Rick Ridgeway calculates that he’s spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents: “Small tents pitched in the world’s most remote regions.” Whether at elevation or raising a family at sea level, those years taught him, he writes, “to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence.” Some of his adventures made news: the first American ascent of K2; the first traverse of Borneo; the first crossing on foot of a corner of Tibet so remote no outsider had ever seen it. Big as these trips were, Rick kept an eye out for the quiet surprises, like the butterflies he encounters at 23,000 feet on K2 or the furtive silhouettes of eared pheasants running wild in Tibet. What really comes alive in Life Lived Wild are his relationships with his fellow travelers, such as Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, The North Face founder Doug Tompkins, and filmmaker Jimmy Chin. Some companions don’t make the return journey. Rick treats them all with candor and straightforward tenderness. And through their commitments to protecting the wild places they shared, he discovers his own.

Holt Paperbacks, 1998

Combining gripping adventure writing with intimate memoir, Rick Ridgeway takes readers to the mysterious mountain domain of Tibet and into the remote corners of his past. In what Tim Cahill called the “most intensely personal” of his books, Ridgeway recounts the extraordinary journey he takes with Asia Wright, the daughter of his friend Jonathan, who was killed during an expedition with Ridgeway in a terrifying avalanche twenty years earlier. Hoping to help her connect with the father she never knew, Ridgeway takes her to the breathtaking Himalayas her father so cherished. Trekking through forbidding terrain and threatening weather, and past jumpy border patrols, they search for the place where he died.

Here, Ridgeway’s storytelling technique hits perfect pitch as he weaves together indelible stories of past adventures with his and Asia’s journey of self-discipline and self-discovery. Below Another Sky is at once an evaluation of a life lived on the edge and a wrenching story of loss-and of truths revealed.

Holt Paperbacks, 1998

Holt Paperbacks, 1998

Warner Books, 1986

The Last Step is Rick Ridgeway’s inside story of this extraordinary expedition. It’s about the people who, battered by the mountain and their isolation, overcame their individual fears, desire, and disappointments to work together to get somebodyñanybodyñto the top of K2. It’s about the glorious success the team achieved, and about the perilous bivouac Jim Wickwire spent just below the summit without food, oxygen or shelter in temperatures of -40F.

Mountaineers Books, 1980

This exciting, true story recounts the perilous journey of twelve men and women, most of them weekend climbers, to the upper reaches of Mt Everest. The team consisted of a wide range of people – 3 lawyers, 2 medical doctors, 2 college professors, a computer scientist, a modern dance instructor, a pilot, an anthropolgist and a writer. Not your normal Himalayas fair. So goes the journy of the 1976 American Bicentenial Everest Expedition.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979