Big Eye of Summer

The stories in this collection are distilled from 60 years of mountaineering and arctic travel. This second edition provides 10 more enthralling and excellently-written stories. From a sojourn in a wartime bothy with machine-gun toting soldier-poacher-mountaineers to a 3 day 125 mile walk under the unsetting arctic sun; from a ride down a proto-A9 in a steam powered lorry, to a tale of munro-bagging by light aircraft; from a climb in the company of the Roman poet Horace on a day's leave from the Elysian Fields to a consideration of the true meaning of the Flying Dutchman's day off from wandering the seven seas, the collection traverses a physical terrain from Scotland to East Greenland, a temporal span from 1944 to the millennium and a stylistic range from fantasy to arctic travel primer. At turns nostalgic, elegiac, rhapsodic, fantastic, philosophical, but always literate and lyrical, the book explores a new variation, if not an independent new line on the remote buttress of mountaineering literature.