The White Ladder
Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 National Outdoor Book Award (History/Biography)
A sweeping history of mountaineering before Everest, and the epic human quest to reach the highest places on Earth.
Whether in the name of conquest, science, or the divine, humans across the centuries have had myriad reasons to climb mountains. From the smoking volcanoes of South America to the great snowy ranges of the Himalaya, The White Ladder follows a cast of extraordinary characters—conquistadors and captains, scientists and surveyors, alpinists and adventurers—up the slopes of the world’s highest peaks.
A masterpiece of edge-of-your-seat narrative history, The White Ladder describes the epic rise of mountaineering’s world altitude record, a story of ever higher climbs by figures great and small of mountaineering during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Daniel Light describes how climbers used revolutionary techniques to launch themselves into the most forbidding conditions. The expeditions illustrate evolutionary changes in climbing style, the advancement of high-altitude science, and the development of mountain climbing as an industry.
Throughout, Light pays special attention to Incan climbers, Gurkha guides, Sherpa mountaineers, and many others who are often overlooked. He offers nuanced new perspectives on familiar characters, for example, calling out the famed female pioneer Fanny Bullock Workman for racism and for abusing her porters. He presents a complex new portrait of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who was at once a ruthless expedition leader, but also an innovative strategist who could read mountains and would risk everything trying to climb them. Light also makes bold new arguments about classic debates, for example, arguing that the much-maligned Jewish climber Oscar Eckenstein shaped mountaineering as we know it today.
A story of innovation, invention, and determination, The White Ladder immerses readers in a fascinating historical period. With their breathtaking exploits, these climbers laid the groundwork for the historic ascents of K2 and Everest that came after—and heightened the spectacle of their dangerous sport.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mountain climber Light debuts with a high-octane history of mountaineering. Beginning the account in 1802, with explorer Alexander von Humboldt's 19,286-foot ascent of Chimborazo, a volcano in Ecuador—the first climb by a European on record—Light describes how Humboldt, even though he did not reach the summit (he and his ill-equipped party were stymied by a "giant crevasse"), afterward embarked on a sold-out lecture tour that sparked the "Golden Age of Alpinism" by inspiring a heated competition for "the world altitude record." Light vividly narrates some of the era's most famous climbs—including Edward Whymper's summiting of the Matterhorn in 1865 and George Dixon Longstaff's ascent of India's Nanda Devi in 1905—while making clear that these white expedition leaders were not the first or most impressive climbers to top the world's most daunting peaks. He notes, for example, that 15th-century Incan priests ascended Llulliallaco, a 22,110-foot volcano, and also devotes much of his narrative to the feats of Indigenous guides who routinely outperformed early European climbers. Mountaineering quickly took on a bitter and competitive edge that, as Light amusingly recounts, sometimes led to sniping and slander, like an anonymous article that cast doubt on mountaineer William Woodman Graham's 1883 ascent of the Himalayan peak Kabru by claiming that, based on his descriptions, he must have climbed the wrong mountain. It's a spirited, adventuresome chronicle.
