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Alpine Warriors
Alpine Warriors

Alpine Warriors

ISBN: 9781771601092
Bernadette McDonald
$30.00
  • Hardback With printed dust jacket

Winner of the 2015 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival award for Mountaineering History

After the Second World War a period of relative calm began in Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. During the next thirty years citizens could travel freely if they had the money. Most did not, but alpinists did.

Through elaborate training régimes and state-supported expeditions abroad, Yugoslavian alpinists began making impressive climbs in the Himalaya as early as 1960. By the ’70s, they were ascending the 8000ers. These teams were dominated by Slovenian climbers, since their region includes the Julian Alps, a fiercely steep range of limestone peaks that provided the ideal training ground.

After Tito died in 1980, however, the calm ended. Inter-ethnic conflict and economic decline ripped Yugoslavia apart. But Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloevic misread the courage and character of several Yugoslavian states, including Slovenia, and by 1991 Slovenia was independent.

The new country continued its support for climbers, and success bred success. By 1995, all of the 8000ers had been climbed by Slovenian teams. And in the next ten years, some of the most dramatic and futuristic climbs were made by these ferocious alpinists. Apart from a few superstars, most of these amazing athletes remain unknown in the West.

Book Details

336

September 21, 2015

Width: 6 in
Height: 9 in

Epic at every level – literary, historical and ruggedly spiritual – this chronicle of a remote mountain culture tucked away in Eastern Europe’s Julian Alps portrays ascent as both personal quest and national salvation. Welcome to Slovenia and its extraordinary alpinists, and to a thin, mysterious tome known as Pot, or The Path. In the 1970s, when climbers from an impoverished Cold War backwater, using homemade clothing and gear (wooden pitons!), barged into the arena of 8000-metre peaks, no one could explain them. Here at last is their story.

Alpine Warriors is an important book, possibly one of mountain literature’s greatest works, not only for its tale but also for the intelligence, agility and poetry that Bernadette McDonald brings to its telling. Weaving together generations of legendary climbers, she guides us into a land better known for its gypsies and castles through an ever-changing backdrop of violence (from the Second World War and post-war massacres to genocide in Bosnia).

Muscular and tautly drawn, the page-turning adventures in Alpine Warriors connect in the simple mysticism of Pot, a declaration of love for the mountains. Though its 31-year-old author, Nejc Zaplotnik, died in the Himalayas in 1983, his book within McDonald’s book became the bridge between his nation’s survival and its mountain soul.

A cross between the movie Chariots of Fire, Carlos Castaneda’s desert shaman in The Teachings of Don Juan, and certain rare histories written with a novelist’s palette such as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, Alpine Warriors takes mountain literature – and mountain culture – to new heights.—Jeff Long, author of The Wall

To be sure, modern mountaineering is a British, and also a Central European, invention. Finally, after the Polish, Slovenian climbers took traditional alpinism one step further.—Reinhold Messner, alpinist, author of My Life at the Limit

A fascinating account of the extraordinary achievements of the alpinists from this tiny Slovenian nation which has spawned some of the most talented, colourful, controversial and innovative mountaineers of modern climbing history. Once started, I couldn’t put the book down till it was finished.—Sir Chris Bonington, alpinist, author of I Chose to Climb