His account frames a challenging autobiography, by turns hilarious and gut-wrenching.

    Before his tragic death in 1996, mountaineer Scott Fischer scaled the highest and most treacherous peaks on Earth and became, for many, an iconic symbol of hubris, audacity and the limits of endurance.

    Whitney's summit is the 22-mile round-trip Mt. Whitney Trail. Although the hike is non-technical, would-be hikers need to be prepared for the altitude, long distance, elevation gain, mountain weather, and other potential dangers. Author and seasoned Sierra hiker Elizabeth Wenk provides the authoritative, step-by-step guide to planning and completing this superb hike with safety advice, insider information, detail, and reassurance found nowhere else.

    In this lively and generously illustrated book, historians Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver present the first comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering in fifty years. They offer detailed, original accounts of the most significant climbs since the 1890s, and they compellingly evoke the social and cultural worlds that gave rise to those expeditions.The book recounts the adventures of such figures as Martin Conway, who led the first authentic Himalayan climbing expedition in 1892; Fanny Bullock Workman, the pioneer explorer of the Karakoram range; George Mallory, the romantic martyr of Mount Everest fame; Charlie Houston, who led American expeditions to K2 in the 1930s and 1950s; Ang Tharkay, the legendary Sherpa, and many others. Throughout, the authors discuss the effects of political and social change on the world of mountaineering, and they offer a penetrating analysis of a culture that once emphasized teamwork and fellowship among climbers, but now has been eclipsed by a scramble for individual fame and glory.

    He had been attempting a new route, directly up the middle of the highest mountain face in the world—solo. After six days he was out of food, almost out of fuel, and frequently buried by avalanches. Three helicopters were poised for a brief break in the weather to pluck him off the mountain. Because of the audacity of the climb, the fame of the climber, the high risk associated with the rescue, and the hourly reports posted on his base-camp website, the world was watching. Would this be the most spectacular rescue in climbing history? Or a tragic—and very public—death in the mountains? Years before, as communism was collapsing and the Balkans slid into chaos, Humar was unceremoniously conscripted into a dirty war that he despised, where he observed brutal and inhumane atrocities that disgusted him. Finally he did the unthinkable: he left and finally arrived home in what had become a new country—Slovenia. He returned to climbing, and within very few years, he was among the best in the world. Reinhold Messner, among others, called him the most remarkable mountain climber of his generation.

    Andy Cave’s first book Learning to Breathe won the Adventure Travel Award at the Banff International Festival.