Mountain Survival

Acclaimed writer David Smart illuminates the fascinating life of Royal Robbins—in all its soulful ambition, rivalry, and romance. Royal Robbins chronicles his early years growing up as a latchkey kid in Southern California, the push and pull between being an aspiring banker or one of the original Camp 4 dirtbags, and his later decades as a father, husband, kayaker, and the trailblazing founder of the outdoor apparel company that bears his name.

The Last Blue Mountain is the heart-rending true story of the 1957 expedition to Mount Haramosh in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. With the summit beyond reach, four young climbers are about to return to camp. Their brief pause to enjoy the view and take photographs is interrupted by an avalanche which sweeps Bernard Jillott and John Emery hundreds of feet down the mountain into a snow basin. Rae Culbert and Tony Streather risk their own lives to rescue their friends, only to become stranded alongside them.

Endless ice. Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her pulse-raising memoir. A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.

Ian was the one who chased the majestic buck into the forest. (His motto: act first, think later.) Kendra didn't want to become separated from the other sixth graders, but she followed Ian anyway, despite what her analytical mind told her. PJ followed him too. Even though he was scared, he figured he might catch some amazing footage with his video camera. They all hoped to return to the hiking trail before anyone noticed they were gone. However, the mountain had other plans for them: dark, sinister plans that only nightmares are made of.

On the afternoon of July 13, 1977, having become the first climbers to reach the summit of the Ogre, Doug Scott and Chris Bonington began their long descent. In the minutes that followed, any feeling of success from their achievement would be overwhelmed by the start of a desperate fight for survival. And things would only get worse.

After a family trip turned disastrous when their truck broke down in the middle of an old logging road in Oregon, Francie is now back in British Columbia. People try to make things as "normal" as possible for her, but they don't understand that trying to be normal in your old life that's exploded is the worst feeling in the world.

In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest via the South Col route. Roughly two weeks after Whittaker's achievement, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, fellow American mountaineers on the same expedition, became the first climbers ever to summit the world's highest peak via the dangerous and forbidding West Ridge—a route on which only a handful of climbers have since succeeded.

Are you ready for more adventure? Get ready to explore caves systems and mountaintops with Chief Scout Bear Grylls.... Each audiobook in this fun new 12-book series from Bear Grylls follows a different child on an outdoor activity camp. Once they are given a magical compass, they meet the inspirational adventurer in an amazing place and learn new skills and facts they can take with them back to their real life.

In the winter of 1959, a group of nine young and experienced hikers embarked on a journey into the Ural Mountains of Russia. Although they had previously undertaken cold-weather trips, this particular expedition would tragically be their last. During their trek, the hikers encountered something unexpected in the supposedly desolate region, resulting in the demise of the entire group. The exact events of that fateful night remain unknown, but the incident has since become one of the world's most perplexing mysteries.

Mountain Survival: When search-and-rescue park ranger Autumn Mercer and her K-9 partner, Sherlock, meet a stranger in the mountains whose brother is injured, they drop everything to help. But all they find where Derek Peterson last saw his sibling is a trail of blood—and men who want them dead. Search and Defend: Undercover to track the assassin who killed his partner, FBI special agent Alex Driscoll accidentally pulls his partner’s widow, Violet Sharp, and her search-and-rescue K-9, Teddy, into the case.

Letters from Everest is an eye-opening set of personal letters from Mallory to his family, recently discovered hidden in a drawer. In the letters, Mallory is completely open about his life, his climbing and especially the three Everest Expeditions he was a part of – 1921, 1922 and the last in 1924. His writing is full of extraordinary insights – most of which have never been published in any form.

In January 1959, 10 experienced young skiers set out to travel to a mountain named Mount Otorten in the far north of Russia. During the trip, one of the skiers fell ill and returned. The remaining nine lost their way and ended up on another mountain slope known as Kholat Syakhl, or "Mountain of the Dead".

For 18 years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing's holy grail: to stand atop the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. But No Shortcuts to the Top is as much about the man who would become the first American to achieve that goal as it is about his stunning quest. As Viesturs recounts the stories of his most harrowing climbs, he reveals a man torn between the flat, safe world he and his loved ones share and the majestic and deadly places where only he can go.

Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die.

When a bolt of lightning ignited a hilltop in the sleepy town of Yarnell, Arizona, in June of 2013, setting off a blaze that would grow into one of the deadliest fires in American history, the 20 men who made up the Granite Mountain Hotshots sprang into action. An elite crew trained to combat the most challenging wildfires, the Granite Mountain Hotshots were a ragtag family crisscrossing the American West and wherever else the fires took them. The Hotshots were loyal to one another and dedicated to the tough job they had.

A masterpiece of compelling narrative history, The White Ladder describes the epic rise of mountaineering's world altitude record, a story of ever higher climbs by figures great and small of mountaineering. Daniel Light describes how climbers used revolutionary techniques to launch themselves into the most forbidding conditions. The expeditions illustrate evolutionary changes in climbing style, the advancement of high-altitude science, and the development of mountain climbing as an industry.

An accurate and personal record from one of America's first breed of mountain men, giving a detailed description of many the lands he passed through and the habits and character of the various tribes encountered.

A deeply personal travel memoir that combines alpine adventure, family connections, and spiritual encounters in two very different worlds: a Himalayan village and Vancouver, Canada. In 2012, Michael Schauch and his wife, Chantal, undertook an expedition deep in the Himalaya of northern Nepal, into a remote valley that had been closed off to outsiders for decades. They led a team of artists (a photographer, a musician, and a painter), with the objective of capturing a moment in time through their unique lenses.

Barney wasn't happy when his parents moved him from the swamps of Louisiana to the mountains of Tennessee, but that was before he met Silas and Billie. Now it's nothing but fun, sun, and mountain air, until a large boot print is found near the creek behind the barn.

Virgil is making his older siblings trek to a mountain lake on a trip unlike any they have taken before. They carry precious cargo: the ashes of their beloved mother, who asked that her remains be scattered at her favorite spot. But when a forest fire is sparked by a bolt of lightning at the exact moment when their van breaks down, the journey quickly turns to disaster. Virgil finds himself separated from his sister and alone in the wilderness. He isn’t sure he can make it, but with the memory of his mother and her lessons to guide him, he learns that survival starts with letting go.