The Armchair Mountaineer - Softcover

Few sports have the mystic allure that is so much a part of mountaineering. The rewards for success are great, as are the consequences for failure. So solitary a sport, mountaineering leads to the release of some of our innermost feelings; feelings of uncertainty, competitiveness, and the desire to conquer fear and physical limitation. Within the pages of The Armchair Mountaineer are the accounts of many of the great triumphs and tragedies of mountaineering. The combination of great climbers and renowned authors leads to a volume filled with accounts of ascents from around the world, from a detailed account of the equipment necessary to ascend Yosemite's Lost Arrow to Rick Ridgeway's journal of the attack on K2, to Herzog on Annapurna, Hillary on Everest, and Reinhold Messner on the will to survive. Not surprisingly, some of the greatest authors of fiction have made their mark on the literature of climbing. (6 x 9, 352 pages, illustrations)