Re: Darwin and adventure

Shackleton's and Worsley's books on the Endurance expedition (different authors, different viewpoints on the same expedition.

Art Davison's Minus 148 degrees on the ill-fated Wilcox expedition (Wilcox's book is too selfserving and defensive), and the more recent heavily researched book on the same topic by James Tabor, Forever on the Mountain

John Graham's Outdoor Leadership (Mountaineers Press)

Alex Kosseff's AMC Guide to Outdoor Leadership (happens to feature a friend as an example of an outstanding leader)

Warren MacDonald's A Test of Will (you have seen me mention Warren's disaster and recovery a number of times here)

And a whole lot of nuts and bolts books.

Seeing this list, I half-expect (no, more than "half-expect") a couple of people who post on Trailspace from time to time to berate me for recommending a bunch of "disaster" books while decrying "reality TV". In doing so, they will miss the point of these books. They are not about Disaster/Extreme/Death/Destruction. They are about the difference between those who survive in the face of great odds and those who don't, and about learning to live By Nature's Rules (to steal the name from a really awful instructional film made back in the 1960s - it had many good things to say, but it lacked, shall we say, "production values").

I think the main reason people want the nuts and bolts is that they want to get out and do things. There is also a certain amount of hubris, belief that "it won't happen to me". An example of this is a comment I often see in the student evaluations of my "Weather for the Outdoorsman" presentations - "Too many pictures of clouds, just tell me how to predict the weather." Ummm, well, clouds and how they move and change with time form one of the most important tools for anticipating weather changes over the next few days when you are in the hills with no access to satellite photos and out of reach of NOAA Weather Radio or the internet weather sites. You want nuts and bolts for weather? Learn about clouds!