Daniel Light grew up in Godalming, a stone’s throw from the family home of George and Ruth Mallory. He has been climbing for twenty years, indoors and out. Dan writes from an office at a climbing wall in East London, where he climbs regularly with his daughters Lola and Ruby. He lives in Hackney.
<p>Beautiful, remote and dangerous – for generations we have looked to the mountains in awe...</p><p>There are the devout Incan priests who, scaling the Andes’ icy slopes to pay tribute to each mountain’s ‘Great Lord’, travelled higher than any European </p><p>would for centuries. The Gurkha riflemen who joined their commander Charles Granville Bruce in canvassing the Karakoram, admiring the distant summits of Broad Peak and K2 with a gleeful anticipation. The tweed-clad mountaineers who first who made the first serious assaults on Everest, hauling yards upon yards of battered rope, fingers grappling with carabiners, frozen half-shut in the cold.</p><p>Tracing the world altitude record from the ashy slopes of the sacred volcano Llullaillaco to the icy crags and crevasses of the Karakoram, Daniel Light takes a panoramic journey through the storied history of mountaineering before Everest. Joining a cast of colourful characters, The White Ladder offers an ode to mountains’ capacity to enthral, and the fundamental human drive to climb higher and higher.</p><p><br></p>
