Sport Climbing

No one writes about mountaineering and its attendant victories and hardships more brilliantly than Jon Krakauer. In this collection of his finest essays and reporting, Krakauer writes of mountains from the memorable perspective of one who has himself struggled with solo madness to scale Alaska's notorious Devils Thumb.

Mount Everest is situated in the Himalayan Mountains, on the border between Nepal and Tibet. It is the tallest mountain in the world, standing roughly 29,029 feet above sea level. Every year, Everest gets taller by about half an inch. This is due to movements in the Earth's crust and two tectonic plates, deep beneath the Earth's surface, pushing together.

Renowned rock climber Beth Rodden’s inspiring memoir about overcoming devastating trauma, refusing to be held hostage by fear, and taking a leap toward healing.

Dans Instinct de survie, Gabriel Filippi, l'un des plus grands alpinistes du Canada, décrit le parcours stupéfiant qui l'a amené à affronter la beauté sublime de la nature et la cruelle indifférence du destin. Moments forts, exploits remarquables et pertes dévastatrices ponctuent un récit passionnant qui se déroule sur six continents.

A hundred-year mystery lured veteran climber Mark Synnott into an unlikely expedition up Mount Everest during the spring 2019 season that came to be known as “the Year Everest Broke”. What he found was a gripping human story of impassioned characters from around the globe and a mountain that will consume your soul - and your life - if you let it.

In The Mountain, veteran world-class climber and bestselling author Ed Viesturs—the only American to have climbed all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks—trains his sights on Mount Everest in richly detailed accounts of expeditions that are by turns personal, harrowing, deadly, and inspiring.

Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of the best seller Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer examines what it is about Everest that has compelled so many people - including himself - to throw caution to the wind, ignore the concerns of loved ones, and willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense. Krakauer's eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.

Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places.

Not a technical guide on snowboarding but, rather, a very personal approach to how to think about mountains, snow, and adventure, The Art of Shralpinism reflects the remarkable journey of snowboarding superstar Jeremy Jones. Drawing on the hundreds of journals he has kept over the years, Jones offers intriguing snapshots of time and place that include his own on-the-slope stories and white-out moments, as well as those of other prominent adventurers such as Jimmy Chin, Zahan Billimoria, and Christina Lusti.

The Impossible Climb is an emotional drama driven by people exploring the limits of human potential and seeking a perfect, choreographed dance with nature. Honnold dared far beyond the ordinary, beyond any climber in history. But this story of sublime heights is really about all of us. Who doesn’t need to face fear down fear and make the most of the time we have?

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.

The Climb is a true, gripping, and thought-provoking account of the worst disaster in the history of Mt. Everest: On May 10, 1996, two commercial expeditions headed by experienced leaders attempted to climb the highest mountain in the world, but things went terribly wrong...

On January 14, 2015, Tommy Caldwell, along with his partner, Kevin Jorgeson, summited what is widely regarded as the hardest climb in history - Yosemite’s nearly vertical 3,000-foot Dawn Wall, after 19 days on the route. This engrossing memoir chronicles the journey of a boy with a fanatical mountain-guide father who was determined to instill toughness in his son to a teen whose obsessive nature drove him to the top of the sport-climbing circuit.

The name of Maurice Herzog, the first man to reach the summit of Annapurna, is widely recognized, but how many know Ang Tharkay, the Sherpa who carried the seriously frostbitten Herzog on his back for miles? Although rarely mentioned in published accounts of early expeditions, local climbers have long been significant members of first ascents on the world's tallest and most challenging peaks. In Alpine Rising, award-winning writer Bernadette McDonald sets the record straight by shining a light on these too often forgotten heroes.

With heart-pounding descriptions of avalanches and treacherous ascents, Barry Blanchard chronicles his transformation from a poor Native American/white kid from the wrong side of the tracks to one of the most respected alpinists in the world. At 13 he learned to rappel when he joined the 1292 Lord Strathcone's Horse Army Cadets. Soon kicked out for insubordination, he was already hooked on climbing and saw alpinism as a way to make his single mother proud and end his family's cycle of poverty.

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. So Parrado, an ordinary young man with no particular disposition for leadership or heroism, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of a snowcapped mountain and across forty-five miles of frozen wilderness.

As 1909 dawned, the greatest jewels of exploration - set at the world's frozen extremes - lay unclaimed: the North and South Poles and the so-called "Third Pole", the pole of altitude, located in unexplored heights of the Himalaya. Before the calendar turned, three expeditions had faced death, mutiny, and the harshest conditions on the planet to plant flags at the furthest edges of the Earth.

What does it take to be one of the world's best high-altitude mountain climbers? A lot of fundraising; traveling in some of the world's most dangerous countries; enduring cold bivouacs, searing lungs, and a cloudy mind when you can least afford one. It means learning the hard lessons the mountains teach. Steve House built his reputation on ascents throughout the Alps, Canada, Alaska, the Karakoram, and the Himalaya that have expanded possibilities of style, speed, and difficulty.

When Edmund Hillary first conquered Mt. Everest, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was at his side. Indeed, for as long as Westerners have been climbing the Himalaya, Sherpas have been the unsung heroes in the background. In August 2008, when eleven climbers lost their lives on K2, the world’s most dangerous peak, two Sherpas survived. They had emerged from poverty and political turmoil to become two of the most skillful mountaineers on earth. Based on unprecedented access and interviews, Buried in the Sky reveals their astonishing story for the first time.

The publication of The Mountain of My Fear in 1968 and Deborah in 1970 changed the face of the mountaineering narrative. Now these two classic expedition narratives by acclaimed writer David Roberts are together again in one volume for a new generation of readers.