Prehaps the most colourful character in British mountaineering, and a man who commanded international respect, Dougal Haston was one of the world's first mountaineers and a man with a rock-star-like reputation for heavy drinking, brawling and womanizing. Dougal led the first ascent of the Eiger Direct, featured in the BBC's Old Man of Hoy and performed startling feats on Everest and other great mountains. Jeff Connor had full access to Dougal's private journals, and reveals his developing ideas on philosophy - as well as his true thoughts on his peers - bringing to life one of the sport's most enduring figures.

Climbing: Knots features instructional knot-making information for the novice climber. Pocket-size, it's portable and easy-to-use, with photos throughout to assist with learning.

Combining the skills of ice climbing and rock climbing, mixed climbing-or M-climbing-allows for travel over all types of terrain, under any condition. Though mixed climbing has always been an essential part of mountaineering, the focus of this challenging sport has shifted from the means of achieving a summit to what is essentially the wintertime equivalent of sport climbing-with bolted, often overhanging, ice and rock routes being climbed using leashless tools, employing acrobatic and athletic moves.
Mixed climber, alpinist, and author Sean Isaac is at the forefront of this new movement. He has established more than sixty new ice and mixed routes and pioneered alpine mixed routes to summits around the world. Mixed Climbing is the complete manual for learning the newest techniques in the most rapidly evolving type of climbing today. Everything you need to know is here, from recommendations on equipment to complete instruction in all the disciplines of mixed climbing, including advanced ice technique, drytooling, moving over mixed rock and ice, and advanced mixed climbing techniques. Also included are training exercises to get you into condition for the specific rigors of this specialized sport.

The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men-pioneers of enlightenment-scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world's most alluring and forbidding heights. Our obsession with "who got to the top first" may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers' aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings. Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing's ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen's exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.

'Will undoubtedly become a classic narrative of this scenically magnificent, legend-rich and geologically unique part of Scotland' Cameron McNeish, The Herald Rising a kilometre out of the storm-scoured waters around Scotland's Isle of Skye is a dark battlement of pinnacles and ridgelines: the Cuillin. Plagued by ferocious weather and built from rock that tears skin and confounds compasses, a crossing of the Cuillin is the toughest mountaineering expedition in the British Isles. But the traverse is only part of its lure. Hewn from the innards of an ancient volcano, this mountain range stands like a crown on an island drenched in intrigue. While nineteenth-century climbers flocked to the Alps, the ridge lay untrodden and unyielding. When a generation of mountaineers did come, they found a remarkable prize: the last peaks of Britain to be climbed - peaks that would be named after those who climbed them. Along the way, many others, from artists and poets to mystics and wanderers, have been lured by the Cuillin's haunting beauty and magic. Those who have been seduced by the deadly magic of these mountains attest to the complexity of humans' relationship with the intrigue of our wildest, most dangerous places. The Black Ridge is a journey through the history and into the heights of the Cuillin of Skye - from the ridge's violent birth to the tales of its pioneers, its thrills, its myths and its monsters. From a night spent in a cave beneath its highest peak to the ascent of its most infamous pinnacle, this is an adventure on foot through all seasons across the most mesmerising mountain range in Britain.

'This is the story of how, on 29 May, 1953, two men, both endowed with outstanding stamina and skill, reached the top of Everest and came back unscathed to rejoin their comrades. 'Yet this will not be the whole story, for the ascent of Everest was not the work of one day, nor even of those few anxious, unforgettable weeks in which we prepared and climbed this summer. It is, in fact, a tale of sustained and tenacious endeavour by many, over a long period of time... We of the 1953 Everest Expedition are proud to share the glory with our predecessors.' Sir John Hunt

Grand Prize Winner, Banff Mountain Book Festival 2009. When Jerry Moffatt burst onto the scene as a brash 17-year-old, rock climbing had never seen anyone like him before. Fiercely ambitious, even as a boy Moffatt was focussed on one thing: being the best in the world. This is the story of his meteoric rise to stardom, and how he overcame injury to stay at the top for over two decades. Top sport-climber, brilliant competitor and a pioneer in the new game of bouldering, Moffatt's story is that of climbing itself in the last thirty years. Yet Jerry Moffatt is more than a dedicated athlete. Travelling the world to fulfil his dreams, Revelations is a compelling and often hilarious account of the climbing community with all its glories, dangers and foibles, as well as the story of a true sporting legend.

Vertical, overhanging and upside-down climbing on indoor walls studded with bulbous handholds and footholds is the fastest-rising adventure sport. This book is a complete instruction guide to technique, safety, and getting the most out of your indoor climbing experience.

*** 'Silvia Vasquez-Lavado is a warrior. I'm in awe of her strength and courage' - Selena Gomez 'An incredibly powerful story' Sunday Independent 'In the Shadow of the Mountain has all the elements a great memoir requires - a strong voice, cinematic prose, a hero to root for - in essence, an extraordinary story about an extraordinary woman's life' - San Francisco Chronicle 'Silvia Vasquez-Lavado is a woman possessed of uncommon strength, rare compassion, and a ferocious stubbornness to not allow the trauma of her childhood to destroy her life' - Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love 'Powerful' - New York Times YOU DON'T CONQUER A MOUNTAIN. YOU SURRENDER TO IT ONE STEP AT A TIME. Despite a high-flying career, Silvia Vasquez-Lavado knew she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, and hiding her sexuality from her family, she was repressing the abuse she'd suffered as a child. When her mother called her home to Peru, she knew something finally had to change. It did. Silvia began to climb. Something about the sheer size of the mountains, the vast emptiness and the nearness of death, woke her up. And then, she took her biggest pain to the biggest mountain: Everest. The 'Mother of the World' allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn't go alone. Trekking with her to Base Camp, were five troubled young women on an odyssey that helped each confront their personal trauma, and whose strength and community propelled Silvia forward... Beautifully written and deeply moving, In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of compassion, humility, and strength, inspiring us all to find have faith in our own heroism and resilience.