Five of the best books on climbing mountains

Mountaneering has gone mainstream. What was once a pursuit for only the hardiest adventurers is now the extreme sport du jour. Take Mount Everest. In the four decades after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first reached the summit in 1953 an average of 12 people a year followed in their footsteps. In 2023 more than 1,200 people attempted the climb; 655 reached the summit and 18 died trying. The ascent of Everest is now an industry: for between $35,000 and $110,000 guides will take novices to the top of the world. But the new commercialism should not detract from the romance of mountaineering. These five books and a documentary allow armchair alpinists to experience a bit of the thrill with none of the peril.

Killing Dragons. By Fergus Fleming. Atlantic Monthly Press; 416 pages; $26 and £24.50

The early history of mountaineering in Europe is in no small part one of British adventurism, which is surprising. Ben Nevis, at 1,345 metres, is Britain’s highest peak. That is less than half as high as Mont Blanc in the Alps (4,805 metres). Yet many of the Alp-conquering protagonists of “Killing Dragons” were Britons. The Alpine Club, the world’s first for mountaineering, was founded in London in 1857. Edward Whymper, the first person to ascend the Matterhorn (4,478 metres), started the craze for tourism in the Alps. Fergus Fleming, a British author, traces the lives and obsessions of explorers, some eccentric, some simply eminent. “Killing Dragons” tells the story of the age and conveys the pull that these—at the time unclimbed—peaks exerted. The exploits of these Victorians were a prelude to the conquests, again often by British climbers, of even loftier mountains in Asia in the 20th century.

Eiger Dreams. By Jon Krakauer. Lyons Press; 202 pages; $18.95 and £14.99

Jon Krakauer is a seasoned chronicler of calamities. He wrote “Into Thin Air”, about a disaster on Mount Everest, and “Into the Wild”, about a one-way journey into the Alaskan wilderness. “Eiger Dreams”, a collection of essays and articles published in 1990, explores the minds of mountaineers as they explore the mountains. Each of the dozen short chapters, most of which first appeared in magazines, tells a story of an adventure. The locales include Denali (North America’s highest mountain), K2 (the world’s second-highest) and the Eiger (a punishing Swiss peak). Mr Krakauer gives concise accounts of climbers’ personal stories and spares us technicalities. In one gripping tale, the author recounts his own solo trip as a young man. He travels by boat and ski to a remote part of Alaska to climb the icy flanks of Devils (sic) Thumb, using ice axes and crampons. Mr Krakauer writes of the mad enterprise: ”Below was thirty-seven hundred feet [1,100 metres] of air, and I was balanced atop a house of cards.”

Time on Rock. By Anna Fleming. Canongate; 272 pages; $26 and £16.99

Although most famous mountaineers have been men, some of the best books about climbing are by women (see also Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain”, written in the 1940s but not published until 1977). “Time on Rock”, by Anna Fleming, an academic and journalist, is the story of a young woman’s climbing life, from nervy teenage apprentice to lead climber, the person who takes charge of putting in place security equipment. It is also a “journey into the rock”, which takes place primarily in the British Isles, although one chapter is about Greece. “Time on Rock” is partly about what it’s like to be a woman in a sport dominated by men. It is also about rocks themselves—Ms Fleming dilates on their characteristics and variety as she clambers up or across them. She describes one as “a good stone, the kind dropped by a retreating glacier perhaps. Large, bald, flat-topped, grey-coloured with little white, blue and green lichen splodges, it made an ideal lunch stone.” The more time Ms Fleming spends on mountains, the more she realises that the joy of climbing is not the brief elation upon reaching the summit but rather the “journeys across the stones”. Read our full review from 2022.

No Picnic on Mount Kenya. By Felice Benuzzi. MacLehose Press; 320 pages; $29.99. Quercus; £18.99

Spikes from the rusted fences of a prisoner-of-war camp do not make for ideal crampons. But Felice Benuzzi did not have the luxury of choosing his equipment. An Italian soldier in the second world war, he spent half a decade in internment camps after British forces took Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) in 1941. At one camp a few days’ trek from Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-highest mountain, Benuzzi, a climber, dreamed of standing on the summit. “No Picnic on Mount Kenya” is his account of how he and two accomplices escaped, reached the lower peak and then, surprisingly, broke back into the camp (the consequences of being recaptured outside it might have been dire). In our review from 2015 of a new edition we wrote that the book crackles with dry humour, and has become a classic among climbers since it first appeared in Italian in 1947, and in English in 1952.

Into the Silence. By Wade Davis. Knopf; 672 pages; $32.50. Vintage; £25

“Into the Silence” gives a detailed account of George Mallory’s failed and fatal attempt in the early 1920s to climb Chomolungma, as Tibetans call Mount Everest. The thick, meticulously researched book paints a vivid picture of life after the Great War. It presents the reader with a varied cast of soldiers, dignitaries and adventurers and follows the expedition from the Royal Geographical Society in London to the far reaches of the Himalayas.

Free Solo. By Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. (2018)

This Oscar-winning documentary from 2018 follows Alex Honnold, a 33-year-old climber, in his quest to scale El Capitan, a famous 914m-high precipice in California. His ambition is to scale it “free solo”, ie, without a rope or any other safety equipment. The scenes of Mr Honnold inching up a featureless flat wall are vertiginous and at times almost too tense to watch. If your nerves aren’t quite up to the hair-raising scenes in “Free Solo”, search on YouTube for a video of Mr Honnold (this time on the ground) reviewing famous climbing scenes from Hollywood films.