“Suddenly I had the sensation that the mountain was moving. My brain quickly corrected that impression, telling me that no, the mountain was not moving. Instead, a block of rock the size of a refrigerator was toppling off. And I was clinging to it.”
As detailed on page 293 of this book, Ben might have had his remarkable career nipped in the bud while he was climbing Mt. Hungabee in 1972. Would someone else have come along to write Handbook of the Canadian Rockies or Raven’s End? Not likely. Ben’s memoir tells the story of how a skinny, myopic and cowardly kid grew into the mountaineer who wrote those classics and received the Banff Centre’s coveted Summit of Excellence award in 2014.
There’s a lot more to this memoir than just biography. Interleaved with the personal history are 36 readings from Ben’s favorite written work. These essays, magazine articles, stories and book excerpts will have you chuckling in some places, touched in others. All this plus hundreds of color illustrations.
And if you’re wondering what “orogenous” means, here’s a hint: don’t confuse it with “erogenous.”
655 pages, soft-cover, full color, index
Published by Corax Press, 2017
Distributed by Alpine Book Peddlers
ISBN 978-0-9692631-4-2, Cdn $39.95
For post-release corrections, click here.
To hear Ben sing the songs mentioned in the book, click here and scroll down to Music.