Winner of the Kekoo Naoroji AwardDoug Scott was a legend among mountaineers. His expeditions, undertaken over a period of five decades, are unparalleled achievements. This book describes the extraordinary drama of them all, from the Himalaya to New Zealand, Patagonia, Yosemite and Alaska. It includes his famous 'epic' on The Ogre, one of the hardest peaks in the world to climb, his ascent of Kangchenjunga without supplementary oxygen and his ascent, with Dougal H...

Essays from the Edge gathers fifty years of selected writing by Dennis Gray, one of British climbing's most influential voices. These twenty-one essays, spanning one of British mountaineering's most exciting periods, provide a compelling narrative of a life studying the art of climbing and of living it first-hand on the cliffs and mountains of the world in the company of some of the sport's most colourful characters of the last century.Vivid portraits anch...

Edmund Hillary – A Biography is the story of the New Zealand beekeeper who climbed Mount Everest. A man who against expedition orders drove his tractor to the South Pole; a man honoured around the world for his pioneering climbs yet who collapsed on more than one occasion on a mountain, and a man who gave so much to Nepal yet lost his family to its mountains.The author, Michael Gill, was a close friend of ...

'Everest by fair means - that is the human dimension, and that is what interests me … In reaching for the oxygen cylinder, a climber degrades Everest … a climber who doesn't rely on his own strength and skills, but on apparatus and drugs, deceives himself. In May 1978 Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler became the first climbers in history to reach the summit of Mount Everest without the use of supplementary oxygen - an event which made international headlines and permanently altered the fu...

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...

Some mountains are high; some mountains are hard. Few are both.On the afternoon of 13 July 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.Rising to over 7,000 metres in...

An expert mountaineer cracks Everest’s most intriguing mystery – did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit before they perished on its slopes?On the 6th June 1924, mountaineers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine perished in their attempt to reach the summit of Everest.Obsessed by uncovering what happened, in 1993 Graham Hoyland became the 15th Englishman to climb Everest. His investigations led to the finding of Mallory’s body; it will be his evidence that will recover Irvine’s....

K2 is the world's second highest mountain, but its savage reputation is second to none. The loss of Alison Hargreaves and six companions in 1995 was a grim echo of the multiple deaths in 1986 and of earlier disasters which have become part of climbing legend. K2 has always attracted the greatest names in mountaineering. Wiessner, Houston, Bonatti, Diemberger and Bonington are among those whose lives have been permanently scarred by their experiences on it. At the same time some inspiring n...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom bestselling true-crime author Peter Edwards and Governor General's Award-winning playwright Kevin Loring, two sons of Lytton, the BC town that burned to the ground in 2021, comes a meditation on hometown―when hometown is gone.**“It’s dire,” Greta Thunberg retweeted Mayor Jan Polderman. “The whole town is on fire. It took a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.”Before it made...

Winner: Himalayan Club Kekoo Naoroji Award for Mountain Literature'A full and fascinating portrait of one of the great figures of mountaineering.' – Michael Palin'As well as relaying the literal ups and downs of the biggest walls and highest mountains in the world, Scott writes with honesty about the emotional and personal peaks and troughs of a life where family relationships are put under strain and life itself is so often at risk.' – The Wes...

Don Whillans has an iconic significance for generations of climbers. His epoch-making first ascent of Annapurna's South Face, achieved with Dougal Haston in 1970, remains one of the most impressive climbs ever made - but behind this and all his other formidable achievements lies a tough, recalcitrant reality: the character of the man himself.Whillans carried within himself a sense of personal invincibility, forceful, direct and uncompromising. It gave him sporting superstar status ...

**Winner of the 2025 National Outdoor Book Award (History/Biography)"Hugely entertaining.…[A]nyone who loves mountains will enjoy this book." —Sarah Wheeler, SpectatorA sweeping history of mountaineering before Everest, and the epic human quest to reach the highest places on Earth.**Whether in the name of conquest, science, or the divine, humans across the centuries have had myriad reasons to climb mountains. From the smoking volcanoes of South America to t...