29 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. Seventy-two…
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…
Callan Wink
In this second novel from author and fly-fishing guide Callan Wink, twenty-something brothers Thad and Hazen are hanging on, barely, in their rustic log house on the banks of the Yellowstone River, just outside the national park. They’re saddled with…
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…
Doug Peacock
Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun, just a camera and years of sitting still watching bears he came to…
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…
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 others — each with photographs, a short bio, and a passage in their own words. Lewis-Jones is a…
Keith McCloskey
In February 1959, nine experienced backcountry skiers died on a slope in the northern Urals. They cut their way out of the tent from the inside and ran into a blizzard at night in bare feet and underwear. Some froze;…
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…
Ann Zwinger
Ann Zwinger ran the Green River from its source in the Wind River Range down to its confluence with the Colorado — by kayak, raft, and on foot — and wrote the whole river as a naturalist. She covers the…
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is the poet who worked Sierra trail crews and fire lookouts, spent a decade in a Kyoto Zen monastery, and later won the Pulitzer for Turtle Island. The Back Country, 1968, is four sections that map his life…
Peter Heller
Peter Heller’s novel The River,moved as swiftly and eventfully as class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
Eric Blehm
Randy Morgenson spent twenty-eight summers as a backcountry ranger in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, walking a district most people never see, and in July 1996 he didn’t answer the radio. What followed was one of the largest searches in Park…
Maggie Stiefvater
June Hudson runs the Avallon, a grand hotel built over mineral springs in the West Virginia mountains, and she came up from the hollers to do it. In 1942, the State Department requisitions the place to intern Axis diplomats and…
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…
James Galvin
A hundred years of one meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado line, at ten thousand feet, told out of order. Author James Galvin owned part of it and knew the people who worked it, chiefly Lyle Van Waning, a man who built…
Joshua M. Powell
Not a guidebook. Powell hiked the PCT and made a visual compendium of it — hand-drawn maps, charts, and diagrams covering the whole 2,650 miles from Campo to Manning Park. Elevation profiles, snowpack, water sources, the mileage between resupply towns,…
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…
Carrot Quinn
The Pacific Crest Trail, 2,660 miles, told as the daily blog she actually kept — which is why it reads nothing like a reflective memoir. It’s feet, water carries, hunger, weather, town stops, and the trail family that forms and…
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…
Earl Swift
Virginian Earl Swift loves the Appalachian Trail. As a young man, he kept moving closer and closer to it, as if inching toward a girl he wanted to know, eventually leasing “a goddamn eyesore” apartment because it was located at…
Daniel Duane
My favorite Daniel Duane book, and that’s saying something from the man who wrote Caught Inside. A Sierra boyhood braided with the harder history behind the postcard, and he never stops loving the place even as he reckons with it.
