After reading the book I followed the Freakonomics Blog for a while, though as time progressed the authors’ unconventional wisdom began to look more and more like conventional right-wing claptrap, so I moved on. Flash forward to this year, and the release of Levitt and Dubner’s new book. SuperFreakonomics has a key chapter on Climate Change titled, “Global Cooling: What Do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo Have in Common?”, which gives you a good sense of where their unconventional wisdom has apparently led them (more…)

Born To Run

Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run arrived on my desk with impeccable timing. I’d just finished a mammoth 19-hour climb and ski of California’s Mount Tyndall, and while nursing my wounds I began asking hard questions about my physical limits.

If your experience is anything like mine, you’ve been conditioned over your entire life to believe that human beings were not meant to run.

Give us tools, weapons, or wheels—anything but our own two feet. We are the slowest, most awkward creatures in nature, conventional wisdom goes, and while a very few of us engage in marathons or ‘ultra’ marathons, such refusals to accept one’s destiny inevitably end in injury (more…)

Mammoth Lakes climber/photographer Dan Mingori and Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center co-founder Nate Greenberg have released a new backcountry skiing guidebook, Backcountry Skiing California’s Eastern Sierra.

Backcountry Skiing limits its coverage to the Mammoth and surrounding regions, but oh what coverage it is! The book joins Paul Richins Jr.’s 50 Classic Backcountry Ski Summits and John Moynier’s Backcountry Skiing in the High Sierra as one of three essential guidebooks for the Sierra ski mountaineer. Don’t miss it.

High Crimes documents the shocking but very real emergence of theft as yet another deadly threat climbers must face on 8000 meter peaks. You’ve probably heard about the ‘borrowing’ of oxygen bottles on Everest and similar tales, but the depth of the crime on Everest and other big peaks (including K2!) is truly astonishing.

Kodas notes numerous incidents in which climbers left high camps (ie, the last camp before summit) for marathon summit pushes only to return and find their tents ransacked, with critical supplies, such as fuel, clothing, and even sleeping bags gone. Obviously, such theft is life-threatening for exhausted, exposed climbers at extreme altitude with the sun going down.

The author makes the point that in many of these cases, it would be patently evident to the thieves that their actions could directly lead to the deaths of other climbers. If you watch someone take off for the summit, and then raid his tent, what you are doing is tantamount to murder.

If that sounds like an overstatement, consider the situation Don Bowie found himself in while trying for a solo summit of the Karakorum’s Broad Peak (more…)

The depth of coverage in Secor’s book is truly astonishing. According to the cover, The High Sierra describes “every known route” on over 570 Sierra Peaks. This has become the climber’s bible for Sierra afficianados. If you love to hike or climb in the Sierra, you really owe it to yourself to pick up a copy—your bookshelf is naked without it.