Annotation Don Forest: Quest for the Summits tells the story of one of the most colorful-perhaps eccentric-people of the Canadian West, who is also an award-winning mountaineer. Yet Don Forest didn't take up the sport until he was in his mid-40s. At a time when most men are thinking of retiring from strenuous activities, Don was busy setting records: He was the first person to climb all 27 of the 11,000-foot peaks in the Canadian Rockies and Columbia Mountains in one year, and in 1991, at age 71, he was the oldest person to climb Mount Logan, Canada's highest mountain. In 1992, he celebrated his 72nd birthday with friends, cake, and champagne on the summit of Holy Cross Mountain-a 9000-foot-high mountain in southwest Alberta. Kathy Calvert's biography of Don Forest runs the gamut of emotion: Her narrative swings from the humor in Don's eccentricities and the pathos of Don's dealing with close friends lost in the mountains to the pride and satisfaction felt when Don's climbing career was recognized by his peers across Canada.
Mountain rescue in western Canada developed through the Canadian Pacific Railway's use of Swiss guides to enhance the climbing experience in the early 1900s. These guides brought their knowledge of mountain rescue to the Canadian Rockies. As climbing gained in popularity with the emerging middle classes after the Second World War, tragic accidents became more common. Two accidents in 195455 (the deaths of a group of female climbers from Mexico on Mt. Victoria and a group of Philadelphia schoolboys on Mt. Temple) forced the government to develop a professional mountain rescue team through the Park Warden Service under the tutelage of Walter Perren (a Swiss guide and the father of mountain rescue in Canada). Perren essentially turned cowboys into competent rescue personnel, and the story takes off from there.Following five principal men through the first 50 years of mountain rescue in Canada, Guardians of the Peaks also looks at all aspects of the rescue experience. It is the story of personal tragedy and the ability of individuals to cope with this stress-laced, demanding occupation.
Arizona Daily Star, July 07,2008 J.C. Martin Southern Arizona Authors "Naomi of the Arizona Territory" (Xlibris, $19.99 paperback, $30 hardcover) is Mary Katherine Arensbergs picture of life and love on the Southwest frontier at the close of the Civil War. Idomitable heroine Naomi Atkins Hart, wife of a sheepherder, battles illnes - its sobering to realize how many people suffered from tuberculosis before the mid-20th century - and hard times to make a home for herself and her baby daughter, FAN MAIL I just finished reading Naomi and I really liked it. She is a survior; and that little girl of hers and the that dog, what a pair! Denise H. Hilltop, USA Naomi of the Arizona Territory wins First Place in the Readers Favorite 2010 Historical Fiction category and earned a Five Star Review. "This is one of the best books I read in a long time
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