mountain literature

The phrase Aladdin’s cave is often used to describe a place crammed full of interesting objects, and if ever there was a building worthy of the definition it was the Pilgrim’s Book House, Kathmandu. Squeezed between souvenir shops and tourist guest houses was an inauspicious shop front which led into a maze of rooms filled from floor to ceiling with books. Sadly, last week it burned to the ground.

This is a post I have been meaning to write for a while. Much has been written by westerners about Sherpas over the last hundred years, but the voice of the Sherpas themselves is rare. I can’t provide it, but I can provide my own perspective of a people who have given me many happy memories, taken me to places I could never have been without them, and put their lives at risk to help me.

When the Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen stood on the highest point in South America in 1897, as far as anyone knew it was the highest place man had ever been, but he stood there alone. His expedition leader Edward Fitzgerald had been left behind with altitude sickness at 6000m.

Pete Boardman was only 31 years old when he went missing with his climbing partner Joe Tasker on the Northeast Ridge of Everest in 1982, but already he was a climbing legend who had packed an enormous amount into his short life. He climbed Everest by a new route on the Southwest Face in 1975 at the age of only 24, and the world’s third highest mountain Kangchenjunga also by a new route in 1979.

No, the title of this post is not a euphemism, but a reference to the similarities between one of the great mountaineering survival stories, Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, and another less well-known survival story which happened in the Pakistan

Book review: Abode of Snow by Kenneth Mason and Fallen Giants by Isserman & Weaver. It’s always interesting to read two books which cover the same subject 50 years apart. It’s even more interesting when that subject is Himalayan mountaineering, one very close to my heart. In the last couple of months I’ve read an epic modern work and an old classic.

If you type the word Everest into the books category on Amazon.com, here’s what you get: 4 teen novels about a group of backstabbing teenagers competing to become the youngest person to climb Everest 1 worst-case scenario teen adventure book

Book review: Dark Summit by Nick Heil and High Crimes by Michael Kodas “There’s three things that could happen: you could fail, you could get up it, or you could not come back. You’ll just have to make sure you

Last week I finished reading Triumph and Tribulation, the very last book that HW (Bill) Tilman ever wrote. The following year, 1977, the septuagenarian explorer’s ship left Rio de Janeiro bound for Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, never to

The great Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner famously claimed to have seen a yeti when he was camping alone in a clearing in Tibet in 1986. Whatever it was, it moved adeptly on two legs and was too big to be

Farewell to the Pilgrim’s Book House, Kathmandu

A tribute to Sherpas, the tigers of the snow

First ascent of Aconcagua: a story of self-inflicted altitude sickness

Book review: Sacred Summits by Pete Boardman

Touching Doug Scott’s void: a crawl down The Ogre

Two great histories of Himalayan mountaineering

Why most books about Everest are irrelevant (but not all of them)

5 Everest horror stories

In praise of Bill Tilman and his great travel books

How to escape from a yeti