2005. 112 pp, 100+ photos. This book tells examines the exciting lives and experiences of some of the first mountaineers in the Canadian Rockies. New Paperback (only edition).
Summit Tales recounts the hardships, the adventures, the rivalries, and the accomplishments of mountaineers in the golden age of mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies. From fur traders seeking a better view of the land to government surveyors perfecting the art of phototopography; from university chums on summer vacation to England's mountaineering elite seeking untrodden peaks; from Swiss guides who would haul just about anyone to the summits around Lake Louise to Gertrude Benham, who left everyone breathless in her wake, Summit Tales brings Canadian mountaineering history to life.
Illustrated with one hundred archival images - some never before published - Summit Tales recreates the sense of adventure and the challenge of climbing in the Canadian wilderness when most of the land was unmapped and no guidebooks to the peaks existed.
About the Author
Graeme Pole has been writing professionally since 1989. He is the best-selling author and photographer of six non-fiction books that describe the human history and the natural history of western Canada: Canadian Rockies SuperGuide (1991, 1997), The Canadian Rockies: A History in Photographs (1991), Walks and Easy Hikes in the Canadian Rockies (1992, 1996), Classic Hikes in the Canadian Rockies (1994, 2003), The Spiral Tunnels and The Big Hill (1996) and David Thompson (2003).He has written and published one novel, Healy Park (1998). His wilderness essays and photography have been widely circulated.
Graeme Pole's books have aggregate annual sales of more than thirty thousand copies. Three of his titles have been finalists in the Banff Mountain Book Festival. Classic Hikes in the Canadian Rockies won the Mountain Exposition category at the inaugural festival in 1994. Graeme has been a runner-up for the Andy Russell Nature Writers' Award (1995), a finalist in the Crown of the Continent Nature Writing Award (1998), and in 1997 received a Northwest Outdoor Writers' Association 'Excellence in Craft Award,' and the inaugural Teddi Brown Award for Nature Writing, for which he was also runner-up. Healy Park was a 'Staff Pick' at the Calgary Public Library, and was published to favourable reviews in 1998.
Graeme Pole continues to write fiction and non-fiction. An illustrated history of early mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies is due for publication in December 2004. He is presently writing a volume on railway history in western Canada. He has circulated an illustrated anthology of landscape essays, yet to be published, and has a novel, set in coastal BC, on the back burner. He lives with his family near Hazelton in northwestern BC, where he serves as a paramedic. New Paperback.
