Mountains category: 178 books

“Much more than a coming-of-age story, Badluck Way is an important meditation on what it means to share space and breathe the same air as truly wild animals, and the necessary damage that can occur when boundaries are crossed” (Tom Groneberg, author of The Secret Life of Cowboys). In this...

In Illumination in the Flatwoods, Joe Hutto unveiled the secret lives of wild turkeys to great critical acclaim, which resulted in the Emmy Award–winning PSB documentary My Life as a Turkey. Now Hutto has done it again. Touching the Wild is the enchanting story about one man who has lived with a...

"My objective in setting forth this series of mostly autobiographical vignettes was not to inspire a rash of juvenile delinquency but to have something on paper before the age of involuntary repetition set in. I don't feel I owe much to Sir Walter Scott for cribbing the subtitle; he surely cannot...

In The Measure of a Mountain, Seattle writer Bruce Barcott sets out to know Rainier. His method is exploratory, meandering, personal. He begins by encircling it, first by car then on foot. He finds that the mountain is a complex of moss-bearded hemlocks and old-growth firs, high meadows that blossom...

Using unpublished diaries, Jim Perrin, the acclaimed author of The Villain and Menlove, tells the story of the greatest exploring partnership in British history. In the 1930s Tilman and the younger Shipton pioneered many routes in Africa and the Himalayas and found the key to unlocking Everest. They...

On Mount Hood is a contemporary, first-person narrative biography of Oregon's greatest mountain, featuring stories full of adventure and tragedy, history and geology, people and places, trivia and lore. The mountain itself helps create the notorious Oregon rains and deep alpine snows, and paved the...

From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon�s Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent excursion across the Harding Icefield conceived under the influence of rain and whiskey, David Stevenson chronicles...

On Mount Washington, it’s lack of preparation, not the mountain, that kills. The weather is highly changeable with wind gusts of 140 mph and -35 degree temps. Then there are the avalanches and icefalls. Combine this with inexperienced hikers in t-shirts and flip flops and things can get ugly fast. Death...

Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson is a fabulous philosophical interpretation of nature and how it influences man physically and spiritually. Emerson's writing is redolent with the wonder of the true romantic, but never sinks to the level of maudlin fluff.

“Pepacton” is a fantastic collection of nature poetry and prose by American Naturalist John Burroughs, first published in 1898. Each chapter concerns a different aspect of nature, ranging from the countryside in summer to wild herbs. This volume will appeal to lovers of nature writing, and it...

Mountaineers will realize, from these descriptions of Sierra climbs, how few dangers we encountered which might not have been avoided by time and caution. Since the uncertain perils of glacier work and snow copings do not exist in California, except on the northeast flank of Mount Shasta, our climbs...

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there...

Hans Florine embodies the genius of "and"—collaborative and competitive, fast and safe, audacious and disciplined, visionary and quantitative. The themes that run through Florine's 101 ascents of Yosemite's most iconic route can benefit people who will never climb a rock, indeed anyone...