Prior to that, the steep, narrow route to Angels Landing led to at least five fatalities. Numerous people have found that high, exposed places in Zion-such as rim trails-are bad places to be in lightning storms. Death in Zion National Park collects some of the most gripping accounts in park history of the unfortunate events caused by natural forces or human folly.

    And Alaska’s mesmeric wilderness has permeated Keenan’s life ever since. A short visit to Fairbanks several years ago was enough to seal his connection with the place, and he resolved to return. He eventually did so with a head full of questions about its inspiring landscape and a heart informed with his own love of the desolate places of the world. In a journey that takes him through four geographical quarters from snowmelt in May to snowfall in September, he discovers a land as fantastical as a fairy tale but whose vastness has a very peculiar type of allure. From dog-mushing on a frozen lake beneath the colors of the aurora borealis to camping in a two-dollar tent in the tundra of the Arctic Circle, from skinning hides with an aging shaman and his wife to boating in the stormy Bering Sea, and along frozen inlets to a remote Eskimo fishing camp, Keenan seeks out the ultimate wilderness experience and connects with a spectrum of wildlife, including his own “spirit bear,” all of them roamers in “The Big Lonely.” En route, he encounters hard-core survivalists who know what struggle and endurance mean from their daily battle for existence. And finally, he discovers that true wilderness is as much a state of mind as it is a place and that ultimately, to make Alaska home, one must surrender to the land.

    A century later, the battle rages still. This book is about one of the most enduring and vitriolic feuds in the history of exploration. "What a consummate cur he is," said Robert Peary of Frederick Cook in 1911. Cook responded, "Peary has stooped to every crime from rape to murder." They had started out as friends and shipmates, with Cook, a doctor, accompanying Peary, a civil engineer, on an expedition to northern Greenland in 1891. Peary's leg was shattered in an accident, and without Cook's care he might never have walked again. But by the summer of 1909, all the goodwill was gone. Peary said he had reached the Pole in September 1909; Cook scooped him, presenting evidence that he had gotten there in 1908. Bruce Henderson makes a wonderful narrative out of the claims and counterclaims, and he introduces fascinating scientific and psychological evidence to put the appalling details of polar travel in a new context.

    Today an explorer can make a phone call from the top of Mount Everest and geo-locate himself in the thickest rain forest or the widest desert. Yet despite these advances, few modern adventures get close to the charm and romance of "The Desert Road to Turkestan," "Mysterious Temples of the Jungle," and "Airplanes Come to the Isles of Spice." In those bygone days, the pages of National Geographic were as close as most people could get to high adventure and faraway lands—and here's a chance to recapture them. Alongside noteworthy names like Robert Peary, Amelia Earhart, and Teddy Roosevelt, other less famous travelers take us on long-forgotten trips to places few Americans had gone. We follow as "An American Girl Cycles Across Transylvania," trek "A Thousand Miles Along the Great Wall of China," and glide "By Felucca Down the Nile."Introduced by brief essays that provide context and perspective, these engaging, engrossing selections speak for themselves—and trace the National Geographic Society's growth as it explored the unknown and brought it to readers eager for knowledge of "the world and all that is in it."

    Colleen Mondor spent four years running dispatch operations for a Fairbanks-based commuter and charter airline—and she knows all too well the gap between the romance and reality of small plane piloting in the wildest territory of the United States. From overloaded aircraft to wings covered in ice, from flying sled dogs and dead bodies, piloting in Alaska is about living hard and working harder. What Mondor witnessed day to day would make anyone's hair stand on end.Ultimately, it is the pilots themselves; laced with ice and whiskey, death and camaraderie, silence and engine roar—who capture her imagination. In fine detail, Mondor reveals the technical side of flying, the history of Alaskan aviation, and a world that demands a close communion with extreme physical danger and emotional toughness. The Map of My Dead Pilots is an engrossing narrative whose gritty, no-holds-barred style is reminiscent of the works of Ken Kesey and Tim O'Brien.

