“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

― Attributed to Ernest Hemingway

I don’t remember the exact moment, but some time in my early teens leafing through the pages of old Outside magazines, I fell in love with the idea of mountaineering.  I didn’t know anything about climbing itself, mind you, beyond hiking and a few knots learned as a boy scout.  However the idea of climbing and specifically mountain climbing captured my imagination. I was, and admittedly still am, drawn to adventure and nothing seemed to capture the essence of adventure better than those individuals who chose to enter a dangerous arena whose risk was death and whose rewards were not measured in trophies won but in the tremendous natural beauty witnessed and the satisfaction derived from surmounting extreme challenges.

Although the passion for mountaineering had been lit, my path took me in a circuitous route interspersed among other life events; first attending rock climbing classes at a gym in Paris, then as a member of my university climbing club on the east coast, and later bolting out on weekends with friends to scramble up peaks in the Pacific Northwest.  Finally, I have had the opportunity to explore mountains around the world. Throughout, I drew inspiration from the stories of those individuals who had challenged themselves on the world’s greatest peaks. My own climbing exploits pale in comparison, but all of us-whether climbers or not-can taste the fear, excitement, camaraderie, and awe these writers felt.  Something about the mountains makes poets out of climbers. So too, is a palpable sense of the torment of those addicted souls who forsake almost everything; love, family, and security to be in the mountains. Here are a few titles that are are bound to inspire you to explore the outdoors and your own limits.

Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer

“Writing these words more than a dozen years later, it’s no longer entirely clear just how I thought soloing the Devils Thumb would transform my life.  It had something to do with the fact that climbing was the first and only thing I’d ever been good at.  My reasoning, such as it was, was fueled by scattershot passions of youth, and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzsche, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards- the later a deeply troubled writer/psychiatrist who, before putting an end to his life with a cyanide capsule in 1958, had been one of the preeminent British rock climbers of the day.”

Long before Krakauer became famous as the witness to the disastrous 1996 Everest climbing season, or captured the short poetic life of Chris McCandless; he was a climbers’ writer.  For my money, his short story collection on the climbing life is still his best work. In short pithy vignettes he describes his own climbs on the infamous Eiger North Face in Switzerland and the aptly named Devil’s Thumb in Alaska.  He also captures all the absurdities and characters which populate the climbing community. One gets a sense of someone who never takes himself or his craft too seriously, but who still captures the ethos and contradictions of whose drawn to the mountains.

Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber by Marc Twight

“In 1984 I went to the Eiger because it was the most radical, dangerous climb I could imagine myself doing.  To prepare, I backed away from everything except the mountain and my ambition. They were all that mattered. Relationships that were incomplete or inconsequential were cut away.  I consolidated my power by not sharing it. Sure, I’m a self-centered asshole, but being obsessed is something not easily shared, nor is it often appreciated.”

Those who know Marc Twight at all, probably associate him with the trans-formative Gym Jones, which sculpted the crew of the film 300 (and countless other athletes and special operators).  However, before becoming a physical fitness guru, Twight was a young American who ventured to the most difficult peaks in Europe to test himself at the absolute limit of the humanly possible.  Unlike many other American climbing stars who stress the importance of returning from the summit alive, one gets a sense that a young Marc Twight was borderline suicidal, willing to risk everything while soloing up vertical rock and ice faces listening to punk music on his walkman.  Nothing here is polished, but if you want a raw unvarnished tale of what drives some to climb the most extreme faces in the world, Twight allows you to peak behind the curtain.

The Mountain of My Fear and Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative, Two Mountaineering Classics in One Volume by David Roberts

“The deepest despair I have ever felt, as well as the most piercing happiness, has come in the mountains-a fair portion of each on Deborah and Huntington.  In my later years as a writer, I have been lucky enough to travel widely, often on fine adventures: rafting an unknown river in New Guinea, climbing to prehistoric burial caves in Mali, prowling through Iceland in search of saga sites.  But none of these latter-day exploits has had quite the intensity of those early climbing expeditions. And looking back, at age forty-seven, I have to confess that nothing I have done in my life has made me nearly so proud as my best climbs in Alaska.”

In the early sixties, as a young college student and a member of the Harvard Mountaineering Club, David Roberts and his friends sought out some of the most difficult climbs ever attempted in the Alaskan range.  In the process they experienced triumph, tragedy, and in the case of Mount Deborah-the first climb- the grinding claustrophobia of two men alone in the wilderness together for forty two days.  Roberts returned from his second climb, Mount Huntington, and in the spring of 1966 at the age of twenty-two he wrote The Mountain of My Fear; sometimes completing a chapter a day, followed by Deborah. 

The combined result is probably the greatest literary work produced in English on the climbing experience in the modern era.  One is swept up in the terse prose and pulsing emotion of these young men consumed by a passion for the mountains.  The Mountaineers Pacific Northwest climbing club of which I was a member has published both classics in a single volume.

Roland Minez is a co-founder of Pushing Horizons.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are that of the author.