Mountain Men

London: Boxtree. Very Good/Very Good. 2001. First Edition. Hard Cover. Lge 8vo 0752218905 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Black cloth with bright gilt titling on spine. Ownership stamp on ffep.Colour & b/w Illustrations / Photographs , Map. 208 pages clean and tight. Imagine a world without Gore-Tex and Imax, where hobnail boots and tweed were the order of the day and intrepid photographers dragged huge panoramic cameras to the tips of rocky peaks. Imagine a time when the Swiss Alps seemed as remote as the Himalayas, and the Himalayas as remote as the moon. MOUNTAIN MEN tells the story of the pioneer climbers who explored and conquered the high mountains of the world. They were fanatical, obsessive, eccentric; risk and hardship were a small price to pay to get their names onto the maps and into the history books. Edward Whymper's relentless siege of the Matterhorn ended in bitter controversy when four of his companions plunged to their deaths, barely an hour after leaving the summit. In gold-rush Alaska there were many disputed claims to. the first conquest of Mt McKinley, the highest peak on the continent. But who was actually the first to reach its summit? Was it a Brooklyn doctor, a gold prospector, or the Episcopal Archdeacon of the Yukon? Locals still insist that the honour belongs to three miners who climbed it to win a bet, armed with home-made crampons and bags of doughnuts and dragging a fourteen-foot flagpole behind them. For a hundred years mountaineers from around the world have fallen victim to the fatal attraction of K2. An Italian aristocrat, an American millionaire and an English Satanist were among the first to reach its slopes. They found a place of disappointment and madness; one of them never returned. With access to unique archive materials and interviews with some of the world's greatest climbers, MOUNTAIN MEN is a series of unforgettable tales from the history of mountaineering. .