The Mountain Bookshelf

Armchair ascents

When mid-February rolls around, thoughts often turn to the approaching spring. After all, it’s the shortest month, the days are getting longer, and March is technically spring, right? A lifetime living exactly halfway to the North Pole (45 degrees latitude), has taught me better. It’s a fool who dreams of the garden, bike rides, and beers on the patio in Minnesota before the Ides of March. To dismiss the remaining six weeks of winter is to have hopes crushed like an avalanche, so might as well lean into it. Keep the woodshed and the whisky cabinet stocked and the skis waxed up. As I type this, I’m staring down a weekend forecast where the Centigrade and Fahrenheit scales might actually meet, at minus 40. 

So how are you doing on the pile of books I recommended in my polar bookshelf article from October? I promised to continue the literary theme with different adventure genres, and if you’re still yearning for more tales of frostbite, crevasses, and cold misery, you’re in luck: today I present some of my favorite mountaineering books. This is a vein that is perhaps even richer to mine than Arctic and Antarctic literature. The mountains, even in their cruel indifference, are arguably more beautiful than the polar wastelands and, unlike the Poles, most of us have been in and around mountains, perhaps even hiked in them or bagged a peak or two. I have summited a handful of “14ers” in Colorado, and my experience climbing the glaciated Mount Rainier in 2013 gave me a peek into high altitude mountaineering, with its pre-dawn alpine starts, vertiginous exposure, and overhanging seracs. While I have no intention of planting my flag on any more peaks anytime soon, I still enjoy a good book about others who have done it. So, without further ado, here are the ones on my shelf currently.

Jon Krakauer has not one, but two books in my list. First off, he’s best known for Into Thin Air, the firsthand account of the tragic 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest. It is a cautionary tale about the rise of professional guiding on big mountains and a story that was eerily prescient. I am old enough to remember reading Krakauer’s original Outside magazine story of the same title in the September, 1996 issue. It’s not an understatement to say that it is the most famous and maybe important book about mountaineering ever written. Krakauer is a brilliant writer and the fact that he was on the mountain, in the thick of the storm that claimed so many lives makes it a gripping read. The book was later criticized for not being fair to all parties involved, but despite its perceived flaws, it remains a must read for anyone who loves adventure literature.

Before Into Thin Air, Krakauer was a journalist, carpenter and something of a dirtbag climber who set off on wild, sometimes lonely, and often dangerous expeditions to climb mountains. Eiger Dreams:Ventures Among Men and Mountains is his collection of early essays about climbing, the climbing life, and the places and people he met along the way. It is some of his best work and also least read, given his later successes with Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, Under the Banner of Heaven and others. 

Feeling small. Facing the Wetterhorn, with the Eiger, just off stage right.

Speaking of the Eiger, that fearsome, mythical slab of rock in the Swiss Alps, in the 1960s, new routes up its North Face were being pioneered. One of the best climbers of his day was American, John Harlin, who was so obsessed with Alpine climbing that he emigrated to Switzerland to found the International Mountain School and be close to the peaks he loved, including the Eiger. Harlin was the first American to climb the North Face of the Eiger and in 1966, led a team up a new direct line straight up the face. He fell 2,000 feet to his death when his rope broke. The route, which was completed by a teammate, was named the Harlin Route in his honor. The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain That Killed My Father, is a book about Harlin’s single-minded focus on the Eiger, written by his son, John Harlin III, himself an accomplished climber. The author ended up climbing the mountain himself 40 years after his father’s death and the book details his life living in the mountains, an expat childhood with an obsessed and accomplished father, and finally, his own climb.

OK, one more Eiger book: Heinrich Harrer’s, The White Spider. You may know Harrer from the Brad Pitt movie, “Seven Years in Tibet” which was based on a book also written by Harrer and is also an excellent read. But it was years before his epic journey across the Himalayas during World War II, in 1938, when he was a part of the small Austrian team that became the first to summit the Eiger by its North Face. Harrer was a young man then, ambitious, perhaps a little naive and foolhardy and he and his partner got in a bit over their heads on the climb, but managed to join another small team halfway up the face to complete the ascent. This is the book to start with if you want to understand the mythology of the Eiger.

Crossing the pond to the New World leads to perhaps my favorite mountaineering book. In 1985, two British mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates traveled to a remote valley in the South American Andes to climb the West Face of 20,804-foot Siula Grande. After summiting, they began their descent in deep snow and approaching darkness. Simpson took a fall and shattered his leg, which necessitated reliance on Yates to lower him down the mountain, one rope length at a time. As if this predicament wasn’t bad enough, the weather deteriorated and then, a tragic mishap, an agonizing decision and the extraordinary consequences, played out deep in a crevasse. Spoiler alert: both men survived, barely, and Simpson went on to write, Touching the Void, about the ordeal. In 2003, it was made into a documentary film of the same name, which is worth watching—annually. If you ever think you’re in an impossible predicament or utterly miserable, reading this book will cure you and make you realize that it can always get worse.

If your interests lie in the Himalayas, specifically Everest, you absolutely must find a copy of Sir John Hunt’s, The Ascent of Everest. It is the OG Everest story, detailing the very first ascent of Everest by the leader of the British team that “knocked the bastard off.” Hunt’s writing is fairly dry and feels characteristically British in its understatement, but it’s also fascinating to read how he selected his team, procured gear, and pulled off the logistics of what was such an epic accomplishment. Hunt wrote the book shortly after returning to England in 1953 and reading it now, one still senses the freshness of his pride in accomplishment. It’s also amusing the read the appendices to the book, which list the gear they took, which included“necessities” like whisky and Romney’s Mint Cakes. I managed to find a first edition hard copy of the book in a used bookshop in Henley-on-Thames, a town in which Hunt lived for a while. It is a treasure on my bookshelf.

On the flanks of Rainier.

Finally, the only work of fiction on my list: Solo Faces, by James Salter. This is one of my favorite novels of any genre. Salter writes exquisitely, spare yet descriptive, efficient but expansive. The story surrounds a young climber who works as a roofer in California while climbing in the Sierras in his spare time. He’s a loner, obsessed with climbing, a man of few words. His grand ambition is to travel to the French Alps and climb the sheer rock walls around Chamonix, and a good part of the book is set there. Salter’s descriptions of climbing are beautiful, meditative studies of movement and controlled emotion as opposed to clinical detail of an athletic endeavor. It is a quiet book and one I like to revisit every few years. There was a rumor that a film was to be made from the book (Salter wrote the screenplay for Redford’s Downhill Racer) but I actually hope there never will be. It exists in its perfect form already.

Now, I know I’ve left plenty of books off the list. Though I wasn’t enamored with Ed Viesturs’s, No Shortcuts to the Top, it’s worth reading simply for his pioneering accomplishments. Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna is a big hole on my bookshelf that I need to fill. And Reinhold Messner has written several books about his own extraordinary exploits at the top of the world. I also want to read Nirmal Purja’s Beyond Possible about his 2019 sprint to the tops of all 14 8,000-meter peaks. But when it comes to books, like mountains, there’s always another one on the horizon. And the ones I listed here should carry you through to spring. So stoke the fire, grab a book, and keep warm. If you have any other mountaineering books you like, feel free to drop titles in the comments.