McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, To Build a Fire, An Odyssey of the North, The Wit of Porportuk. He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they...
March 1996, Outside magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Z...
In quella primavera del 1996, sulle pendici dell'Everest, non mancavano i sognatori: le credenziali di molti aspiranti scalatori della montagna erano esili quanto le mie, se non di più. Quando per cia...
In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber’s actions can affect the welfare of the entire team. The consequences of a poorly tied knot, a stumble, a dislodged roc...
I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.
I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security...
I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unkno...
He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others. . .
He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.
Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest s...
Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previ...
But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions.
But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind. Thomas F. Hornbein
Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artisti...
And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few more modest trusts: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to...
And because he happened to be the father of Debbie's own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself.
Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves. The bush is an unforgiving place, however,...
Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses. Taske,
«la felicidad sólo es real cuando es compartida.» Es
Ways—raw, boiled, baked, or fried—and enjoy it