Sixty-three pieces range from Conrad Kain's classic account of the first ascent of Mount Robson to Sharon Wood's thoughts on her experience as the first North American woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Early explorers and modern daredevils, exhilarating achievements and deadly accidents provide a testament to extraordinary places and personalities. View More...
Describes Mallory's final expedition to Mount Everest in 1924, the mystery surrounding his disappearance, and the discovery of his remains in 1999. View More...
In August 1983, at the age of 16, Ffyona Campbell set out from Britain on a walk that was to take her around the world. Eleven years and 20,000 miles were to elapse before she returned home. Now she tells the story of her extraordinary life and personal odyssey. View More...
A firsthand account of Scott's disastrous Antarctic expedition The Worst Journey in the World recounts Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard--the youngest member of Scott's team and one of three men to make and survive the notorious Winter Journey--draws on his firsthand experiences as well as the diaries of his compatriots to create a stirring and detailed account of Scott's legendary expedition. Cherry himself would be among the search party that discovered the corpses of Scott and his men, who had long since perished from starvation and brutal c... View More...
The subzero temperatures were only one of the dangers explorer Frederick Cook (1865-1940) faced in his attempts to reach the North Pole. During his extraordinary and harrowing journey, he fought off arctic wolves and polar bears, lived through ice storms, almost starved on several occasions, and faced long and lonely hours of isolation. His book relates how he learned from Eskimos how to survive in the Arctic, hunting musk ox to survive, harpooning walruses, and traveling by dog sled. After his journey, he defended himself against the charges of fellow explorer Robert Peary, who claimed that C... View More...
A richly illuminating biography of Robert Falcon Scott, and the first to transcend the myths that have taken root in the story of his life. Since Scott's death in 1912, he has been the subject of innumerable books--some declaring him a hero, others dismissing him as an irresponsible fool. But in all the pages that have been written about him, the man behind the legend has been forgotten or distorted beyond all recognition. Now, with full access to all family papers and to the voluminous diaries and records of key participants in the Antarctic expeditions, and with the inclusion in the book of ... View More...
The definitive story of the British adventurers who survived the trenches of World War I and went on to risk their lives climbing Mount Everest. On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Everest's North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain's finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a twenty-two-year-old Oxford scholar with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned. Drawing on more than a decade of prodigious research, bestselling author and explorer Wade Davis vividly re-creates the heroic efforts of Ma... View More...
Stripped naked and pursued across cactus-studded plains by a band of armed Blackfoot Indians, John Colter escaped certain death to become the one of the most durable characters in western American history. But Colter's harrowing tale was not beyond the ordinary when compared to the adventures of other American explorers. In The Devil May Care, popular historian and travel writer Tony Horwitz has culled through the American National Biography and selected fifty stirring biographies of adventurers who had no one's footsteps to follow in--and yet contributed enormously to our understanding of the... View More...
Nothing obsessed explorers of the mid-nineteenth century more than the quest to discover the source of the White Nile. It was the planet's most elusive secret, the prize coveted above all others. Between 1856 and 1876, six larger-than-life men and one extraordinary woman accepted the challenge. Showing extreme courage and resilience, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Augustus Grant, Samuel Baker, Florence von Sass, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley risked their lives and reputations in the fierce competition. Award-winning author Tim Jeal deploys fascinating new research to p... View More...
When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin his long, dangerous descent from 29,028 feet, twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly toward the top. No one had noticed that the sky had begun to fill with clouds. Six hours later and 3,000 feet lower, in 70-knot winds and blinding snow, Krakauer collapsed in his tent, freezing, hallucinating from exhaustion and hypoxia, but safe. The following morning, he learned th... View More...
John Rae's accomplishments, surpassing all nineteenth-century Arctic explorers, were worthy of honors and international fame. No explorer even approached Rae's prolific record: 1,776 miles surveyed of uncharted territory; 6,555 miles hiked on snowshoes; and 6,700 miles navigated in small boats. Yet, he was denied fair recognition of his discoveries because he dared to utter the truth about the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew, Rae's predecessors in the far north. Author Ken McGoogan vividly narrates the astonishing adventures of Rae, who found the last link to the Northwest Passage and u... View More...
"The snow forms the beginning of a near vertical chute that falls at least a thousand feet. My feet, shaking, manage to hug the thin edge of solid rock. I feel my heart creep to my throat and warm sweat drip down my back, defying the subzero Arctic air. Somehow I reach a plateau and think the worst is behind me. I couldn't be more wrong." This is the story of Dave Metz's death-defying, breathtaking, and passionate journey through the Arctic outback. Driven by his lifetime reverence for the outdoors, Dave, with the help of his two beloved Airedale terrier dogs, embarks on a three-month epic of ... View More...
Lawrence Millman writes stylish, often wildly amusing tales of remote places and offbeat characters (from the South Pacific islands of Yap to eccentric author and explorer Hassoldt Davis, a literary man-of-action whose many brushes with death including being paralyzed by an African sorcerer). He specializes in unsolved mysteries (what really happened to the great explorer Henry Hudson after his men mutinied and cast him off in an open boat?) and odd myths. And he is not immune to misadventures of his own, often landing in extremely uncomfortable or dangerous situations in his pursuit of newand... View More...
The Great Untold Story of EverestSherpas are part of our everyday parlance, yet we know so little of their world beyond their depiction as climbing wonders. In Touching My Father's Soul, Jamling Tenzing Norgay gives us an insider's view of the Sherpa world as he tells a story of Everest unlike any told before. His tale is one of profound adventure that entwines the lives of a family, a mountain, and a people.As Climbing Leader of the famed 1996 Everest IMAX expedition led by David Breashears, Jamling Norgay was able to follow in the footsteps of his legendary mountaineer father, Tenzing Norgay... View More...
