Beautiful, remote and dangerous – for generations we have looked to the mountains in awe...
There are the devout Incan priests who, scaling the Andes’ icy slopes to pay tribute to each mountain’s ‘Great Lord’, travelled higher than any European would for centuries. The Gurkha riflemen who joined their commander Charles Granville Bruce in canvassing the Karakoram, admiring the distant summits of Broad Peak and K2 with a gleeful anticipation. The tweed-clad mountaineers who first who made the first serious assaults on Everest, hauling yards upon yards of battered rope, fingers grappling with carabiners, frozen half-shut in the cold.
Tracing the world altitude record from the ashy slopes of the sacred volcano Llullaillaco to the icy crags and crevasses of the Karakoram, Daniel Light takes a panoramic journey through the storied history of mountaineering before Everest. Joining a cast of colourful characters, The White Ladder offers an ode to mountains’ capacity to enthral, and the fundamental human drive to climb higher and higher.
Review
‘A beautifully written and sure-footed history of mountaineering “before Everest”, full of wonderful stories and spanning continents and centuries. A splendid debut.’ -Sir Ranulph Fiennes
'Hugely entertaining... The tone is brisk, chummy and companionable: the reader feels safe on the end of Light’s rope... Light is above all a storyteller, and anyone who loves mountains will enjoy this book , especially if they prefer to experience the rasp of thin air from a base-camp armchair.' - Spectator
‘Wonderful… a massive story with an enormous cast of characters, among them some of the most compelling figures of mountaineering history.’ -Wade Davis, author of Into the Silence
'Why did mountaineers of old risk life and limb to break new ground and scale new summits? In his thrilling
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