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Author is a renowned writer in international climbing community Fascinating story of hoax that inspired a quest for a North American Shangri-La Vivid recounting of fabled mountains from across the world Using an infamous deception about a fake mountain range in British Columbia as her jumping-off point, Katie Ives, the well-known editor of Alpinist, explores the lure of blank spaces on the map and the value of the imagination. In Imaginary Peaks she details the cartographical mystery of the Riesenstein Hoax within the larger context of climbing history and the seemingly endless quest for newly discovered peaks and claims of first ascents. Imaginary Peaks is an evocative, thought-provoking tale, immersed in the literature of exploration, study of maps, and basic human desire.
An energetic, witty collection of stories where the supernatural meets the anomalies of everyday life--deception, infidelity, lost cats, cute memes, amateur pornography, and more. There are analogies between being female and being left-handed, I think, or being an animal. A woman answers a Craigslist ad (to write erotic diaries for money). A woman walks onto a tennis court (from her home at the bottom of the ocean). A woman goes to the supermarket and meets a friend's husband (who happens to be an immortal demon). A woman goes for a run (and accidentally time travels). Cosmogony takes accounts of so-called normal life and mines them for inconsistencies, deceptions, and delights. Incorporating a virtuosic range of styles and genres (Wikipedia entry, phone call, physics equation, encounters with the supernatural), these stories reveal how the narratives we tell ourselves and believe are inevitably constructed, offering a glimpse of the structures that underlie and apparently determine human existence.
Winner of the 2015 New Welsh Writing Awards: WWF Cymru Prize for Writing on Nature and the Environment Shortlisted for the 2016 Wales Book of the Year: The Open University in Wales Creative Non-Fiction Award 'Eluned Gramich has written the perfect essay - a minutely detailed yet nuanced evocation of place and personalities that is full of ecologically precise imagery and is as attentive to the Japanese language as it is to Hokkaidan landscape.' – Mark Cocker As precise and nuanced as Japanese calligraphy, this memoir of the author's stay on the remote Hokkaido island in the far north of Japan, has at its heart the mountain, Yotei-san, the region's iconic equivalent to Mount Fuji. As much a...
Features a new “where are they now” section, updating readers on lives of expedition’s original climbers Fully updated and detailed resources based on the "Anti-Racism in the Outdoors" (ARITO) guide Readers’ Guide explores additional context and questions for further consideration Outdoor journalist James Edward Mills’s book, The Adventure Gap, is a groundbreaking volume that is equal parts adventure story, history, and inspiration as it chronicles the first American all-Black summit attempt on Denali in 2013. Mills uses this momentous expedition as a jumping-off point to explore diversity in the outdoors, from Mathew Henson who stood at the North Pole in 1909 to contemporary adven...
Waymaking is an anthology of prose, poetry and artwork by women who are inspired by wild places, adventure and landscape. Published in 1961, Gwen Moffat's Space Below My Feet tells the story of a woman who shirked the conventions of society and chose to live a life in the mountains. Some years later in 1977, Nan Shepherd published The Living Mountain, her prose bringing each contour of the Cairngorm mountains to life. These pioneering women set a precedent for a way of writing about wilderness that isn't about conquering landscapes, reaching higher, harder or faster, but instead about living and breathing alongside them, becoming part of a larger adventure. The artists in this inspired colle...
• One of the greatest explorers of the 20th century • Shipton’s Everest explorations set the stage for its conquest by Edmund Hillary Eric Shipton was an adventurer when adventure meant traveling to places for which no maps existed, scaling mountains whose heights were uncalculated, and encountering people whom no westerner had ever met. That Untravelled World, originally published in 1969, is his autobiography, written near the end of his career, when the passing of time had deepened his reflections on his many accomplishments and companions. Shipton’s story begins with his early childhood, his first climbs in the Alps, his decision to be a coffee farmer rather than attend universit...
'How much risk is worth taking for so beautiful a prize?' The Magician's Glass by award-winning writer Ed Douglas is a collection of eight recent essays on some of the biggest stories and best-known personalities in the world of climbing. In the title essay, he writes about failure on Annapurna III in 1981, one of the boldest attempts in Himalayan mountaineering on one of the most beautiful lines – a line that remains unclimbed to this day. Douglas writes about bitter controversies, like that surrounding Ueli Steck's disputed solo ascent of of the south face of Annapurna, the fate of Toni Egger on Cerro Torre in 1959 – when Cesare Maestri claimed the pair had made the first ascent, and t...
The account of one of the deadliest and most mysterious tragedies in mountaineering history-the 2008 K2 disaster. One Mountain Thousand Summits reveals the true story of the K2 tragedy that claimed the lives of eleven men. Based on his numerous trips to Nepal and in-depth interviews he conducted with the survivors, the families of the lost climbers, and the Sherpa guides whose heroic efforts saved the lives of at least four climbers, Freddie Wilkinson's narrative uncovers what actually occurred on the mountain, while delivering a criticism of the mainstream press's incomplete coverage of the event, and an insightful look into the lives of the six Sherpas who were involved.
This magesterial and thrilling history argues that the story of American mountaineering is the story of America itself. In Continental Divide, Maurice Isserman tells the history of American mountaineering through four centuries of landmark climbs and first ascents. Mountains were originally seen as obstacles to civilization; over time they came to be viewed as places of redemption and renewal. The White Mountains stirred the transcendentalists; the Rockies and Sierras pulled explorers westward toward Manifest Destiny; Yosemite inspired the early environmental conservationists. Climbing began in North America as a pursuit for lone eccentrics but grew to become a mass-participation sport. Begi...