    As the Vietnam war took more and more of his friends, and many of those who returned sank further into drugs and despair, Stan looked for meaning and found nothing. His life's purpose lay thirty-three hundred miles northwest, deep in the Tozitna River Valley in the heart of Alaska's frozen interior. Deadly cold, famine, grizzly bears, and one unruly sled dog with a grudge kept Stan on the knife's edge between survival and death. Humbled by the power of nature, the Boston greaser who was destined for prison found a new life in the wild, where one mistake can prove fatal. This is the true story of Stan Zuray's incredible journey; the reformation of a man's heart and mind in the forbidding darkness of Alaska's endless winter.

    From the #1 bestselling author of The Hot Zone comes an amazing account of scientific and spiritual passion for the tallest trees in the world, the startling biosystem of Rthe canopy, S and those who are committed to the preservation of this astonishing and largely unknown world.

    Read James Greiner's Wager with the Wind to learn how a hero was born, and also how he made his courageous journey to the unknown skies of dealing with cancer.

    In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are.

    O'Hanlon, accompanied by friend and poet James Fenton and three native guides brings wit and humor to a dangerous journey.

    Ambitious and hungry for adventure, he fell in love with the challenge the Alps presented and set out to conquer them peak by peak. Whymper made quick work of the challenge, racking up dozens of first ascents and acquiring a reputation as one of the best in the nascent field of mountaineering. But on the Matterhorn, considered to be mountaineering's Holy Grail at the time, Whymper met with failure again and again. On his eighth attempted ascent he finally succeeded, becoming the first man to reach its magnificent peak. The victory came at a heavy cost, however, as Whymper watched four of his companions fall to their deaths on the descent. It was a tragedy that would cast a shadow over the remainder of his life.Published in 1871, Scrambles Amongst the Alps is Whymper's own story of his nine years spent climbing in the Alps. One of the first books devoted to the sheer thrill of mountaineering, it is a breathtaking account of the triumph of man over mountain in a time before thermal clothing, nylon ropes, global positioning systems, and air rescues. It also offers Whymper's controversial story of the tragedy on the Matterhorn. One of the best adventure books of all time, Scrambles Amongst the Alps is an essential classic of climbing literature by one of mountaineering's most legendary figures.

    Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness. American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel. Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.

    As New York Newsday has said of his work, "If Alaska had not existed, Haines might well have invented it."

    This guide divides the attractions into sections—the North Rim, South Rim, Colorado River, and Havasu Falls—with lodging, dining, and camping information given for each. Outfitters for hiking, backpacking, mule rides, and rafting adventures are listed, and carefully researched chapters about the park's history, geology, and wildlife encourage leisurely study of the area's unmatched natural beauty. This book is the winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award for best full-color travel guide and the Independent Publisher Award for best travel guide. About The Complete Guides:With a large number of beautiful, high-quality color photographs, these guides are as browsable as the best coffee table books but also supply travelers with maps, travel tips, and extensive listings for lodging, camping, and sightseeing.

    . . who has discovered through the medium of mountains the true perspective of living." --Sir John Hunt, author of The Conquest of Everest Known for his lyrical writing and his ability to convey not only the dangers of mountaineering but the pure exaltation of the climb, Gaston Rebuffat is among the most well-known and revered Alpinists of all time. He rose to international prominence in 1950 as one of the four principal stalwarts in the first ascent of Annapurna, the highest mountain climbed at that time. Yet his finest feat as a mountaineer was to be the first man to climb all six of the legendary great north faces of the Alps--the Grandes Jorasses, the Piz Badile, the Dru, the Matterhorn, the Cima Grande di Lava-redo, and the Eiger.With this elegant book, first published in 1954, Gaston Rebuffat transformed mountain writing. His insistence on seeing a climb as an act of harmonious communion with the mountain, not a battle waged against it, seemed radical at the time, though Rebuffat's aesthetic has since won the day. Through storms, avalanches, rock fall, unplanned bivouacs, and even the deaths of companions, we follow the Chamonix guide to the altar of his communion, on dark, icy walls that struck terror into the hearts of Europe's finest mountaineers. Nor are these deft narratives mere recitations of dangers faced and obstacles overcome, for Rebuffat pays as keen attention to the joys of comradeship won on these faces as he does to the climbs themselves. In our own day of corporate sponsorships, online expeditions, and eco-vacations, the purity of Rebuffat's vision of the Alps as (in the epithet of the title of another of his books) an "enchanted garden" shines forth in prose as fresh and stylish as any ever lavished on mountaineering.