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The ARMCHAIR MOUNTAINEER (The Armchair Library)
The ARMCHAIR MOUNTAINEER - The Armchair Library Author:Thorn 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 t... more »he 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. These are stories of physical endurance beyond the endurable. The fatigue, the pure doggedness that pulls one foot up slowly after another, is documented again and again by climbers whose sole purpose is reduced to taking the next agonizing step, to finding the one lodging place for a foot. The techniques of mountaineering are also recorded, 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.« less