The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer: 15-11

Outside Magazine January 2003

The Outside Adventure Canon
The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer: 15-11

By Brad Wieners & The Editors


	(Kim Kurian)

15. A SHORT WALK IN THE HINDU KUSH
Eric Newby
(1958)

"NEWBY TO FRIEND: I'm bored. Let's drive to Afghanistan and climb some previously unvisited peaks in the Hindu Kush.

"Friend to Newby: Good idea, but we don't know how to climb mountains.

"Newby to Friend: Not a problem. We'll go to Wales for the weekend and learn how."

That's how Tony Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet and the proud U.S. publisher of A Short Walk, summarizes this droll classic, the original buddy flick of Extreme Lit. Without Newby, there might never have been a Bryson, an O'Hanlon, or a Cahill. He's the backpacker without a cause, the sort who gives himself over to the journey—a quite ambitious trek through Afghanistan's rugged Nuristan region—certain that only by blundering forward can the purpose of the excursion be revealed. Newby reminds us that even a valid passport is inessential to traveling. All you really need is to be game.

14. ARCTIC DREAMS
Barry Lopez
(1986)

THANKS TO FELLOW badass Edward Hoagland's glowing New York Times review, critics couldn't seem to refer to Arctic Dreams without the word "jubilant," which, from a certain perspective, is curious. After all, close encounters with polar bears, killer whales, and walruses, while thrilling, aren't necessarily joyful, and tend to make the author, by his own confession, rather anxious.

"It is not all benign and ethereal at the ice edge," Lopez writes. "You cannot—I cannot—lose completely the sense of how far from land this is. I am wary of walrus....A friend of mine was once standing with an Eskimo friend at an ice edge when the man cautioned him to step back. They retreated 15 to 20 feet. Less than a minute later, the walrus surfaced in an explosion of water where they had been standing."

Lopez may feel inexperienced, but it's hard to imagine a better interpreter of the far north. His descriptions of the Arctic Ocean shine: "A geometry of lightning-bolt-shaped leads, of long black ponds, jagged rills, and ridges of debris that meander like eskers stretches as far as light and the atmosphere let you see." And come to think of it, though Arctic Dreams involves a great deal of solitude and icebergs and cold, jubilant is the word. Lopez leaves us amazed by the natural world, respectful of our place in it, and elated at its dazzling variety.

13. IN PATAGONIA
Bruce Chatwin
(1977)

WE KNOW WHAT you're thinking: Idiots, it's fiction! But the claims that Chatwin lied to fashion the episodes and characters that make up this exquisite little book turn out to be greater exaggerations than Chatwin's own. Sure, he got things out of order, mangled some Spanish, and dished up a few now-classic Chatwinian embellishments (Se-ora Eberhard's run-of-the-mill steel chair becoming a Mies van der Rohe, for one). But In Patagonia is at heart a personal quest—to find the origins of boyhood fascination, "a piece of brontosaurus" supposedly recovered from a thawed glacier in Punta Arenas by Chatwin's seafaring cousin. At first Chatwin's prose seems uniform—like Hemingway, only boring. But his subtle sentences sneak up on you, and their economy allows him to surprise, leaving an indelible impression. Take Walter Rauff, exiled Nazi and inventor of the lethal Mobile Gas Truck: "There is a man in Punta Arenas, dreams pine forests, hums Lieder, wakes each morning and sees the black strait. He drives to a factory that smells of sea. All about him are scarlet crabs, crawling, then steaming. He hears the shells crack and the claws breaking, sees the sweet white flesh packed firm in metal cans....Does he remember that other smell, of burning?" Chatwin's haunting images stay with you, reminding you that this is one messed-up, astonishing world.



	(Kim Kurian)

12. THE MOUNTAINS OF MY LIFE
Walter Bonatti
(2001)

BONATTI'S MEMOIRS—finally published in the United States just two years ago—take pride of place here over a number of towering works on mountaineering because (a) Bonatti was a god, a poetic soloist whose career included a controversial role in the first ascent of K2, and (b) he proves he can write as gracefully about a sunrise over the Alps as about an epic first ascent: "The horizon showed up sharply, enchanted peaks plucked clean by the claws of a freezing and frenzied wind," Bonatti says of his 1962 ascent of the Alps' Pilier d'Angle. "When I looked out I saw the most beautiful spectacle one can encounter at dawn on the peak of Mont Blanc: on the one hand the Italian flank flooded with warm and blazing light, on the other the Savoie still immersed in night."

Take nothing away from Gaston Rebuffat's 1954 Starlight and Storm, the Frenchman's spare and lovely tract that made the case for climbing as a communion with, rather than siege upon, mountains. And we know as well as anyone that Maurice Herzog's canonical 1953 Annapurna was the Into Thin Air of its day, inspiring Ed Viesturs and countless other next-generation alpinists to take up climbing. But in returning to Annapurna we found we'd rather skip Herzog's press-release nationalism and hang out with Bonatti.



	(Kim Kurian)

11. TOUCHING THE VOID
Joe Simpson
(1988)

AS MOUNTAINEERING survival stories go, this is the destroyer of its class: an incredible climbing epic in the hands of a pitch-perfect writer. The book starts out as a journal about the solace (and menace) of going high and remote (Peru's 21,000-foot Siula Grande) but soon becomes something else entirely. On the descent from the 21,000-foot summit, the author, suffering from a broken leg and damaged ribs from a previous accident, falls into a crevasse. His partner, Simon Yates, presuming him a goner and unable to keep Simpson's dead weight from pulling him off the mountain, does the unthinkable: He cuts the rope. Alone in a canyon of ice, Simpson veers from stubborn determination to screaming anger and despair: "There was no one to hear," he writes, "but the looming empty chamber behind me made me feel inhibited, as if it were some disapproving silent witness to my weakness."

The book's device of interspersing the devastated Yates's thoughts in italics makes for amazing reading, and the pair's reconciliation three days later at base camp, after Simpson has dragged himself down the scree, is a scene—and theme—that rises far above the mountaineering genre. Present the ethics of this book to someone who's never climbed a mountain and you could still end up talking about it all night.