Shipton & Tilman: The Great Decade of Himalayan Exploration. Jim Perrin. Hutchinson, 2013. 412 pages, black and white photos. Hardcover, £25.The highest ideals of mid-20th century mountaineering have been summed up in the phrase “brotherhood o...
The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment. Peter H. Hansen. Harvard University Press, 2013. 392 pages, 24 halftones. Hardcover, $35.Climbing has recently attracted increasing attention from major university presses. This i...
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration, David Roberts. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. 368 pages, hardcover/paperback, $27.95/$16.95.Douglas Mawson’s 1911–13 Antarctic journey was riddled with horrific crevas...
Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968: Reflections on the Lost Photos of the Third Ascent. Yvon Chouinard, Dick Dorworth, Chris Jones, Lito Tejada-Flores, Doug Tompkins. Patagonia Books, 2013. 144 pages. Hardcover. $35.The iconic 1968 climb is reflected on here...
Echoes: One Climber’s Hard Road to Freedom. Nick Bullock. Vertebrate Publishing (U.K.), 2013. 256 pages. Hardcover. £20. Nick Bullock’s new book Echoes opens with a violent revenge attack in a prison training facility, in which one pr...
The Seventymile Kid: The Lost Legacy of Harry Karstens and the First Ascent of Mount McKinley. Tom Walker. Mountaineers Books, 2013. 304 pages. Paperback. $19.95.Tom Walker’s The Seventymile Kid is an antidote to one of the least-read books from t...
Short Peaks: 33 Brief Mountain Tales. Jerry Auld. Imaginary Mountain Surveyors, 2013. 280 pages. Paperback. CAN $25. Climbing fiction has always been problematic, perilously close to an oxymoron. During the bad old days in Camp 4 we used to read a...
Everest–The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain. Harriet Pugh Stuckey. Lyons Press, 2013. 402 pages. Hardcover. $26.95.This superb, wonderfully researched, and readable book does several impossible things impossi...
The Alchemy of Action. Doug Robinson. Moving Over Stone, 2013. 188 pages. Paperback. $24. First, full disclosure: Doug Robinson is an old and good friend. I am a fan of his writing in general and am included in The Alchemy of Action as both friend...
Rock, Paper, Fire: The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing. Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome, editors. Banff Centre Press, 2013. 295 pages. Paperback. $21.95.On the face of it, an anthology of pieces written by students in any kind of writers’ ...
In early April, I spent ten frustrating days waiting in town, hoping to fly into the Revelation Mountains. Nothing was going our way. First the weather was bad and pilots were available; then the weather was good, but our pilots couldn’t fly in. O...
In July, Graham Zimmerman and I spent 10 days in the remote Revelation Mountains, at the far southwest end of the Alaska Range. This sub-range has seen a recent surge of activity in the spring season, and climbers have returned with stories of hug...
After leaving a balmy spring in the Oregon desert, Geoff Unger and I headed for the east face of the Mooses Tooth. We shared the flight with David Lama and Dani Arnold, who were gunning for a line up the middle of the face, while Geoff and I were ...
During the dry winter season of 2013, Argentines José Bonacalza, Ian Schwer, and Julián Fehrmann opened a number of new routes in Tierra del Fuego, outside the city of Ushuaia, Chile. On July 14 they established a new route on the south face of th...
From September 29-October 18, Michael Ganter, Jörn Heller, Wilfrid Henselmann, Klaus Hildenbrand, Thomas Nieberle, Hans-Jörg Schelb, and I did the probable first ascents of a number of peaks in the Cordillera Darwin. We left from Punta Arenas, sai...
During the first longitudinal traverse of the Cordillera de Darwin, the French GMHM climbed a peak they called Mt. Beyond the Far, believing this to be the first ascent (AAJ 2012). However, during research for the Uncharted Project, mapping and do...
On December 15, Leopold Fuchs, Philip Schreiner, and I (all Austrians) left Punta Arenas by boat. The aim of our expedition was to explore and climb new routes on Peninsula Buckland, which holds a group of rugged, glaciated mountains west of Monte...
The Cordillera de Sarmiento is the southernmost range of the Andes before they sink under the Magellan Strait. Although these peaks are all under 2,000m, the ragged ridges, sharp needles, and steep faces offer great mountaineering challenges, with...
In October-November 2013, Jerry Gore, Raphael Jochaud, Calum Muskett, and Mike “Twid” Turner made the first ascent of the southeast face of the South Tower of Paine. The South Tower stands tallest among the three towers that form the massif, and t...
In mid-February, Tommy Caldwell and I were lucky enough to get a five-day weather window in Patagonia. We took advantage of it by climbing the “Fitz Traverse,” a complete traverse of the Fitz Roy Massif. From north to south, the major summits on t...