Fiercely ambitious, even as a boy Moffatt was focussed on one thing: being the best in the world. This title tells the story of his meteoric rise to stardom, and how he overcame injury to stay at the top.

    A must-read.”— Booklist At 28,251 ft, K2 might be almost 800 ft shorter than Everest, but it’s a far harder climb. In this definitive account, Mick Conefrey grippingly describes the early attempts to reach the summit and provides a fascinating exploration of the first ascent’s complex legacy. From the drug-addicted occultist Aleister Crowley to Achille Compagnoni and Lindo Lacedelli, the Italian duo who finally made it to the summit, The Ghosts of K2 charts how a slew of great men became fixated on this legendary mountain.Through exclusive interviews with surviving team members and their families, and unrivalled access to diaries and letters that have been archived around the world, Conefrey evokes the true atmosphere of the Savage Mountain and explores why it remains the ‘mountaineer’s mountain’, despite a history steeped in controversy and death. Wrought with tension, and populated by tragic heroes and eccentric dreamers, The Ghosts of K2 is a masterpiece of mountaineering literature.

    Plagued by doubts and cold, group tension and a crevasse tragedy, the expedition tackled McKinley in minimal hours of daylight and fierce storms. They were trapped at three different camps above 14,000 feet during a six-day blizzard and faced the ultimate low temperature of 148 F.Minus 148 is Art Davidson's stunning personal narrative, supplemented by diary excerpts from team members George Wichman, John Edwards, Dave Johnston, and Greg Blomberg. Davidson retells the team's fears and frictions and ultimate triumph with an honesty that has made this gripping survival story a mountaineering classic for over 40 years.

    The articles are composed of three types: Adventures (Roberts' own climbs and outings), Profiles (other adventurers), and Reflections (meditative essays about the meaning of the whole business). Roberts ranges the globe (Africa, Alaska, New Guinea) and introduces unique personalities (Reinhold Messner, John Roskelly, Don Sheldon). He also recounts how his own love of writing and the useless pastime of climbing combined to produce the bread and butter of his career today.Popular with audiences far beyond active mountaineers, Roberts sets himself this challenge: "For me, the abiding puzzle of adventure writing lies in keeping, on the one hand, a sense of proportion about the absurdity of most of our antics in the outdoors, while staying alert, on the other, to the majesty of spirit which at their best those antics demonstrate."RUNNING TIME ⇒ 10hrs. and 39mins.©1986 David Roberts (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

    Dick Bass had made his fortune as an energy and resort entrepreneur. In middle age, both men left behind home, family, and successful careers to share an impossible dream. Seven Unconquered Summits The challenge: be the first to climb the highest mountain on each of seven continents, from McKinley to Kilimanjaro to Everest. The obstacles: many and merciless, from ice storms to illness to a measurement question that threatened to make their record-breaking expedition a sham. The prize: the sheer, exhilarating triumph of standing at the top of every continent on earth.

    The route they targeted is called “Fiva” (pronounced “fever”). Poor judges of their own abilities, experience, and gear, they began the climb convinced they would return to their tent in time for afternoon tea.Within hours of starting the route, things went terribly wrong. Fiva is the story that Gordon Stainforth lived to tell, 40 years later. While it’s a tale that climbers will embrace, the adventure is one that all readers of non-fiction adventure will enjoy and find absorbing. It’s a story of innocence, brotherly love, youthful folly, and of danger, danger, and more danger.

    Enveloped by mystery whether he reached Mount Everest's summit before his fall, he continues to grip the imagination. An exceptionally gifted and driven climber, his spell-binding memory inspires mountaineers to this day, attracting lively speculation as well as fact-finding expeditions to retrace his steps. Climbing Everest gathers for the first time Mallory's influential canon on mountaineering from its disparate locations in archives.Mallory was unique in drawing a new literature from his mountain craft. For him, as for his predecessors, earth was still a heroic place with hidden parts promising novel experiences while the eyes of history were trained upon them. But he was strongly inspired by the Bloomsbury group, unlike previous explorers, and a talented writer and poet. He chose to break with the Edwardian stiff upper lip in favor of emotional truthfulness about the art of climbing. The result created a novel branch of mountaineering literature, as fresh and vivid as the feelings he recorded in handwriting under the most harrowingly extreme mountain-top conditions.--From the 2010 edition.

