Mountain Memoir

When Apostle Justin Garner Jr. was seventeen, God showed him something that changed his life forever. One evening at his father's church, he experienced an out-of-body event that took him to the streets of heaven itself. "What I can tell you is that I saw, felt, and smelled everything--this was no dream or vision--I was there," Justin says in his revelation. After this experience, God began to teach him how to use the spiritual gift of sight that he has been blessed with all his life.

Ben and Helen Harrison set aside their comfortable life in San Francisco and headed to Costa Rica to build a 38-foot sailboat. They had never built a boat before...Then they had to get it down a mountainside to the water, and from there sail to Key West, where they now live. It was a dauntless task and a challenge that put their marriage, their sanity, and their very lives on the line. A real-life adventure that will make you feel like you’ve got a berth on La Dulce Mujer Pintada, the Sweet Painted Lady.

The Last Blue Mountain is the heart-rending true story of the 1957 expedition to Mount Haramosh in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. With the summit beyond reach, four young climbers are about to return to camp. Their brief pause to enjoy the view and take photographs is interrupted by an avalanche which sweeps Bernard Jillott and John Emery hundreds of feet down the mountain into a snow basin. Rae Culbert and Tony Streather risk their own lives to rescue their friends, only to become stranded alongside them.

At eighteen, Paul Mountain pissed on his academic scholarship to the University of Minnesota and fled to Boulder, Colorado without money, family or prospects. In a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two other dudes, Paul's life was youth unbridled, impulsive, and without remorse. Within a year, Paul finds himself in a tiny cabin with his new girlfriend in a Rocky Mountain ghost town, convinced he can write his way out of poverty before buying his first legal drink. He was wrong. He was wrong about a great many things.

Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain is the remarkable story of a couple who came together during the Civil Rights Movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers’ rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity—with the strength of their love and commitment—to bring about meaningful change.

Against all odds, just barely one month after Jessica Buchanan had been rescued by SEAL Team Six by order of President Obama, she found out she was pregnant. After spending ninety-three days at the hands of Somali pirates who had demanded a 45-million-dollar ransom in exchange for her freedom, Jessica could not imagine a reality in which her traumatized mind and malnourished body could grow, birth, and nurture this new life. But he grew, and as a result, so did she; in her capacity to trust her heart, her therapist, and the wise plan of the Universe.

Because she refused to testify against her husband for actions she had already forgiven, Diana Weinberger, a former missionary, was incarcerated in an Idaho jail - a jail in which she had volunteered for a year in prison ministry! Diana's marriage was on the rocks. Years of wandering from her Christian roots had led this former YWAM missionary down paths she would later regret. She and her husband, both successful career professionals, divided their time between the world of work and the world of play - a world of bikers and wild parties.

Climbing over adversity. In her groundbreaking memoir, Another Step Up the Mountain, Dianette tells of her unique experiences climbing the Seven Summits, participating in adventure races (including four Eco-Challenges and ultra marathons around the world), as she raised three wonderful children. Trying to survive a tumultuous marriage, Dianette felt empty and unhappy. However, everything changed when she discovered adventure racing.

With Mountain Madness, Clinton Crockett Peters chronicles his travels and personal transformation from a West Texas evangelical to mountain guide to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village, nestled in central Japan's peaks, where he was the only foreigner in town. This essay collection profiles who he was before Japan, why he became obsessed with mountains, and his fallout from mountain obsession. Ultimately, the collection asks, how can landscape create and end identities?

On October 12, 2007, a young soldier is injured in Afghanistan. For the next two years, as he is moved from Bagram to Germany to Walter Reed to Palo Alto and finally home to Washington State, his family never leaves his side. And throughout those years, his father writes daily emails to family and friends, chronicling the journey from a dusty road in Afghanistan to the snowy summit of Mt. Rainier.

After decades as a long-haul trucker, Finn Murphy left the road and settled in Boulder County, Colorado. Before long he noticed that many of his neighbors were captivated by the prospect of vast riches in “the Hemp Space.” When hemp was legalized, after eighty years in federal exile, Colorado became the center of a hemp growing and processing boom. Figuring he’d harvest some of that easy money, Murphy bought a thirty-six-acre farm. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything…

Great-granddaughter’s creative historical non-fiction by narration interviews. An exploration of the life and true stories of Henrietta Cloud Brown and the Brown homestead of Telluride through the creative use of imagined interviews.

An intimate and evocative memoir of identity and the definition of family. At the age of 53, successful entrepreneur and faithful member of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), Rich Christiansen discovers his ancestors aren't who he thought they were and that he and his brothers are only partly related. This reveal—during what was supposed to be a fun, "let's see where our family is from" DNA test—shatters Rich's perception of himself, his identity, and his parents, and tests his faith. It launches him on a search for healing, acceptance, and self-love

On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form—the soldiers' own words—unedited and unabridged.

Now in his late seventies, Sir Ranulph Fiennes looks back on a lifetime of exploration, and draws powerful, inspiring lessons that we can all use when faced by the tribulations of everyday life. Having crossed both Polar ice caps on foot, climbed Everest and the Eiger, served in the SAS and circumnavigated the world along its polar axis—a 53,000-mile odyssey that has never been repeated—'Ran' looks back from the summit of an incredible life.

From the award-winning author of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon comes an intimate exploration of Alaska's northernmost mountain range with observations on Indigenous cultures, conservation, and intense cross-country travel, all shaped by respect for the land. Follow author Michael Engelhard through tussock-studded tundra for a remarkable tale of bear encounters and white-knuckled river moments, as well as poetic reflections on a vast, untamed landscape.

For the Love of It: The Mammoth Legacy of Roma and Dave McCoy traces the lives of Roma and Dave McCoy, visionary founders of world-renowned Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, from their singular childhoods through their eventual building of the first chairlift in the Eastern Sierra. The nostalgic narrative non-fiction book depicts California skiing in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s and illustrates the power of dedication, upbeat attitudes, and teamwork.

In Wilderness and Mountain Lore explores the stories and adventures of visiting a mountain wilderness retreat over a 50-year period with a group of friends. We nearly always were able to reserve the only two cabins for the second week of June. Domke Lake is located in the North Cascades wilderness area of North Central Washington State. There is no electricity or phone service of any kind along with little change other than what nature has wrought.

By the time life had finished hitting Rick Crandall from all sides, he was at the lowest point of his life, both personally and professionally. His wife, Pamela, makes an astute and life-changing suggestion: "Let's get a dog." So begins the story of Emme, a 200-pound Saint Bernard trapped in the body of a five-pound Australian terrier puppy. Soon, Emme and Rick hit the hiking trails around Aspen, Colorado. While she is groomed to be a show dog, it's soon obvious that her heart is in the hills and with Rick, who decides to add more challenging hikes to the mix.

Outdoor journalist James Edward Mills's book The Adventure Gap is a groundbreaking volume that is equal parts adventure story, history, and inspiration as it chronicles the first American all-Black summit attempt on Denali in 2013. Mills uses this momentous expedition as a jumping-off point to explore diversity in the outdoors, from Mathew Henson who stood at the North Pole in 1909 to contemporary adventurers such as polar explorer Barbara Hillary and rock climber Kai Lightner.