Introduction to GPS: The Global Positioning System, Second Edition

This new edition of Summits & Icefields 2: Alpine Ski Tours in the Columbia Mountains continues RMB’s tradition of offering snow enthusiasts updated editions of our bestselling guidebooks. Researched and written by legendary alpinist Chic Scott, with the assistance of certified mountain guide Mark Klassen, this guidebook—along with its companion volume Summits & Icefields 1: Alpine Ski Tours in the Canadian Rockies (RMB, 2011)—will continue to be the bibles for ski mountaineers looking to experience the winter grandeur of western Canada’s mountain ranges.

Completely revised and updated, this new edition will feature both classic and new tours, along with information on a variety of locations that has either been greatly expanded or freshly redone, including the ever-popular sections on Rogers Pass and the Bugaboos to Rogers Pass Traverse. With stunning, full-colour photos throughout and featuring digitally shaded maps prepared from satellite imagery, these new editions will set a unique standard for ski guidebooks in North America.

“Well-written and fascinating . . . this is the kind of book you want everyone to read.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Brilliant, funny, evocative. Made me want to ski now. Hands down the best ski-travel book ever written. But then, what else would you expect from the master of ski travel?" -- Jake Bogoch, former editor of SKIER

A fun and informative look at the global ski revolution from one of its long-time devotees.

Writer, adventurer, and ski hound Leslie Anthony has spent his life on two planks, racing down hills, searching for the next perfect ride. His own discovery of skiing occurred just as Alaska was becoming the ski world's Next Big Thing. In the late eighties and early nineties, ski enthusiasts, powder snow, and vast tracts of steep terrain came together, captured on film and beamed to audiences around the world. The result was a freeskiing revolution.

In White Planet, Anthony traces an arc through much of skiing's global diaspora over the past thirty years, observing its metamorphoses, its ever-new destinations, and the forces that continue to push the sport in more extreme directions. He's skied volcanoes in Mexico and vertical faces in Alaska, he's raced historic telemark courses in Italy, and he's swum through powder in Japan and avalanches in India, always chasing a new experience, a fresh line, and a bluebird day of skiing with someone who shares the passion. Along the way, he introduces many of the daredevils who have succeeded-and sometimes failed-at spectacular feats, the visionaries who have changed the whole concept of boots and boards and what can be done on them, and the entrepreneurs who are bringing the sport to nontraditional markets such as China, Bulgaria, and India.

From the sadistic to the sublime, White Planet is an insightful, humorous, rock 'n' roll adventure that paints a picture of modern global ski culture.

A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Spending nearly half the year in a 7' x 7' tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico, his tasks were simple: keep watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign of smoke.

Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. The landscape over which he keeps watch is rugged and roadless—it was the first region in the world to be officially placed off limits to industrial machines—and it typically gets hit by lightning more than 30,000 times per year. Connors recounts his days and nights in this forbidding land, untethered from the comforts of modern life: the eerie pleasure of being alone in his glass-walled perch with only his dog Alice for company; occasional visits from smokejumpers and long-distance hikers; the strange dance of communion and wariness with bears, elk, and other wild creatures; trips to visit the hidden graves of buffalo soldiers slain during the Apache wars of the nineteenth century; and always the majesty and might of lightning storms and untamed fire.

Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with reflections on his literary forebears who also served as lookouts—among them Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, and Gary Snyder—Fire Season is a book to stand the test of time.

“Gripping, intense. . . . Buried in the Sky will satisfy anyone who loved [Into Thin Air].”—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

"Unique among survival books...stunning...enthralling. Deep Survival makes compelling, and chilling, reading."—Penelope Purdy, Denver Post