Audiobooks by David Roberts

An Audio Bundle: Epic & Rough Water Audiobook

· Publishers Weekly 'Listen Up' Award Winner · ForeWord Magazine's 'Audiobook of the Year' Winner · AFIM Indie Award Winner · Independent Publisher Magazine’s ‘IPPY Award’ Finalist. Epic--a mountaineering term that evokes a sense of treacherous disaster. The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. With writing from Greg Child, David Roberts, Stephen Venables, Alfred Lansing and others, Epic is a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world’s most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions! In Rough Water, hear the stories of men and women battling the elements, and sometimes each other, to stay alive, confronting savage storms, rogue waves, icebergs, sharks, starvation and their own fear and suffering. From Sebastian Junger’s The Whale Hunter to Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny to Lawrence Beesley’s The Loss of The S.S. Titanic, Rough Water is a unique collection of the finest writing on why men and women go to sea, and what they find there!

Alfred Lansing, Art Davidson, Charles Houston, David Lewis, David Roberts, Fa Worsley, Greg Child, Herman Wouk, Lawrence Beesley, Maurice Herzog, Patrick O’brian, Robert Bates, Samuel Leech, Sebastian Junger, Stephen Venables, Steven Callahan (Author), Alan Sklar, Eric Conger, George Guidall, Graeme Malcolm, Rick Adamson, Simon Prebble (Narrator)

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Into the Great Emptiness: Peril and Survival on the Greenland Ice Cap

The riveting story of one of the greatest but least-known sagas in the history of exploration from David Roberts, the “dean of adventure writing” By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed “Gino”), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the ice cap, 8,200 feet above sea level. The Ice Cap Station was to be the anchor of a transpolar route of air travel from Europe to North America. The weather on the ice cap was appalling. Fierce storms. Temperatures plunging lower than negative fifty degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. Watkins’s scheme called for rotating teams of two men each to monitor the station for two months at a time. No one had ever tried to winter over in that hostile landscape, let alone manage a weather station through twelve continuous months. Watkins was younger than anyone under his command, but he had several daring trips to the Arctic under his belt and no one doubted his judgement. The first crisis came in the fall when a snowstorm stranded a resupply mission halfway to the top for many weeks. When they arrived at the ice cap, there were not enough provisions and fuel for another two-man shift, so the station would have to be abandoned. Then team member August Courtauld made an astonishing offer. To enable the mission to go forward, he would monitor the station solo through the winter. When a team went up in March to relieve Courtauld, after weeks of brutal effort to make the 130-mile journey, they could find no trace of him or the station. By the end of March, Courtauld’s situation was desperate. He was buried under an immovable load of frozen snow and was disastrously short on supplies. On April 21, four months after Courtauld began his solitary vigil, Gino Watkins set out inland with two companions to find and rescue him. David Roberts draws on firsthand accounts and archival materials to tell the story of this daring expedition and of the epic survival ordeal that ensued.

David Roberts (Author), Julian Elfer (Narrator)

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The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest

An award-winning author and veteran mountain climber takes us deep into the Southwest backcountry to uncover secrets of its ancient inhabitants. In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last twenty years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.

David Roberts (Author), Shawn Compton (Narrator)

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An Audio Bundle: Climb & High

Winner of Publisher's Weekly 'Listen Up' Award. Year after year, in spite of monumental dangers, climbers return to the world's most difficult mountains, whether it's the cliffs of Yosemite or the peaks of the Himalaya. At these places, even the most cautious climber must accept the possibilities of moving unroped to save time, braving terrain vulnerable to rockfall, trusting afternoon thunderstorms to hold off long enough to get below treeline. Mistakes, bad weather and bad luck often lead to death. Climb offers harrowing accounts of extreme mountaineering and its potentially fatal consequences. Everest and K2--two of the most feared and respected peaks in the world. High offers a unique perspective on climbing these two peaks, from early exploration disasters, to the modern tragedies. These stories remind us, in vivid written accounts, why Everest and K2 are among the world's most dangerous places, yet why the world's best climbers can't stay away from them.

