Mountain Heroes Portraits of Adventure

by Lewis-Jones, Huw

• ISBN13: 9780762779918
• ISBN10: 0762779918
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-11-22
• Publisher: FalconGuides

Summary

Come face to face with those who have spent their lives at altitude: explorers and mapmakers, pioneering travelers and film-makers, ice climbers and extreme skiers, environmentalists and anthropologists, geologists and glaciologists, and the peoples of the mountains themselves. The weathered faces of black-and-white portraiture from the world's leading collections are displayed alongside modern photographs by a group of leading adventure photographers such as Ace Kvale and Martin Hartley. Among those featured are Sir George Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, George Mallory, Fritz Wiessner, Kurt Diemberger, Bill Briggs, Stein Eriksen, Reinhold Messner, John Long, Maurice Herzog, Richard Bass, Joe Simpson, Alain Robert, Ingemar Stenmark, Deborah Comagnoni and Terje Haakonsen..

Author Biography

Huw Lewis-Jones is a historian and former Curator of Art at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Polar Portraits and Ocean Portraits. Formerly Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, and Curator of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, London. Lewis-Jones is also a consultant a media and broadcasting consultant and an expert in maritime and polar exploration history

Table of Contents

FACING THE SUMMIT FOREWORD: Sir Chris Bonington MOUNTAINS IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD COMMENTARY: Jack Ives and Bruno Messerli PHOTOGRAPHY THEN ESSAY: Huw Lewis-Jones MOUNTAIN PORTRAITS GALLERY: Huw Lewis-Jones and Colin Wells PHOTOGRAPHY NOW DISCUSSION: Huw Lewis-Jones with Gordon Wiltsie, Glen Denny and Cory Richards IN WILD PLACES COMMENTARY: Stephen Venables AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING AFTERWORD: Doug Scott FURTHER READING 282 INDEX 285

Excerpts

Daunting rock pinnacles, knife-edged arêtes, cascading glaciers, and explosive avalanches of blinding snow – and a team of grim-faced climbers risking everything in their arduous upward press to bag another summit – this is perhaps the conventional image conjured up by the wordmountains. It is a vignette that might recall upper sections of the Alps, the Andes, or the Himalaya. But these lofty regions represent only a small fraction of our total mountain terrain. Sadly, images of the heroic age are now too often supplanted by the reality of warfare in the mountains, abused natural resources, impoverishment of mountain peoples, and the environmental and economic disruption caused by climate change.

Mountains are found on every continent, from the equator to as close to the poles as land exists. As a single great ecosystem, they encompass the most extensive known array of landforms, climates, flora, and fauna, as well as human cultures. From a geological point of view they comprise the most complex and dynamic of the Earth’s underlying structures that are still in the process of formation as the numerous volcanoes and frequent earthquakes testify.

No surprise then, that it is hard to limit the mountains to simple definition. Ask the people of northern England and Wales – perhaps shepherds at high pasture in the Lake District, or farmers at work in the shadow of Snowdonia’s imposing crags – and they would all affirm that they live among mountains, yet altitudes here barely exceed a thousand metres. Peasants of southern Peru or Tibetan nomads likewise would be classed as mountain people; their local surroundings exceed 4,000 meters and yet may be as flat as the prairies of central Canada. The well known German mountain geographer of the twentieth century, Carl Troll, described the highest parts of equatorial Indonesia, for example, as ‘high mountains without a high-mountain landscape’ – unlike the remote, challenging, conventionally ‘mountainous’Hochgebirgeof popular imagination. It’s clear that the diversity of the mountain world defies easy categorization.