A Georgetown University physics professor describes the rigidly scheduled and isolated existence he led before embarking on a life-risking effort to climb the world's highest mountains and surf every ocean.

Despite attempts by his friends, loved ones and his new girlfriend to dissuade him from this dangerous feat, Alex Honnold, the world's most accomplished free soloist climber, prepares mentally and physically for his most daring adventure to date: scaling the 3200-foot El Capitan in Yosemite without a rope or safety gear. If he succeeds, it will mark the largest wall he, or anyone else, for that matter, has ascended without any kind of equipment.

"New Hampshire's Mt. Moosilauke, westernmost of the White Mountain peaks, offers all-encompassing views of the North Country. but for those who know where to look, it also provides glimpses of a forgotten past. Fragments of that past have been explored here in eight short stories; among them cutting the first trail (1840), opening the summit's Prospect House (1860), the gold craze (1875), mountain poet Lucy Larcom (1892), skiing Hell's Highway (1942)....

"Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman...