A Couple of Good Outdoor Books

Here are two book recommendations related to the outdoors and mountaineering.

"Accidents in North American Climbing" is an annual publication from the American Alpine Club, with frank and interesting accounts of problems encountered during the report year. I discovered the Accidents annual publication when I worked at XOR Network Engineering in Boulder Colorado many years ago. Someone always kept the latest copy in the bathroom.

"Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance" by Peter Stark is a set of vivid fictional accounts of what happens to your body and mind when you die from various outdoor perils (freezing, drowning, falling, running out of water, etc).

The author Peter Stark is a physiologist. The stories contain a lot of excellent physiological detail, without being dry and academic. Last Breath is book that I read with a book club ~20 years ago. The stories are really engaging, and it's a book that has really stayed with me. I reflect on little bits of that book very often in my daily life, both in the city and out in the wild.