    In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceives his own crazy, beautiful plan: he will fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit—all utterly alone. Wilson doesn’t know how to climb. He barely knows how to fly. But he has the right plane, the right equipment, and a deep yearning to achieve his goal. In 1933, he takes off from London in a Gipsy Moth biplane with his course set for the highest mountain on earth. Wilson’s eleven-month journey to Everest is wild: full of twists, turns, and daring. Eventually, in disguise, he sneaks into Tibet. His icy ordeal is just beginning. Wilson is one of the Great War’s heroes, but also one of its victims. His hometown of Bradford in northern England is ripped apart by the fighting. So is his family. He barely survives the war himself. Wilson returns from the conflict unable to cope with the sadness that engulfs him. He begins a years-long trek around the world, burning through marriages and relationships, leaving damaged lives in his wake. When he finally returns to England, nearly a decade after he first left, he finds himself falling in love once more—this time with his best friend’s wife—before depression overcomes him again. He emerges from his funk with a crystalline ambition. He wants to be the first man to stand on top of the world. Wilson believes that Everest can redeem him. This is the tale of an adventurer unlike any you have ever encountered: complex, driven, wry, haunted, and fully alive. He is a man written out of the history books—dismissed as an eccentric, and gossiped about because of rumors of his transvestism. The Moth and the Mountain restores Maurice Wilson to his rightful place in the annals of Everest and tells an unforgettable story about the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

    In the years following the publication of Into Thin Air, much has changed on Mount Everest. Among all the books documenting the glorious adventures in mountains around the world, none details how the recent infusion of wealthy climbers is drawing crime to the highest place on the planet. The change is caused both by a tremendous boom in traffic, and a new class of parasitic and predatory adventurer. It's likely that Jon Krakauer would not recognize the camps that he visited on Mount Everest almost a decade ago. This book takes readers on a harrowing tour of the criminal underworld on the slopes of the world's most majestic mountain.High Crimes describes two major expeditions: the tragic story of Nils Antezana, a climber who died on Everest after he was abandoned by his guide; as well as the author's own story of his participation in the Connecticut Everest Expedition, guided by George Dijmarescu and his wife and climbing partner, Lhakpa Sherpa. Dijmarescu, who at first seemed well-intentioned and charming, turned increasingly hostile to his own wife, as well as to the author and the other women on the team. By the end of the expedition, the three women could not travel unaccompanied in base camp due to the threat of violence. Those that tried to stand against the violence and theft found that the worst of the intimidation had followed them home to Connecticut. Beatings, thefts, drugs, prostitution, coercion, threats, and abandonment on the highest slopes of Everest and other mountains have become the rule rather than the exception. Kodas describes many such experiences, and explores the larger issues these stories raise with thriller-like intensity.

    Describes Mallory's final expedition to Mount Everest in 1924, the mystery surrounding his disappearance, and the discovery of his remains in 1999.

    But controversy has swirled around this ice-capped peak since Cesare Maestri claimed first ascent in 1959. Since then a debate has raged, with world-class climbers attempting to retrace his route but finding only contradictions. This chronicle of hubris, heroism, controversies and epic journeys offers a glimpse into the human condition, and why some pursue extreme endeavors that at face value have no worth.

    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.

    Their four books of lightweight Himalayan expeditioning are here published in one volume for the first time.

    This is his account of the dramatic events of that summer, a story of ambitions both achieved and thwarted on a mountain which all high-altitude climbers take the most pride in overcoming. In 1986 K2 took its toll of those ambitions.Curran vividly describes the moments that contribute to the exhilaration of climbing on the world's most demanding mountain, and he assesses the tragedy of that summer with compassion and impartiality.K2, "the savage mountain", is the second-highest peak in the world - and the most difficult to climb. In 1986, it was the site of both dazzling triumph and great loss as twenty-seven men and women reached the top but thirteen died trying. Curran was there to record it all in words and photographs: courage and obsession, luminous success and thwarted ambition.

    Everest in 1953 and a biography of her father, Dr Griffith Pugh, whose role was absolutely pivotal, yet mostly untold. As the expedition’s physiological consultant, Pugh designed almost every aspect of the survival strategy for the expedition, the acclimatization program, the oxygen- and fluid-intake regime, the diet, the clothing and the high altitude boots. Without him and his work, the ascent of Everest would have been impossible.