A View from the Ridge: Mountaineering Anecdotes in Scotland and America

Fed up of anaemic books about mountains, about being poor and happy and mystical fulfilment? Then this is the book for you, tearing the veil from the culture clashes and conflicts on the hills. What happens if you go in search of the American Dream in Colorado, or Celtic Twilight in the Cuillins? And how do the mountains alter the pattern of male/female sexual behaviour? This book presents a different approach, but one that aims to answer just why the mountains exert such fascination over so many people.

Originally from Aberdeen, Ian Mitchell has lived in Glasgow for the past thirty years. Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature for A View from the Ridge, historian Ian R. Mitchell gave up teaching to write full time. Ian's background in historical research, coupled with indepth personal experience of East Berlin in the 1980s, allows him to create an authentic historical novel. His previous exercise in historical fiction, Mountain Outlaw, was described by the renowned historian E J Hobsbawm as 'fascinating...a fine piece of work...more support for my ideas on social banditry.'

DAVE BROWN started climbing in 1960, spending much of his formative years in the Trossachs, the Arrochar Alps and Glencoe, where he met some of the great characters of the early climbing scene. He worked for the Colorado Outward Bound School as a senior instructor and lator with the British Columbia Outward School. As well as articles in the climbing press, Dave has also co-authored (with Ian) the 1991 Boardman-Tasker Prize winning book of climbing tales, A View from the Ridge, recently re-published by Luath Press. IAN R. MITCHELL started climbing and walking in the cairngorms in the 1960s. He has an extensive knowledge of the Scottish mountains and has also scaled peaks in Iceland, Norway, the Pyrenees, Morocco and the Austrian Alps. Ian also broke free from a career in Further Education to pursue his dream of writing full-time. He is the author of eight books on mountain themes including Scotland's Mountains Before The Mountaineers (1998), for which he won the Outdoor Writer's Guild Award for Excellence, and On the Trail of Queen Victoria in the Highlands (2000), both published by Luath Press.