The Wild Within

Simon Yates

From Shelf: Favourite books about mountains

The Wild Within is the third book by Simon Yates, one of Britain's most accomplished mountaineers. Yates leads expeditions to the Cordillera Darwin in Tierra del Fuego, the Wrangell St-Elias ranges on the Alaskan-Yukon border, and Eastern Greenland, and this book relates his experiences of the rapid commercialisation of mountain wilderness.

'All mountaineers develop differently. Some go higher, some try ever-steeper faces and others specialise in a particular range or region. I am increasingly drawn to remoteness - to places where few others have trod.'

The Wild Within is the third book from Simon Yates, one of Britain's most accomplished and daring mountaineers. With his insatiable appetite for adventure and exploratory mountaineering, Yates leads unique expeditions to unclimbed peaks in the Cordillera Darwin in Tierra del Fuego, the Wrangell St-Elias ranges on the Alaska-Yukon border, and Eastern Greenland. Laced with dry humour, he relates his own experience of the rapid commercialisation of mountain wilderness, while grappling with his new-found commitments as a family man. At the same time he must endure his role in the film adaptation of Joe Simpson's Touching The Void, having to relive the events of that trip to Peru for a Hollywood director.

Yates' subsequent escape to the some of the world's most remote mountains isn't quite the experience it once was, as he witnesses first hand the advance of modern communications into the wilderness, signalled by the ubiquitous mobile phone masts appearing in once-deserted mountain valleys. He is left to dwell on the remaining significance of mountain wilderness and must rediscover what the notion of 'wild' means for him now.