David Stevenson is the director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is the author of the short fiction collection Letters from Chamonix, winner of the Banff Mountain Festival Fiction Prize.

• Introduction Warnings against Myself 1. Speaking in Code: Conversations and Reflections on Climbing, Language, and the Religion of the French 2. The Purposes of Ascent: Episodes and Conversations on Adventure, Climbing, and What It All Might Mean; An Account of Twenty Years in the West 3. Climber as Writer: From the Armchair to the Tetons Last Dance of the Wu Li Master: A Distanced Appreciation of Terrance "Mugs" Stump Virga 4. Untethered in Yosemite: A Report from Paradise in the Last Summer of the Millennium 5. Short Walks with McInerney: Three Classic Pilgrimages 6. Superstitious: Mont Blanc, French Alps 7. Struck: Longs Peak, Rocky Mountains 8. In the Bugs: In the Canadian Rockies 9. Axe of Contrition10. Byron Glacier, June 24, 2009 11. Eros on the Heights 12. The Tower and the Riddle 13. Lives of the Volcano Poets 14. Here Comes Ol' Flattop 15. A Short Cultural History of the Ice Axe in the Twentieth Century 16. Three Dreams of Mountains, Late Fall 2004 17. Whillans, Haston, and Me: A Distanced Appreciation with a Couple Trip Reports, Contextualized 18. In the Very Big Ice House: Travels on the Harding Icefield List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

"This collection of essays provides an evocative look into the somewhat exclusive climbing world. Stevenson's prose is lively, and his references to other prominent climbers and climber-authors may serve as a jumping-off point for further research in the field."- Lucy Hereford (Pacific Northwest Quarterly (PNQ))