Climbing

In honor of the release of A Mountaineer’s Life by Allen Steck, Patagonia Books is pleased to share this excerpt from chapter eight.  Camp II was a desperate and fearful place. We spent seven days there in severe weather. We could not leave the tents… Read More

After El Capitan, my desire for wall climbing diminished. Perhaps it was growing older, or perhaps it was just my surroundings. The Black Canyon was no longer an hour away. Yosemite was no longer in my waking dreams every day. Durango was so close to the desert, and… Read More

It’s right in front of me now, directly in my face. For weeks it had been little more than a vague concept we kept alive solely by reassurance and persistence, every day moving forward, every day pedaling closer to our fate, waiting to discover if it looked anything like… Read More

At the wind-scoured southern tip of Argentina, between the vast ice cap and the rolling estepas of Patagonia, rises a 10,262-foot tower of ice and rock named Cerro Torre. Considered by many the most beautiful and compelling mountain in the world, it draws the finest and most devoted technical… Read More

Regardless of how you choose to play outside, if someone gets hurt in the mountains, the first step on the checklist remains the same: “scene safety”—you make sure the thing that hurt your buddy isn’t going to hurt you too. But there’s no checklist… Read More

Patagonia is proud to announce our latest publication: Barry Blanchard’s memoir, The Calling. With heart-pounding descriptions of avalanches and treacherous ascents, Blanchard chronicles his transformation from a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks to one of the most respected alpinists in the world. Read More

Guidebooks come in all forms. The kind that I like the most are more than mere guidebooks; they have bits of history, interesting information and stunning photos. They inspire me. By necessity, they can only be written by a true expert. They don’t hold my hand, but they have… Read More

Yvon Chouinard first came onto my radar in 1999. I was a young lass from the Midwest, transplanted for the summer in southern Utah and awestruck by the dramatic landscapes of the West. Having never traveled beyond the forests of Missouri, I was eager to explore these… Read More

Shadows crept across the pavement, clouds reflected stars and headlamps crawled slowly up the road, bicycles under a full moon at 12,000 feet. A month later – just last week, in fact – I parked my beater Honda and stood on the sidewalk outside of… Read More

I was actually pretty anxious about going on RAGBRAI. I didn’t really know what to expect. I travel extensively to the far corners of the world, but always as a climber, with the security of other climbers and knowing, to some extent, what the climbing… Read More

Bleeding sunburns and limping – those were my earliest memories of people returning from RAGBRAI. What’s that? You don’t know what RAGBRAI is? (I’m just as shocked when people don’t know what RAGBRAI is as the Canadian who realizes that Americans don’t know who … Read More