Upon That Mountain

Upon that Mountain is the first autobiography of the mountaineer and explorer Eric Shipton. In it, he describes all his pre-war climbing, including his Everest bids of the 1930s, and his second Karakoram survey in 1939, when he returned to Snow Lake to complete the mapping of the ranges flanking the Hispar and Choktoi glacier systems around the Ogre. Crossing great swathes of the Himalaya, the book, like so many of Shipton's works, is both entertaining and an important addition to the mountain literature genre. It captures an important period in mountaineering history - that just before the Second World War - an ends on an elegiac note as Shipton describes his last evening at the starkly-beautiful snow lake, before he returns to a 'civilisation' about to embark on a cataclysmic war.

Welcome back to Grace Valley, California, where the best things in life never change… Here in this peaceful community, folks look out for one another like family, though sometimes a little too well. In a town like this, it's hard to keep a secret—but Dr. June Hudson has managed to keep one heck of a humdinger.… Though visits from her secret lover, undercover DEA agent Jim Post, are as clandestine as they are passionate, somehow it fits with her demanding schedule as the town's doctor—a calling that requires an innate ability to exist on caffeine, sticky buns and nerves of steel. But how can a secret lover compete with a flesh-and-blood heartthrob from her past? June's old flame has just returned to town after twenty years—and he's divorced. June is seriously rattled. So when the town's most devoted wife takes buckshot to her husband and some human bones turn up in her aunt Myrna's backyard, she's almost happy for the distraction. Sooner or later, love will have its way in Grace Valley. It always does.

In this coming-of-age story, Timothy Wangusa tells the tale of a young boy struggling to reconcile between his Christian beliefs and his village's ancient traditions. Upon this Mountain captures a time of profound religious change and colonialism in rural Uganda. Mwambu, a schoolboy living in eastern Uganda, is certain that if heaven is anywhere, it must be at the highest peak of their village's mountain – so he is shocked to discover that his father has never tried to reach it. While on a quest to climb to the top, Mwambu finds himself on a journey of self-realisation, confronted with the contradictions of his childhood. As the values of Christianity collide with the traditions of his ancestors, the path to adulthood becomes increasingly treacherous...

The View Upon the Mountain chronicles the path of a young boy as he journeys up a legendary mountain, only to realize the value of all that he has left behind. Through his Great Pilgrimage, he explores what happens when you achieve a goal that was never really yours, wrestles with the paradox of making love stay, and ultimately learns how to climb back down. A tale of love, loss, forgiveness, and the acceptance of one's fate, The View Upon the Mountain holds up a mirror to our own deepest selves, daring us to look away. A spiritual successor to such classic tales as Hesse's Siddhartha and Coelho's The Alchemist, The View Upon the Mountain provides a refreshing draught of goodness to the world-weary reader, enriching our hearts so that we may bravely embark on our own Great Pilgrimages. Like life itself, it is a story that fluctuates between buoyancy and weight, earnestness and cynicism, examining our darker side no less rigorously than our light. Admirers of plot symmetry, archetypes, and Jungian theory will be especially taken by this well-constructed tale, diamond-like in its multifaceted perfection. By juxtaposing one character's rock bottom with another's greatest ecstasy, Laemmle accentuates both the nuance and irony of life itself. A coming-of-age story to be enjoyed by children and adults alike, The View Upon the Mountain weaves aspects of fantasy, romance, adventure, and myth to create a vibrantly original tale that nevertheless reads like our most familiar bedtime stories, so adroitly does it cut directly to the heart of what makes us human. An epic portrayal of the eternal struggle between man and self that refuses to offer an easy way out, the reader must identify as both hero and villain intertwined, that frustrating and confounding tangle of parts that can only be named: the individual. Stuck in a pit of his own digging, Laemmle wrote this novella as a rope with which to pull himself free. Whether needing to revive one's courage, accept one's imperfections, forgive oneself for past mistakes, or turn regret into a blessing, every human has something to gain by reading this novella, if only they are willing to shed the dead weight that has been holding them back.

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award Grand Prize Winner, Banff Mountain Book Festival "Forever on the Mountain grips even non-climbers with its harrowing scenes of thorny relationships tested by extraordinary circumstances." —Washington Post In 1967, seven young men, members of a twelve-man expedition led by twenty-four-year-old Joe Wilcox, were stranded at 20,000 feet on Alaska’s Mount McKinley in a vicious Arctic storm. Ten days passed while the storm raged, yet no rescue was mounted. All seven perished in what remains the most tragic expedition in American climbing history. Revisiting the event in the tradition of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, James M. Tabor uncovers elements of controversy, finger-pointing, and cover-up that make this disaster unlike any other.

Abandoning his life to honor his best friend's death, Wolf is stranded with three strangers in the mountain wilderness above Palm Springs and confronts a terrible choice in order to survive. By the author of Rush Home Road.

Tolan must rescue his sisters from the shades who slaughtered his family, but he cannot save them without first finding an honorable man upon the mountain. A story from The Unshut World. Part of The Ridge of Earth Collection. (~10000 words)

Levi Swanberg had no idea of the forces of darkness he was unleashing when he prepared to set off for Sweden to learn his grandfather's secret power, nor did he anticipate the radiance of light he would discover soon after. The inspiration of the Swanbergs' story is to be found in their Christ-like lives, their gusto for witnessing, and the impact they had on Cloe, their next-door neighbor, and are still having generations later.