Brummie Stokes, Charles Clarke, Charles Houston, Chris Bonington, Daniel Duane, David Roberts, Ed Webster, Evelyn Waugh, Fs Smythe, Galen Rowell, H.G. Wells, Hamish Macinnes, Jim Haberl, John Long, Matt Dickinson, Maureen O'neill, Pete Sinclair, Robert Bates, Tom Patey (Author), Alan Sklar, Eric Conger, Gary Telles, George Guidall, Graeme Malcolm, Kimberly Schraf, Nick Sampson, Simon Prebble, Terence Aselford (Narrator)

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The Bears Ears: A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness

A personal and historical exploration of the Bears Ears country and the fight to save a national monument. The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by the Trump administration in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It's also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by Jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s. In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes listeners on a tour of his favorite place on earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he's explored for the last twenty-five years.

David Roberts (Author), Danny Campbell (Narrator)

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The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America's Boldest Mountaineer

“Stunning and stirring.” —Boston Globe In The Last of His Kind, renowned adventure writer David Roberts gives readers a spellbinding history of mountain climbing in the twentieth century as told through the biography of Brad Washburn, legendary mountaineering pioneer and photographer. Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, has praised David Roberts, saying, “Nobody alive writes better about mountaineering”—and nowhere is that truth more evident than in this breathtaking account of the life and exploits of America’s greatest mountain climber.

David Roberts (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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Sandstone Spine: Seeking the Anasazi on the First Traverse of the Comb Ridge

On September 1, 2004, three middle-aged buddies set out on one of the last geographic challenges never before attempted in North America: to hike the Comb Ridge in one continuous push. The Comb is an upthrust ridge of sandstone—virtually a mini-mountain range—that stretches almost unbroken for a hundred miles from just east of Kayenta, Arizona, to some ten miles west of Blanding, Utah. To hike the Comb is to run a gauntlet of up-and-down severities, with the precipice lurking on one hand, the fiendishly convoluted bedrock slab on the other—always at a sideways, ankle-wrenching pitch. There is not a single mile of established trail in the Comb's hundred-mile reach. The friends were David Roberts, writer, adventurer, famed mountaineer of decades past, at age 61 the graybeard of the bunch; Greg Child, renowned mountaineer and rock climber, age 47; and Vaughn Hadenfeldt, a wilderness guide intimately acquainted with the canyonlands, age 53. They came to the Comb not only for the physical challenge, but to seek out seldom-visited ruins and rock art of the mysterious Anasazi culture. Each brought his own emotions on the journey; the Comb Ridge would test their friendship in ways they had never before experienced. Searching for the stray arrowhead half-smothered in the sand or for the faint markings on a far sandstone boulder that betokened a little-known rock art panel, becomes a competitive sport for the three friends. Along the way, they ponder the mystery, bringing the accounts of early and modern explorers and archaeologists to bear: Who were the vanished Indians who built these inaccessible cliff dwellings and pueblos, often hidden from view? Of whom were they afraid and why? What caused them to suddenly abandon their settlements around 1300 AD? What meaning can be ascribed to their phantasmagoric rock art? What was their relationship to the Navajo, who were convinced the Anasazi had magical powers and could fly?

David Roberts (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest

The dramatic and tragic story of the only successful Native American uprising against the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. With the conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish governors, soldiers, and missionaries began their brutal subjugation of the Pueblo Indians in what is today the Southwestern United States. This oppression continued for decades, until, in the summer of 1680, led by a visionary shaman named Pope, the Puebloans revolted. In total secrecy they coordinated an attack, killing 401 settlers and soldiers and routing the rulers in Santa Fe. Every Spaniard was driven from the Pueblo homeland, the only time in North American history that conquering Europeans were thoroughly expelled from Indian territory. Yet today, more than three centuries later, crucial questions about the Pueblo Revolt remain unanswered. How did Pope succeed in his brilliant plot? And what happened in the Pueblo world between 1680 and 1692, when a new Spanish force reconquered the Pueblo peoples with relative ease? David Roberts set out to try to answer these questions and to bring this remarkable historical episode to life. He visited Pueblo villages, talked with Native American and Anglo historians, combed through archives, discovered backcountry ruins, sought out the vivid rock art panels carved and painted by Puebloans contemporary with the events, and pondered the existence of centuries-old Spanish documents never seen by Anglos.

