SPORTS
Mountain & Rock Climbing
10 books
Ten books about climbing — the sport that involves going up things that most people look at from a safe distance and conclude are not meant to be climbed. The list covers high-altitude alpinism, technical rock climbing, the specific tradition of big-wall climbing in Yosemite, and the memoir tradition of climbers who discovered in the vertical world something they couldn't find anywhere else. Climbing writing is a distinctive genre because the experience it describes is fundamentally untranslatable — you can read about what it feels like to be three thousand feet up a granite face with nothing between you and the ground, but you cannot really know — and the best books in the tradition are honest about that untranslatability while somehow conveying it anyway.
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Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
Jon Krakauer
Krakauer was on Everest as a journalist when the 1996 disaster killed eight people in a single day. He survived. This is his account — written fast, written guilty, written with the specific anguish of a man trying to reconstruct events he was too hypoxic and too overwhelmed to process as they happened. The commercial expedition model he was part of — wealthy clients guided to the summit regardless of fitness — is the structural villain of the book, but the mountain itself is the actual one. No book has ever better captured what altitude does to human judgment, and no book has made the indifference of high mountains more plain. The industry it described has only gotten worse since.
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Touching the Void
Joe Simpson
When Joe Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates set out to climb the treacherous Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, they knew they were undertaking a very dangerous task. When an accident sends Joe crashing into a ravine, Simon assumes his death and is forced to continue on without him. Left alone and critically injured, Simpson proceeds to crawl down the glacier, arriving barely alive at his base camp 3½ days later. An astonishing tale of one man's will to survive.
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K2: The Savage Mountain
Charles S. Houston & Robert H. Bates
K2, the world's second highest mountain, has rightfully earned the nickname the savage mountain, with approximately one of every four who attempt a summit dying in the process. This is the story of the first Americans to reach the summit of K2 and successfully return, as told by the mountaineers themselves.
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Annapurna
Maurice Herzog
Herzog's account of the first summit of Annapurna, a 26,200 ft mountain in the Himalayas. As expedition leader, Herzog and his team not only had to reach the summit but had to create a climbing route, as the mountain was almost completely uncharted. A classic of the mountaineering genre.
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No Shortcuts to the Top
Ed Viesturs
Viesturs spent eighteen years climbing all fourteen eight-thousand-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen — a feat accomplished by fewer than two dozen people in history — and this is the account of how and why. The overview entry on this list: Viesturs covers the full arc of high-altitude mountaineering from a practitioner's perspective, which means the history, the physiology, the specific decision-making framework that kept him alive when other climbers died, and the specific relationships between the mountains and the men who return to them repeatedly. Around 340 pages and the entry that makes the other books on this list comprehensible in context. The reader who starts here before reading Krakauer, Herzog, and Houston will understand what they are reading more completely.
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Eiger Dreams
Jon Krakauer
Before Into Thin Air made Krakauer famous, he spent years writing about climbing for Outside and other magazines — attempting routes beyond his ability, failing at some, succeeding at others, and documenting all of it with a self-deprecating honesty that his later work replaced with authority. This collection of those early essays is the humor entry on this list and the entry that makes the rest of the list human: a climber who is very good but not great, who wants things he cannot quite achieve, and who keeps going back anyway. Around 186 pages. The two Krakauer entries on this list are genuinely different books — Into Thin Air is disaster journalism written at the height of his powers; this is a younger writer being funny about his own ambitions before he had earned the right to be solemn about them.
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Alone on the Wall
Alex Honnold
In June 2017, Honnold free soloed El Capitan's Freerider route — 3,000 feet of vertical granite in Yosemite, no rope, no protection, no margin for error — in three hours and fifty-six minutes. One misplaced hand or foot meant death. The documentary Free Solo covers the same event visually and is excellent; this book goes where the camera cannot: the interior psychology of a man who prepares so thoroughly that fear becomes a manageable variable rather than a veto. Around 256 pages and the solo climbing entry on this list — doing a genuinely different job from every other first-person account here. Krakauer, Simpson, Herzog, and Houston document what happens when mountains fight back. Honnold documents what happens when a human being methodically removes that possibility through preparation alone.
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The White Spider
Heinrich Harrer
Harrer was one of the four climbers who made the first ascent of the Eiger's North Face in 1938 — a route that had already killed eight men and that the German and Italian governments had banned their climbers from attempting. He wrote this account twenty years later, expanded it with subsequent editions as more climbers died on the same face, and produced the definitive document of the most feared route in the Alps: the specific technical difficulties, the specific weather that turns the face into a waterfall of ice, and the specific obsession that sends men back to it after watching others die there. Cross-seeds with the WWII list — Harrer was an Austrian SS member who escaped British captivity in India and spent seven years in Tibet, documented in Seven Years in Tibet. The White Spider is the mountaineering masterpiece; the life was equally improbable.
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Camp 4
Steve Roper
Through the 1960s, a loose tribe of climbers lived semi-permanently in Yosemite Valley — sleeping in Camp 4, working minimal jobs for minimal wages, and spending their days attempting routes on El Capitan and Half Dome that had never been climbed. Roper was one of them and this is the oral history of that era: Royal Robbins establishing new standards of boldness, Warren Harding spending forty-seven days bolting his way up the Nose, and the specific counterculture of men who had decided that vertical granite was worth organizing a life around. Around 225 pages and the deep cut on this list — largely unknown outside climbing circles and the most purely enjoyable read on it. The golden age of American rock climbing, documented by someone who lived it.
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The Eiger Obsession
John Harlin III
In March 1966, John Harlin II fell four thousand feet down the Eiger's North Face when a fixed rope snapped during his attempt on a new direct route. He was thirty years old. His son John was nine. Forty years later, Harlin III returned to the Eiger to climb the route his father died attempting, reconstructing the father he barely knew through the mountain that took him. Around 290 pages and the biography entry on this list — not a conventional biography but a son's forensic investigation of a man through the obsession that defined and ended him. The Eiger itself runs through the entire list: Harrer's White Spider documents its dead, Krakauer's Eiger Dreams documents its pull, and this book documents what that pull costs the people left behind.