Athlete Anna DeMonte’s passion for mountain sports began in the most unlikely of places: the swimming pool. Years of competitive training taught her the importance of precision, focus, and honed technique, but after four gruelling years of college swimming and Olympic trials, burnout hit hard. Trading the flat Midwest for the towering Rockies, Anna found freedom in climbing and skiing and fully immersed herself in the mountains.
High in the heart of Chamonix, one of the world’s most iconic alpine playgrounds, mountain guide and Rab athlete Pierre Idris “Pim” Mehdi reveals what it truly takes to build a life in the mountains. A Guide’s Book follows Pim through steep ski lines, complex terrain, and the daily balance between personal ambition and guiding clients safely in some of the Alps’ most demanding environments.
For decades, the prevailing belief in mountaineering was that humans couldn’t survive above 8,000m without supplemental oxygen; a notion disproven in 1970, when Reinhold Messner became the first person to climb Mt. Everest with no bottled oxygen. This feat prompted further paradigm shifts, prompting alpinists to pursue progressively more stripped-down approaches. In 2022, The North Face Athlete Benjamin Védrines set out to break K2’s FKT, failing his attempt and barely escaping to tell the tale.
He returned in 2024 to fulfill the challenge that had come to define him—and face the psychological scars of his earlier mission.
In the final season of the original 119-year-old Le Refuge de la Charpoua, hutkeeper of eight years, Sarah Cartier, and her two children, embrace the high life and all its history in the mountains near Chamonix, France. The timeworn little building, set to be rebuilt in the same place in 2023, is surrounded by towering granite walls and alpine light providing them with a mystical setting to do all the dailies of cooking, cleaning and climbing; a place to breathe in the freedom of the high life while the sights and sounds of the busy world below fall away.
In 1955, the first all-female expedition team to the Himalaya stepped foot in the wild, remote, and unexplored region of the Jugal Himal. 70 years later, Pauline Sanderson assembles her own team of women, all highly skilled and experienced mountaineers, to follow in their footsteps.
As they tackle the unpredictable, unspoiled terrain of this lesser-known corner of the Himalayas, they draw inspiration from the women that came before them to make safe, best-practice decisions and reduce their impact on local communities.
