Books by Sir Chris Bonington

For Chris Bonington and Charles Clarke, few mountains were more alluring than Tibet's Sepu Kangri. Tibet's Secret Mountain is their poignant account of their two expeditions there, and the people, experiences and tensions that accompanied them.

When the Chinese Mountaineering Association opened many of China's mountains to foreigners in the 1980s, Chris Bonington thought it too good an opportunity to miss. Kongur is his account of the 1981 expedition to this unexplored peak, with a formidable team including Joe Tasker, Peter Boardman, Al Rouse and Michael Ward.

When leading mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington contacted Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first person to sail single-handed and non-stop around the world, for an interview, this request turned into a joint expedition to Greenland's unexplored Lemon Mountains. Sea, Ice and Rock is the story of this epic journey.

Bonington chronicles four expeditions to the Himalaya and Everest, including the 1975 South-West Face expedition on which he was leader and on which Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to summit the mountain. Bonington also recounts expeditions to K2 and The Ogre (Baintha Brakk) in the Karakoram, and Kongur, in China.

The Next Horizon, the second volume in Chris Bonington's autobiography, relates his adventures from 1962 as a mountaineer, journalist and expedition leader throughout a decade of discovery.

In 1970, Chris Bonington and his now-legendary team of mountaineers were the first climbers to tackle a big wall at extreme altitude. Their target was the south face of Nepal's Annapurna: 12,000 feet of steep rock and ice leading to a 26, 454-ft. summit. As serious armchair climbers will tell you, Annapurna South Face is better than all but a handful of equally gripping classics. One could also argue that all that has happened in the big mountains in the past 30 years has come out of this expedition and out of this book. Bonington and his team—most of whom subsequently died in the mountains—represented a kind of "greatest generation" of modern mountaineers. They pioneered a new, bolder approach to high altitude climbing, and this book is about how they hit the big time.

Chris Bonington Mountaineer is a photographic autobiography, documenting over sixty years of climbing the world's most beautiful and challenging mountains. In this 2016 edition, which features over 500 photographs, we are given a frank perspective into the surreal, majestic and occasionally tragic corners of his incredible mountaineering career.

The early climbing years of Britain's greatest living mountaineer, from his schooldays to his ascent of the Eiger in 1962.