From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in
the Yukon's Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had
not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent excursion across the
Harding Icefield conceived under the influence of rain and whiskey,
David Stevenson chronicles several decades of a life unified by a
preoccupation with climbing. Reflective and literary, and also
entertaining and funny, his accounts move across the great climbing
locations of the western United States, with forays into the spires of
the Alps, and slip freely in time from the author's childhood, when he
could not wait to head west, to his adulthood, with a wife and two sons,
in which he still feels compelled by a longing to be on the heights.