In 1996, a twenty-three-year-old soldier in the British Army was flying over an African desert on a routine parachute jump. He had a lot to look forward to-a long career ahead of him in the army, a beautiful girlfriend back home. But those dreams were cut short when his parachute failed to open at eleven thousand feet. He had cracked three vertebrae and come within a fraction of severing his spinal cord. A grueling eight months of physical therapy followed. Bear had to retrain his muscles to do all of the things we take for granted-how to sit, stand, walk, even breathe. Eighteen months after his accident he overcame incredible odds to reach the peak of Everest. THE KID WHO CLIMBED EVEREST is a tale of courage and determination. Bear's quest for funding for his expedition, his seventy days on Everest's southeast face, and a narrow brush with death after a fall into a crevasse at nineteen thousand feet, make the story an essential read for anyone who's ever had a dream and made it come true.

This is the tale of Mark Horrell's not-so-nearly ascent of Gasherbrum in Pakistan, of how one man's boredom and frustration was conquered by a gutsy combination of exhaustion, cowardice, and sheer mountaineering incompetence. He made not one, not two, but three intrepid assaults, some of which got quite a distance beyond Base Camp, and overcame many perilous circumstances along the way. The mountaineer Joe Simpson famously crawled for three days with a broken leg, but did he ever have to read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown while waiting for a weather window? But that's enough about Mark's attempt; there were some talented climbers on the mountain as well, and this story is also about them. How did they get on? Heroes, villains, oddballs and madmen - 8,000m peaks attract them all, and drama, intrigue and cock-ups aplenty were inevitable.

The 'Grossglockner', Austria's highest mountain at 3,789m, is one of the most important summits of the Eastern Alps - and not only because it is so important for alpine tourism. At the end of the 18th Century, it had been explored and nobody less than Arch Bishop Salm-Reiffenscheidt-Krautheim was the first to ascend in 1800. Today, with more than 5000 ascents per year, it is a very popular destination for climbers. But even for those who do not want to climb, the fascination of this mountain is hard to escape. There is no better way to investigate than from the 'Grossglockner' High Alpine roads. The road leads across both mountain passes Fuscher Toerl and Hochtor, crossing the main Alpes from Salzburg to Carinthia, with turnoffs to the Edelweiss peak and the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-height. The road as an adventure trip and its 12% ascent has to be well managed. Who would be more capable to report about all this than Stefan Bogner, the master of the automobile photo books? With fuel in his blood and a sensitive feel for history, but also with accelerator and brake, he provides a portrait of one of the most exciting and most visited Alpine roads. Text in English and German.

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.

Mt Gherania is a long limestone massif that extends between Kakia Skala (the narrow pass on the Athens to Corinth highway - now a series of tunnels) and Loutraki. Numerous paths, which can be combined into interesting long routes, run along the tallest peaks of Paliovouna, Douskia and Makriplaghi.

Only one person believed Jane Parnell when she reported being raped at twenty-one: the mountain man who first led her up one peak after another in the Colorado Rockies and who then became her husband. Parnell took to mountaineering in the Rocky Mountains as a means to overcome her family's history of mental illness and the trauma of the rape. By age thirty she became the first woman to climb the 100 highest peaks of the state. But regaining her footing could not save her by-now-failing marriage. Unprepared emotionally and financially for singlehood, she kept climbing - the 200 highest peaks, then nearly all of the 300 highest. The mountains were the one anchor in her life that held. Finding few contemporary role models to validate her ambition, Parnell looked to the past for inspiration - to English travel writer Isabella Bird, who also sought refuge and transformation in the Colorado Rockies, notably by climbing Longs Peak in 1873 with the notorious mountain man Rocky Mountain Jim. Reading Bird's now-classic A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains emboldened Parnell to keep moving forward. She was not alone in her drive for independence. Parnell's memoir spans half a century. Her personal journey dramatizes evolving gender roles from the 1950s to the present. As a child, she witnessed the first ascent of the Diamond on Longs Peak, the ""Holy Grail"" of alpine climbing in the Rockies. In 2002, she saw firsthand the catastrophic Colorado wildfires of climate change, and five years later, she nearly lost her leg in a climbing accident. In the tradition of Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Tracy Ross's The Source of All Things, Parnell's mountaineering memoir shows us how, by pushing ourselves to the limits of our physical endurance and by confronting our deepest fears, we can become whole again.

When the Wells sisters from the tiny English hamlet of Denton, near Ilkley, Yorkshire, took up mountaineering at the start of the twentieth century, little did they know that they were to become pioneers in women's climbing in the UK. At the time of the growing strength of the Women's Suffragette movement, women-only mountaineering began to increase in popularity. This story describes the adventures of Paddy, Trilby and Biddy Wells, through Wharfedale, the Lake District, North Wales, Scotland and the Alps, including the first all-female traverse of the Skye ridge, the first female descent of Gaping Ghyll pothole, and the first female to successfully climb all the Scottish Munros. There were links in the lives of the three sisters to the Church of St. John in Ben Rhydding; to the local ladies Hockey Club; to the founding of England's first women only climbing club; to Bradford Diocesan Council meetings; to innovative ideas in Special Needs education in Bradford; to local amateur operatic and Gilbert and Sullivan Societies; and to many leading and famous British mountaineers of the period. This story will be of interest to the local people in Ilkley and Wharfedale, to mountaineer's around the world and to all those interested in discovering more about some remarkable, independently minded women to whom we should all be in awe.