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Books > Sport & Leisure > Sports & outdoor recreation > Active outdoor pursuits > Climbing & mountaineering
Following his vivid account of traveling with one of the last camel
caravans on earth in Men of Salt, Michael Benanav now brings us
along on a journey with a tribe of forest-dwelling nomads in India.
Welcomed into a family of nomadic water buffalo herders, he joins
them on their annual spring migration into the Himalayas. More than
a glimpse into an endangered culture, this superb adventure
explores the relationship between humankind and wild lands, and the
dubious effect of environmental conservation on peoples whose lives
are inseparably intertwined with the natural world. The migration
Benanav embarked upon was plagued with problems, as government
officials threatened to ban this nomadic family-and others in the
Van Gujjar tribe-from the high alpine meadows where they had
summered for centuries. Faced with the possibility that their
beloved buffaloes would starve to death, and that their age-old way
of life was doomed, the family charted a risky new course, which
would culminating in an astonishing mountain rescue. And Benanav
was arrested for documenting the story of their plight. Intimate
and enthralling, Himalaya Bound paints a sublime picture of a
rarely-seen world, revealing the hopes and fears, hardships and
joys, of a people who wonder if there is still a place for them on
this planet. Laced with stories of tribal cultures from India to
Yellowstone, from Jordan to Kenya, Benanav deftly wends through the
controversial terrain where Western ways of protecting the
environment clash with indigenous understandings of nature.
Himalaya Bound celebrates and mourns an ancient way of life, while
revealing an unlikely battleground in the fight to save the earth.
The definitive story of the British adventurers who survived the
trenches of World War I and went on to risk their lives climbing
Mount Everest.
On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet
on an ice ledge just below the lip of Everest's North Col. George
Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain's finest climber. Sandy Irvine
was a twenty-two-year-old Oxford scholar with little previous
mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
Drawing on more than a decade of prodigious research, bestselling
author and explorer Wade Davis vividly re-creates the heroic
efforts of Mallory and his fellow climbers, setting their
significant achievements in sweeping historical context: from
Britain's nineteen-century imperial ambitions to the war that
shaped Mallory's generation. Theirs was a country broken, and the
Everest expeditions emerged as a powerful symbol of national
redemption and hope. In Davis's rich exploration, he creates a
timeless portrait of these remarkable men and their extraordinary
times.
In 1967, twelve young men attempted to climb Alaska's Mount
McKinley - known to locals as Denali, 'The High One' - one of the
most popular and deadly mountaineering destinations in the world.
Only five survived. Journalist Andy Hall grew up in the mountain's
shadow, the son of the ranger on duty at the time of the tragedy,
and has spent years tracking down survivors, lost documents and
recordings of radio communications to piece together the chain of
events. In Denali's Howl, Hall reveals the full story of an
expedition facing conditions conclusively established here for the
first time: At an elevation of nearly 20,000 feet, these young men
endured an "arctic super blizzard," with howling winds of up to 300
miles an hour and wind chill that freezes flesh solid in minutes.
All this without the high-tech gear and equipment climbers use
today. As well as the story of the men caught inside the storm,
Denali's Howl is the story of those caught outside it trying to
save them - Hall's father among them. The book gives readers a
detailed look at the culture of climbing then and now and raises
uncomfortable questions about each player in this tragedy. Was
enough done to rescue the climbers, or were their fates sealed when
they ascended into the path of this unprecedented storm?
Four Years In the Rockies tells the story of Isaac P. Rose, who
went from greenhorn to legendary trapper at the height of the
fur-trade in the 1830s. His narrative features a who's who of early
American West figures like Jim Bridger, Kit Carson and Nathaniel
Wyeth, and features many memorable sequences such as the trader's
rendezvous, fights with Native Americans and countless details not
in mainstream history books - for example, how Kit Carson found his
wife. Four Years In the Rockies is a definitive look at the era of
the fur-trappers and is a must-read for anyone interested in the
history of the American West.
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