With Friends in High Places: An Anatomy of Those Who Take to the Hills

This personal account of mountainclimbing spans a period of 66 years, during which time attitudes and technology have undergone vast changes. The motivation for mountain climbing is not risk; it is the joy of exploration of the vertical, whether it be a virgin summit, a lonely precipice, or simply a new line on a familiar rock face. It is to heighten the senses in lonely remote places. It is to remove all obstacles between the individual and nature. In With Friends in High Places, Malcolm Slesser recalls perilous situations, such as the ill-fated Pamir expedition of 1962, and unusual environments including the Arctic and the Tropics that he has experienced throughout his decades of mountaineering and exploring around the globe.