Today’s post is the first of a series of posts about getting into the mountains, and how to do so safely. This post is going to highlight some incredibly useful books from a technical point of view.
The first 3 books are all Recommended reading on any mountain related courses you will do in the UK and are seen as three of the best books of their kind.
The green book, ‘hill walking’ covers many great topics such as getting around in the hills, how to move around the hills, how to navigate, including reading maps and using compasses and GPS systems, What to wear in the mountains in summer conditions, and also living in the mountains. As well as this it covers things like how to interpret the weather and forecast for what it should do for the day, how to manage groups of people on the hills, hazards and risk management and lastly how to deal with any incidents that could occur including some uses for a rope.
The red book, ‘Rock climbing’ covers more rock climbing type things, how to set up an anchor, how to abseil, how to lead climb, elements of scrambling including equipment and how to use it.
The blue book, ‘winter skills’ Covers those things not found in either of the other 2 books, elements of winter equipment such as crampons and different types of ice Axes, it describes the layer approach to clothing in much more detail, it also covers moving in the snow, ice climbing and different sorts of anchors for all sorts of eventualities.
The next book is Mountain-craft and Leadership by Eric Langmuir, again this is seen by many people as the best book for any mountain leader to own, this book covers everything on the mountain leader syllabus, such as being in charge of a group on the hills, monitoring the weather, risk assessments both pre made and improvised on the move, problem solving and again rope work in the hills.
‘The International Handbook of Technical Mountaineering’ pictured bellow, is an encyclopedia of mountaineering techniques covering an astonishingly wide variety of topics from the many different knots mountaineers should know, to crossing glaciers and travelling linked together by a rope. It also includes techniques for bigger mountains such as how to set up and use a fixed rope both in ascent and descent and also how to set up more varied things such as a Tyrolean traverse, a way of spanning a rope across a gorge or canyon etc to get from one side to the other.
‘Mountaineering the freedom of the hills’ and ‘Mountaineering’ are the definitive guides and are seen by many people with a mountaineering background as the bibles of mountaineering. They just like the technical mountaineering book mentioned above covers a wide variety of topics and skills however do so in a lot more detail. ‘Mountaineering’ is split into sections such as walking, rock climbing, winter mountaineering and Alpine techniques.
All in all these books mentioned are the best mountaineering books I have read, all are good at their own thing, my most used books from a mountaineering and walking perspective are the freedom of the hills and Technical mountaineering. These books, however good are not in any way a replacement for proper instruction or training.
Cheers guys, happy reading…
Burf
Matts Mountaineering 