Joel Reid high on the west ridge of Mount Stuart. North Cascades, Washington
Higher Calling
More than mere guidebook, Freedom of the Hills has lifted the lives of generations of mountain lovers
In the beginning was the word. Which is to say that as a teenaged suburban Midwesterner I acquired a copy of Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills before I ever set foot on a mountain. My path to the book started, not surprisingly, with another book: Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the subtitle of which was Access to Tools. From there, I went looking for a book more famous at the time: The Complete Walker, by Colin Fletcher, which was widely credited with launching the 1970s backpacking boom. The store was sold out of The Complete Walker and in its stead I chose Freedom of the Hills, the first hardcover book I ever bought. Within six months I had tied myself into a Goldline rope with a bowline-on-a-coil and begun to climb.
Freedom of the Hills, the publishing phenomenon now sixty years in print, is said to be the best-selling mountaineering instructional book of all time, having sold close to eight hundred thousand copies,
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