Mountains of North America

Publication Year: 1983.

Mountains of North America. Fred Beckey. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco in association with The American Alpine Club, 1982. 256 pages, 140 color photographs, map. $35.00.

Shore up your coffee tables: here comes another three-and-a-half pounds of lavish illustration in a large format. Somewhere between The Mountains of America, by Franklin Russell, and Climbing in North America, by Chris Jones, Fred Beckey has perceived a gap; this book is his attempt to fill it.

Mountains of North America is not a mountaineer’s atlas, as its name implies; nor is it a climber’s route book, for which we should be grateful. Neither is it a geology text, a history, a photo-essay, or a catalogue of the author’s climbs, although it partakes of all these things. It is hard to say just what it is. Perhaps it most resembles the Combination Plate at a Mexican restaurant: you get a bit of each item, and after a while, with enough salsa, they all taste the same.

Each of the thirty-five chapters of the book concentrates on a single peak, chosen either for its unique qualities or as representative of an area. Though not necessarily the highest, the most difficult, or the most well-known mountains in North America, the features they do share are Fred Beckey’s footprints and his love. Whether that is sufficient adhesive to hold a book together the reader will have to determine.

For each of the mountains selected, we are treated to a basic geology lesson, a bit of history, the story of the first ascent, a brief rundown on the local flora and fauna and, perhaps, a firsthand description of a climb on the peak. The book is evidently not meant to be read from cover to cover, as much of the information is repeated from chapter to chapter; taken one chapter at a time, it may prove less insulting to a reader’s intelligence. I think that if I had had a copy as a teenager, I would have found it inspiring: there are a lot of little tidbits of information to pique one’s interest and the scent of adventure is definitely in the air. Youth would have kept me from noticing all the clichés.

Be especially careful not to spill your coffee on any of the 140 color photographs, as they are the most painstaking reproductions ever to appear between hard covers. The color is brilliant, the detail perfect and the layout tasteful. At least two of the pictures have appeared before, in Russell’s similarly named book, but this time around it is like remembering to put your glasses on: they might as well be new.

I am personally familiar with only about a third of the peaks selected for inclusion but found little to squabble with among the meticulously researched facts of their chapters. The real core of the book, though, is not the factual content but the attempt to evoke the feeling peculiar to each place. It is the photographs, not the text, that do most of that work; they do it by small revelations, with details of plant life or lighting that say much more than the often ponderous narrative.

With such a vague program giving it form, it is not surprising that this book should be so difficult to describe. The gap it attempts to fill would not even be perceptible to many of us, yet Beckey pours a lot of his soul into it. The climber might disdain it for its insistence on the nobility of the walk-up peaks; the ecologist might skip over it for its superficiality; the historian might pick at its inaccuracies; but the simple lover of mountains will probably pick it out from under his accumulation of Time magazines and junk mail to read a chapter now and then and wish he were there. If he had been as peripatetic as Fred Beckey, he wouldn’t need the book.

Ron Matous