10 Must-Reads for Active (or Armchair) Alpinists

Consider this your syllabus for Mountaineering 101. Below, we've collected a literary canon with tales of adventure, miraculous survival, spiritual journeys, heart-wrenching losses, and timeless instruction on how best to sneak up on a summit and live to tell the tale. These authors — ranging from beatniks to bestsellers, celebrated climbers to average Joes — take you on an eloquent trek through moraines, into (yes, into) crevasses, up headwalls, all the way to the top and back. These books vary from sobering nonfiction and to vivid yarns; however, they each give glimpses into the zeitgeist of modern-day mountaineering: romance and bleak reality, heroism and cowardice, triumph and failure, death and survival.    

1. Freedom of the Hills, 8th Edition, Ed. Ronald C. Eng (The Mountaineers, 2010)

Before even lacing your boots and breaking out the ice axe, read this book! Most of the world's greatest climbers, alpinists, and mountaineers — from Dean Potter to Conrad Anker and Ed Viesturs — all maintain a biblical reverence for this book, having read earlier editions back when they were young, spry climbers. Indeed, in its 600 pages of climbing fundamentals, knot diagrams, belaying techniques, survival tips, and much, much more, Freedom of the Hills contains a scripture-like truth: "The quest of the mountaineer, in simplest terms, is for the freedom of the hills..."

Q&A: "Wild Ones" Author Jon Mooallem

Every good story needs hope.

That’s what an editor once told me when I asked how to broach a somber and potentially depressing article I was working on. "Find the hope."

Dark green stories — inside baseball for environmental pieces that are serious, are scary, and can make you feel sad — sometimes only offer readers a sort of conscious-tithing solace in having taken the effort to read them. Infusing a little hope can make hard truths go down easier. 

Journalist Jon Mooallem, 34, doesn’t manufacture a bright side; his lovely, lucid prose reveals that perhaps grasping for a silver lining is intrinsic to being human. Mooallem’s debut book, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, came out this May. It's the latest and longest in Mooallem’s oeuvre of wildlife reportage that’s revelatory about the human condition. See “Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?” in the New York Times Magazine and “The Last Buffalo Hunt” in Slate for a sense. 

Wild Ones could have been very dark green. Mooallem investigates the plights of the polar bear, the Lange’s metalmark butterfly, and the whooping crane — all endangered — as well as the humans working to save them. Many anecdotes are heartbreaking. A pilot with the whooping crane conservation group Operation Migration admits he has wished he didn’t have his daughter, disillusionment with the world's trajectory weighing on him.

Mooallem’s daughter Isla, around age 2 as he worked on the book, actually inspired her dad's interest in the state of the animals printed all over her pajamas. She often accompanied Mooallem during his reporting, swaddled or strapped to him on buggy rides to spot polar bears in Alaska or hikes to net butterflies in a sand dune. Her presence sweetens and saddens a bleak portrait of our scrambling to preserve what's left of nature.

“I don’t have a totally sunny outlook on these things,” Mooallem told me during a recent interview. “As a parent, I worry about what the world’s gonna be like. That’s why I started this book. I actually thought it would be really kinda cool and important. I’d like my daughter to see some of these species that may not be around.”

Meet America's 5 Newest National Monuments

President Obama signed five more places into the sacrosanct fold of national land-hood on Monday under the nearly 107-year-old Antiquities Act.

Make room for the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, the Río Grande del Norte National Monument, the San Juan Islands National Monument, the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument, and the First State National Monument on your bucket list.

First we'll tell you a little bit about the path to protection for national monuments, then we'll show you why you should visit these five new destinations. 

The Waiting Game

The Antiquities Act lets the president make national monuments of public lands with "historic or scientific" interest, and fast.

While Congress can establish national monuments, too, fast is unlikely — which is just what Antiquities is for, according to Meghan Kissell, campaign communications director for the nonprofit Conservation Lands Foundation.

See: the Grand Canyon.

"There were tremendous fights for years about what to do with that area," Kissell said. "By the time it was designated as a national monument, there had been bills in congress for a dozen year or so. There were a lot of people arguing about what the value of it was."

President Theodore Roosevelt secured the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908 (two days after Muir Woods). It became a national park in 1919 via Congress, which alone has authority to establish national parks.

Q&A: Wildlife Photographer Suzi Eszterhas

Wildlife photographer Suzi Eszterhas spends months in far-flung locations, documenting the family life of endangered animals. Her children’s book series, Eye on the Wild (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books) inspired a Sierra magazine slideshow. Sierra recently chatted with the California-based photographer about how long it takes to get a great photograph of a cheetah hunt, the mountain gorilla’s chances of survival, and how it feels to be slapped by a chimp.  

Do you ever get tired of looking at adorable baby animals?

I don’t. I get tired of some of the travel and some of the physical strain, depending on where I’m working, or the mental [strain]. But I don’t get tired or bored of the wildlife itself. For example, I spent five and a half months at a jackal den. Every day, all day, I sat there in front of the den, from sunrise to sunset. And for most people, five and a half months of that seems quite boring, but for me—of course there’s down time and there’s slow times—but I never felt unhappy or miserably bored. Sure, there were times when it was like, “OK guys, wake up,” but I never felt like, “Oh my god, I need to end this project because I’m bored.”

What’s the most difficult animal to photograph?

I think chimpanzees, by far, have been my most difficult, but they’re not in this series [Eye on the Wild]. So out of this series, I would say probably cheetahs, because the behavior that I captured is not easy to get. For instance, the hunting shot of the mom—the sprint after the gazelle—it took 17 days to get that photo, and it was like 17 days of nothing. There are a lot of failed hunts. And then sometimes they run the gazelle in an area where you can’t follow: a rocky area or a super-bushy area. Other times they run them in a different direction than you think they’re going to run them. For me, gorillas are the easiest by far, because they’re such incredible photo subjects. And we have an amazing opportunity to sit with these animals because of what researchers have done in habituating them.

From Whitney to Yosemite: Hiking the JMT

Suzanne Roberts, avid hiker and author of Almost Somewhere: 28-Days on the John Muir Trail (University of Nebraska Press, September 2012), takes a moment to dish on terrible trail meals, ghosts, and a woman’s perspective on hiking.

Looking back, if you could add any one creature comfort to “Big Heiny” (Suzanne’s backpack) for that hike on the JMT what would it be and why?

Nothing. I would have taken things out of Big Heiny—she was way too heavy as it was.

Out of all the people you met along the trail, who sticks out in your mind the most to this day?

The woman I called “the ghost of Muir Pass” in the book. Even if she didn’t seemingly disappear into nowhere overland, which she did, I would have still been inspired by her. She was a woman in her 70s, hiking alone, overland with a map and compass.