"By the time David Roberts turned twenty-two, he had been involved in three fatal mountain climbing accidents and had himself escaped death by the sheerest of luck." "At age eighteen, Roberts witnessed the death of his first climbing partner in Boulder, Colorado. A few years later, he was the first on the scene of a fatal accident on Mount Washington, New Hampshire. Months afterward, while pioneering a new route in Alaska with the Harvard Mountaineering...

With the conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish governors, soldiers, and missionaries began their brutal subjugation of the Pueblo Indians in what is today the Southwestern United States. In the summer of 1680, led by a visionary shaman named Popé, the Puebloans revolted. Before then the many different Pueblo villages had never acted in concert (and never would again). Now, in total secrecy they coordinated an attack, routing the rulers in Santa...

In 1856, 3,000 Mormons, most of them impoverished immigrants, trudged from Iowa to Utah. More than 220 of them perished along the way. Roberts offers the dramatic story of this disaster--a catastrophe, the author contends, that Brigham Young might have easily prevented.

The only American to have climbed all fourteen of the world's eight-thousand-meter peaks sets his sights on Mount Everest, in a work that combines his own climbs as well as narratives of famous climbs throughout the last century.

Recounts the disappearance of George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine on Mount Everest in 1924 and the recent discovery of Mallory's remains. This is the adventure story of the year, how Conrad Anker found the body of George Mallory on Mount Everest, casting an entirely new light on the mystery of the explorer who may have conquered Everest seventy-five years ago. On June 8, 1924, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine were last seen climbing...

A veteran mountaineer recalls some of his most dangerous climbs as he pursued the goal of reaching the summit of the world's fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, discussing some of his own close calls and rescues, and errors in judgment on the part of fellow climbers.