book reviews
Throughout the years I’ve written dozens of editorial reviews of books, films, venues, events—many of which have been lost to the Internet sands of time (i.e no longer online). However some survive to this day, including these reviews from Amazon, Powder, and The Ski Journal.
Starlight and Storm: The Conquest of the Great North Faces of the Alps (Modern Library Exploration)
By Gaston Rebuffat
(Official Amazon.com review)
From the 1920s to the 1950s, the race was on in Europe to score first ascents of the most formidable routes in the Alps and Dolomites. Buoyed by the advent of artificial climbing techniques (primarily the use of pitons), teams from France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Poland scaled the north faces of the Eiger, the Drus, the Matterhorn, the Grandes Jorasses, and other hallowed peaks, often pooling resources to obtain previously unimaginable success (and often tragedy), while the world below was ravaged by two brutal world wars. Noted French climbing guide Gaston Rébuffat lived at the center of this crucial era in mountaineering history. Starlight and Storm, first published in French in 1954 as Étoiles et Tempêtes, is his personal account of a rugged and glorious time before Gore-Tex, when men, soaked and chilled to the bone, sang to keep each other from falling asleep (forever) during exposed bivouacs in sub-zero degree snowstorms. Rébuffat's love of the climber's life is evident with each turn of the page. Where contemporary authors like Jon Krakauer, who provides this reissue's foreword, describe climbing in terms of nightmares and inner struggles, Rébuffat moves from one harrowing ascent to the next with uncommon gaiety and charm. "We have the instinct for it, the love of rocks and the necessary skill," he writes of time spent on the Drus, "so that we can climb without being worried by technical problems. Thus the whole climb was pure joy, for, while superficially watching over the actual ascent, the spirit had leisure to wander happily." The mysterious joy and lure of traversing earth's high places are expressed with a boyish innocence lost on much of today's climbing culture, making Starlight and Storm an enjoyable read, probably unlike any mountaineering journal you have ever encountered. --Kristopher Kaiyala
On Celtic Tides: One Man’s Journey Around Ireland by Sea Kayak
By Chris Duff
(Official Amazon.com review)
"Every time I thought I had reached the peak, that the passion for the journey must certainly begin to wane, I would stumble on another experience that pulled me onward," writes Chris Duff, recounting his solo circumnavigation of Ireland by sea kayak in the summer of 1996. "Stroke by stroke, four miles an hour, Ireland was filling me with its life blood." Beginning and ending in Dublin, Duff paddled 1,200 miles over the course of three months. Sometimes he piloted his frail craft through waters too tumultuous even for hardy local fisherman; other times he sought refuge in sixth-century monastic ruins on coastal islands or waited out storms for days on end in his tent. In this sense, Duff's journey is a study in contrasting worlds: land and sea; past and present; solitude and society. The story's suspense comes not from a questionable outcome but in the surprise of daily encounters. Who or what relic of the past will the author stumble upon next? Ultimately it is Duff's openness to ancient and elemental forces, expressed in starkly honest prose, that propels his narrative through the churning waters of Irish history and landscape. But this is also the story of a sea kayaker at the top of his game, dealing with nature's harsh blows and quiet caresses. --Kristopher Kaiyala
The Powder Road
By Stephan Drake
(From Powder Magazine)
When Stephan Drake randomly bumped into an old skiing buddy from Alaska, he had no idea he’d soon be living a showerless existence in an aging truck camper north of the 49th parallel. Sometimes that’s where big dreams get you.
Enticed by his friend’s tales of easy sled access to huge, lonely Alaskan peaks, Drake set out to convince three other friends to drop everything and hit the highway for the ultimate road trip—from Boulder, Colorado to Valdez, Alaska—with little more than ski gear and four-stroke snowmobiles. Their collective goal: to search for “untouched mountains to ski while traveling in a self-sufficient style.”
The resulting journey is handsomely documented in The Powder Road (Stellar Transmedia, $49.95 hardcover/$29.95 paperback, www.powderroad.com), a new coffee-table book authored by Drake that features the standout photography of Sweden’s Oskar Enander and Oregon’s Mark Smith. (Oregonian Gavin Cummings rounded out the group.)
Fraught with mechanical failures, physical setbacks, über-finicky weather, and a mink with a bad stomach, Drake’s trip of a lifetime often feels more like an endless sojourn to the hardware store. While the group is eventually rewarded with a few kick-ass days of backcountry skiing, the story is as much about the people they meet along the way as the mountains they hope to conquer.
The Powder Road is somewhat of a trailblazer in ski media; few books of this caliber exist in a sports genre ripe for exploitation. Even fewer capture the essence of post-millennium hardcore ski travel as this tome does. The focus is clearly on the present; Drake eschews ski history and geographical reflection for action. What matters most is getting to the next powder fix, even if the trucks and sleds don’t want to.
As with most coffee-table books, the photographs do the heavy lifting. Enander’s action shots range from standard ski porn to unconventional juxtapositions such as Drake skiing a snow-covered pile of asbestos tailings near an abandoned mining shed. Smith’s medium-format camera is reserved primarily for artistically candid black-and-white portraits and landscapes, expertly brimming with mood and reflection.
Bookworms may pine for a bolder, longer narrative; the text simply ends too abruptly with each chapter. And while the clean, caption-free layout is appreciated, it’s toilsome trying to match photos to their credits listed at the back of the book. Also the jumbled order of images detracts from the documentary nature of the project. One gets the feeling that since the best skiing occurred at the end of the trip, it was decided to spread the wealth to the initial chapters.
However, these are rather minor complaints in light of the book’s elegant presentation and overall strong statement, which is that the powder road is there for the taking—if you don’t mind a few breakdowns along the
way. --Kristopher Kaiyala
Two Planks and a Passion
By Roland Huntford
(From The Ski Journal)
The ski is older than the wheel. That’s the bold takeaway of Roland Huntford’s epic timeline of skiing from Cro-Magnon times to the present, a period that spans some 20,000 years. (By comparison, the first known wheel rolled into town around 3,500 BC. Hot dog carts soon followed.)
Two Planks and a Passion clocks in at more than 400 pages, positioning it among the elite works of ski history and a scholarly work at that. Author Huntford is a Senior Member of Wolfson College at Cambridge, and a former fellow at Oxford. More important to you is that he is a lifelong skier who has made the sport’s rich history a major part of his life’s work.
The book opens in 1911 when Roald Amundsen raises the Norwegian flag at the South Pole and declares simply that the event “was a good day for us skiers.” From there, Huntford decodes the cave drawings, written sources, and preserved relics from Siberia, the Scandinavian peninsula, Finland (note to the unaware: Finland is technically not part of Scandinavia; any separation you can place between Finland and Sweden, for example, will please Finns to no end, as Conan O’Brien once learned), China, and beyond.
And not only do we perceive the origins of skiing and anecdotes about its most influential skiers, we learn about skis themselves. Through technical prose and historical sketches and photographs, the evolution of all kinds of alpine gear made from wood, leather, skins, cables, plates, and high-tech resins is gracefully defined. What’s left is a floating feeling that skiing has shaped mankind’s history in surprising ways, nearly as much as those four round things attached to the base of your car. --Kristopher Kaiyala