David Roberts (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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Great Exploration Hoaxes

Did Peary reach the North Pole? Was Admiral Byrd the first to fly over it? Did Frederick Cook actually make the first ascent of Mt. McKinley? Spanning 450 years of history, Great Exploration Hoaxes tells the spellbinding stories of ten men who pursued glory at any cost even the truth. Acclaimed author and explorer David Roberts delves deeply into the psychology behind the stunt and asks why these individuals, all of whom were exceptionally able, would perpetrate fraud on such a grand and public scale and defend it to their deaths, even in the face of damning evidence, and why these dubious achievements are still so hotly debated, often hundreds of years afterward. Demonstrating that the qualities that brought an individual so close to his goal were often the same ones that drove him to fake success, Great Exploration Hoaxes is history at its best: entertaining, provocative, and revealing of human nature.

David Roberts (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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On the Ridge Between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined

What compels mountain climbers to take the risks that they do? Is it the thrill in the physical accomplishment, in managing to defy the odds, or both -- and why do they continue to do what they do in the face of such great danger? In On the Ridge Between Life and Death, David Roberts confronts these questions head-on as he recounts the exhilarating highs and desperate lows of his climbing career. By the time he was twenty-two, Roberts had already been involved in three fatal mountain climbing accidents and had escaped death himself by the sheerest of luck. And yet, as he acknowledges, few things have brought him more joy than climbing. In a famous essay on the subject written more than twenty years ago, Roberts judged climbing to be 'worth the risk.' He continues to climb to this day, and several of his challenging routes in Alaska have never been climbed since. But in reassessing the emotional costs to himself and to loved ones, he reaches a different conclusion, one that is sure to cause controversy not only in climbing circles, but among adventurers of all kinds. Candid and unflinching, On the Ridge Between Life and Death is a compelling examination of the risks we take in order to feel more alive.

David Roberts (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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Moments of Doubt and Other Mountaineering Writings

This collection of 20 essays and articles on mountaineering and adventure by David Roberts, selected from the published works of two decades, showcases one of the most highly regarded writers in the field. The articles are composed of three types: Adventures (Roberts' own climbs and outings), Profiles (other adventurers), and Reflections (meditative essays about the meaning of the whole business). Roberts ranges the globe (Africa, Alaska, New Guinea) and introduces unique personalities (Reinhold Messner, John Roskelly, Don Sheldon). He also recounts how his own love of writing and the useless pastime of climbing combined to produce the bread and butter of his career today. Popular with audiences far beyond active mountaineers, Roberts sets himself this challenge: 'For me, the abiding puzzle of adventure writing lies in keeping, on the one hand, a sense of proportion about the absurdity of most of our antics in the outdoors, while staying alert, on the other, to the majesty of spirit which at their best those antics demonstrate.'

David Roberts (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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The Mountain of My Fear and Deborah: Two Mountaineering Classics

The publication of The Mountain of My Fear in 1968 and Deborah in 1970 changed the face of the mountaineering narrative. Now these two classic expedition narratives by acclaimed writer David Roberts are together again in one volume for a new generation of readers. Deborah is the story of Roberts's 1964 expedition with fellow Harvard Mountaineering Club member Don Jensen to the eastern side of Mount Deborah in Alaska. Their two-man attempt on the then-unclimbed ridge was a rash and heroic effort. The story tells not only what happened on the mountain, but what happened in the stark isolation to the climbers and their friendship, as each became totally dependent on the other for survival. In The Mountain of My Fear Roberts and Jensen come together again only a year after the Deborah climb. In this account, they and two other Harvard students attempt an ascent of Mount Huntington, for the first time via its treacherous west face. The summit had been reached only the year before, via one of its less dangerous ridges. The story is one of a magnificent achievement. But it is also the story of how a perfect adventure can turn into tragedy in a single instant. Mountaineers, lovers of adventure literature, David Roberts fans, and non-climbers who simply enjoy a good story will value this pairing, by a great climber and a great writer, of two dramatic and enlightening works.

David Roberts (Author), David De Vries (Narrator)

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