Rick Ridgeway

A life worth living is lived at the edges where it is wild At the beginning of his memoir Life Lived Wild, Adventures at the Edge of the Map, Rick Ridgeway tells us that if you add up all his many expeditions, he’s spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents: “And most of that in small tents pitched in the world’s most remote regions.” It’s not a boast so much as an explanation. Whether at elevation or raising a family back at sea level, those years taught him, he writes, “to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence.” He leaves it to his readers, though, to do the final sort of which is which. Some of his travels made, and remain, news: the first American ascent of K2; the first direct coast-to-coast traverse of Borneo; the first crossing on foot of a 300-mile corner of Tibet so remote no outsider had ever seen it. Big as these trips were, Rick keeps an eye out for the quiet surprises, like the butterflies he encounters at 23,000 feet on K2 or the furtive silhouettes of wild-eared pheasants in Tibet. What really comes through best in Life Lived Wild, though, are his fellow travelers. There’s Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and Doug Tompkins, best known for cofounding The North Face but better remembered for his conservation throughout South America. Some companions don’t make the return journey. Rick treats them all with candor and straightforward tenderness. And through their commitments to protecting the wild places they shared, he discovers his own. A master storyteller, this long-awaited memoir is the book end to Ridgeway’s impressive list of publications, including Seven Summits (Grand Central Publishing, 1988), The Shadow of Kilmanjaro (Holt, 1999), and The Big Open (National Geographic, 2005).

In September 1978, Rick Ridgeway, Jim Wickwire, Lou Reichardt and John Roskelley stood on the summit of K2, the first Americans ever to achieve this victory. Under the leadership of Jim Whittaker, they and their teammates had spent 67 days on the mountain, nearly all of them above 18,000 feet, where the stresses of high-altitude living, of monotonous food, of confinement in tiny tents for day after day of frustrating storms had worn them down to the core. The Last Step is Rick Ridgeway's inside story of this extraordinary expedition. It's about the people who, battered by the mountain and their isolation, overcame their individual fears, desire, and disappointments to work together to get somebody - anybody - to the top of K2. It's about the glorious success the team achieved, and about the perilous bivouac Jim Wickwire spent just below the summit without food, oxygen or shelter in temperatures of minus 40F. A mountaineering classic reintroduced with a 32-page colour insert, as well as a new foreword by mountaineer and Patagonian founder Yvon Chouinard,

From the peak of a mountain or the barrel of a wave, Patagonia has collected some of the most spectacular sports imagery in history. Relive the achievements captured in Patagonia's history, as well as the joie de vivre fostered by nurturing a relationship with the great outdoors. Unique for a business enterprise, Patagonia's catalog devotes fully half its space to nonselling editorial content -- to environmental and sport essays and above all to extraordinary photographs of wild places and active pursuits for which the company makes its clothes. Since 1980, Patagonia has invited customers and wilderness photographers to submit their best, most unexpected shots of life outdoors -- of alpine climbing, bouldering in the desert, skiing untracked bowls, surfing secret spots, ocean crossings, first kayak descents and travel in unfamiliar places. The photos have poured in ever since (current rate: 60,000 per year), some from the famous (John Russell, Galen Rowell), others from respected photographers (Corey Rich) who had their first work published in these pages. Jane Sievert and Jennifer Ridgeway, Patagonia's current and founding photo editor, respectively, have been calling -- and culling -- the shots for three decades. This is their compendium of the 100-plus most compelling photos Patagonia has published -- and a celebration of wilderness and outdoor-sport photography as an art and a practice.

This is a remarkable account of a thrilling journey on foot from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean. Rick Ridgeway, one of the world's foremost mountaineers and adventurers, offers us a rare view of East Africa as it is today, and how it once was before the incursion of European civilisation, before the balance of its primal wilderness was destroyed.

Two Undaunted Men Frank Wells was the head of a major motion picture studio. Dick Bass had made his fortune as an energy and resort entrepreneur. In middle age, both men left behind home, family, and successful careers to share an impossible dream. Seven Unconquered Summits The challenge: be the first to climb the highest mountain on each of seven continents, from McKinley to Kilimanjaro to Everest. The obstacles: many and merciless, from ice storms to illness to a measurement question that threatened to make their record-breaking expedition a sham. The prize: the sheer, exhilarating triumph of standing at the top of every continent on earth.