At the age of sixteen, Andy Cave followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps and became a miner - one of the last recruits into a dying world. Every day he would descend 3,000 feet into Grimethorpe pit.But at weekends Andy escaped from the pithead to a very different world - testing his nerve on the cliffs and mountains around Britain, and forging endearing friendships with his new companions.Enduring the 1984-5 miners' strike - the guilt, the broken friendships, t...

In 1997, Andy Cave returned from the Himalayas, having climbed the stupendous north face of Changabang but losing his friend and climbing partner in the process. Traumatized by the savage ordeal, he must examine his relationship with the mountains that have defined his life so far. Will he have the courage to undertake such a challenge again? Does he want to? Thin White Line charts his struggle towards finding an answer. It is as much a journey into the mind of an extreme mountaineer as it...

Rand lives free; lean, pure and defiant, the world has little influence on him. His passion is climbing – the mountains, the huge vertical faces. There, where storms, snow, or rockfall can kill, he finds his happiness, sometimes climbing with others, sometimes alone. This is a novel of obsession and where it leads. Rand, not intending it, becomes suddenly famous for a daring rescue in the Alps. What happens when passion is spent and what becomes of heroes is revealed in this terse and powe...

No Place to Fall is Victor Saunder's follow up to his Boardman Tasker Prize winning debut book Elusive Summits. Covering three expeditions to familiar and unfamiliar ranges in Nepal, the Karakoram and the Kumaon, each shares the exhilaration of attempting new alpine-style routes on terrifyingly committing mountains. In 1989 Victor Saunders and Steve Sustad completed a difficult route on the West Face of Makalu II, only to be brought to a storm-bound halt above 7000 metres while descending....

As he teetered on a narrow rock ledge a yak's bellow short of the stratosphere, with a rubber mask strapped to his face, a pair of mittens the size of a sealion's flippers, and a drop of two kilometres below him, it's fair to say Mark Horrell wasn't entirely happy with the situation he found himself in.He was an ordinary hiker who had only read books about mountaineering, and little did he know when he signed up for an organised trek in Nepal with a group of elderly ladies that ten...

I was aware that I was cold - beyond cold. I was a lump of meat left for too long in a freezer, a body trapped beneath the ice, sinking down into the dark. 'I was freezing to death.' In this brilliant sequel to his award-winning debut "Psychovertical", mountaineering stand-up Andy Kirkpatrick has achieved his life's ambition to become one of the world's leading climbers. Pushing himself to new extremes, he embarks on his toughest climbs yet - on big walls in the Alps and Patagonia - in the...

“A fascinating tale. . . . Readers who are into high-altitude adventure stories won’t be disappointed.”—Associated PressIn 1939 the Savage Mountain claimed its first victim. Born into vast wealth yet uneasy with a life of leisure, Dudley Wolfe, of Boston and Rockport, Maine, set out to become the first man to climb K2, the world’s second-highest mountain and, in the opinion of mountaineers, an even more formidable challenge than Mt. Everest. Although close to middle age an...

I could never again maintain that I was caught up in this game unwillingly. I knew now what I wanted to do. Willingly would I accept the hardship and fear, the discipline and the sacrifices, if only I could be given back the chance to climb that mountain.' Joe Tasker lies, struck down by a tooth abscess, in a damp, bug-infested room in the Himalaya, wondering if he will be well enough to climb Dunagiri, his first venture to the 'big' mountains. He is there with Dick Renshaw to attempt to m...

Mountaintops have long been seen as sacred places, home to gods and dreams. In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very different sacred mountains. He began on the South Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This is the highest point between the Andes and the Himalaya, and one of the most inaccessible, rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone Age tribes.During the spring Boardman made ...

*The bestselling author of The Mountain and No Shortcuts to the Top chronicles his three attempts to climb the world’s tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made—or attempted—*the ascent.“Viesturs and Roberts have written an exhaustively researched and wonderfully compelling history of the most fascinating and dangerous of the Himalayan giants.”—David Breashers, v...

Elusive Summits is the award winning first book by British mountaineer Victor Saunders, winner of the 1990 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. Documenting climbs in the 1980s, at a time when the greatest mountains in the greatest ranges had been climbed by numerous routes, collected like sets of stamps and written about extensively by the world's leading climbers, Saunders and his companions relished the exploration of the thousands of peaks in the 6000 and 7000 metre range. The...

A novice's tale of scaling Everest: "Recommended for all armchair adventurers who have ever wondered what it would be like to climb in the Himalayas."— Geographical MagazineThe last attempt to conquer Everest by the unclimbed northeast ridge had ended in failure and tragedy, with the deaths of two great climbers, Joe Tasker and Pete Boardman. Now, in March 1985, Mal Duff would lead a new expedition. Andrew Grieg and the others knew the risks as well as the...