“An extraordinary life.”—The New York Times Book Review“A fitting homage to one of the great outdoor extremists.”—Kirkus ReviewsLegendary climber Scott Fischer found in Mount Everest a perfect landscape for his fearless spirit. Scaling the world’s highest peak tested his skills, his courage, and his endurance. His legendary final expedition—and its tragic outcome—are portrayed in Everest, the 3-D ...

This is the tale of Mark Horrell’s not-so-nearly ascent of Gasherbrum in Pakistan, of how one man’s boredom and frustration was conquered by a gutsy combination of exhaustion, cowardice, and sheer mountaineering incompetence.He made not one, not two, but three intrepid assaults, some of which got quite a distance beyond Base Camp, and overcame many perilous circumstances along the way. The mountaineer Joe Simpson famously crawled for three days with a broken leg, but did he ever ha...

In April 2014 Mark Horrell went on a mountaineering expedition to Nepal, hoping to climb Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world, which shares a base camp and climbing route with Mount Everest.He dreamed of following in the footsteps of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, by climbing through the infamous ice maze of the Khumbu Icefall, and he yearned to sleep in the grand amphitheatre of Everest Base Camp, surrounded by towering peaks.He was also intrigued by the me...

In April 2012 Mark Horrell travelled to Tibet hoping to become, if not the first person to climb Mount Everest, at least the first Karl Pilkington lookalike to do so.He joined a mountaineering expedition which included an Australian sexagenarian, two Brits whose idea of hydration meant a box of red wine, and a New Zealander who enjoyed reminding his teammates of the perils of altitude sickness and the number of ways they might die on summit day.The media often write about 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 ...

His cheeks are as tender as raw meat on a butcher’s block. And those are just the cheeks of his face. As he slumps in the saddle, watching the road disappear into the distance, he aches in parts of his body that he’s only just discovering he has…When Mark travels to Ecuador to go hiking and climbing, he discovers a land of dramatic volcanoes rising through the clouds and wide-open horizons rich in history.But when his partner Edita suggests a return visit, she has a very di...

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...

Two days east of Lukla was a pleasant yak pasture surrounded by high peaks. When Col. Jim Roberts set out to look for it in 1953, he ended up making the first ascent of Mera Peak and sowing the seeds of Himalayan tourism.Mera Peak has become a popular goal for trekkers and novice mountaineers, but few people climb to its true summit, and fewer still travel beyond it to find the secret yak pasture that sparked Roberts’ journey.The yak pasture was the Hongu Valley, a hidden s...

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....

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...

'It's a preposterous plan. Still, if you do get up it, I think it'll be the hardest thing that's been done in the Himalayas.' So spoke Chris Bonington when Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker presented him with their plan to tackle the unclimbed West Wall of Changabang - the Shining Mountain - in 1976. Bonington's was one of the more positive responses; most felt the climb impossibly hard, especially for a two-man, lightweight expedition. This was, after all, perhaps the most fearsome and techni...