revealing villains as well as heroes, greed as well as selflessness....

Spanning an extraordinary range of subjects and locations, these ten gripping essays show why Jon Krakauer is considered a standard-bearer of modern journalism....

In early May 2006, a young British climber named David Sharp lay dying near the top of Mount Everest while forty other climbers walked past him on their way to the summit....

Steve House built his reputation on ascents throughout the Alps, Canada, Alaska, the Karakoram, and the Himalaya that have expanded possibilities of style, speed, and difficulty....

Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of 13. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disability....

"It’s a preposterous plan. Still, if you do get up it, it’ll be the hardest thing that’s been done in the Himalayas," said Chris Bonington when Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker presented him with a plan to tackle the unscaled west wall of Changabang - the Shining Mountain - in 1976....