GET READY TO ENTER THE
WORLD OF JERRY AULD.
Born and raised in Calgary, Jerry has called Canmore home since 1996, after traveling the world only to find the Bow Valley the best place to settle.
He worked two seasons for the park trail crews, climbing, trail running, and skiing avidly before, during, and since among the Rockies. During this time, Jerry learned of the legend of Hooker and Brown, and was astonished to find himself so ignorant of his own history.
Jerry lives with his wife, a fourteenth generation Quebecoise, and their two daughters in the Rocky Mountains.
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This was a joke that just kept on giving...a send up on the Extreme Climbing meme, that went on to be released to critical acclaim and be rewarded with People's Choice at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
33 brief mountain tales
From angels on summits to ghosts on ledges,
from madmen on diamox
to malevolent gurus on mountain tops.
These intertwined and very short peeks
at the mountains tell tall tales
from the past, present, and future.
click here to find out
more from my publisher.
"These short stories, celebrating mountaineering and mountain culture, can be savoured individually, like boxed Callebaut chocolates.
However, in order to follow the beguiling thread that links the whole, the book must be read in its entirety. But not necessarily chronologically."
— Pat Morrow, Everest: High Expectations
"These are no ordinary mountain stories: they are tales of the mystery that lies at the heart of ascent.
And not just the ascent of the rock climber and alpinist, but the ascent of the monk, the stone mason, the goat,
the cobbler and the office worker.
In his magic way, Jerry Auld reveals the secrets of our need to reach for something intangible,
something sacred, something forbidden."
— Chic Scott, Mountaineer and Historian
"Short Peaks is all about the business of staying alive.
Edgy and evocative, these 33 short stories capture the lure of those dangerously seductive narrow ledges up in the thin air, where style is the currency, but where ego is the cost."
— Bernadette McDonald, Freedom Climbers
A group of friends work down in Kananaskis and stumble upon an old mystery of the Rockies. Hooker & Brown – two mythical mountains soaring above 17,000 feet, discovered during the fur trade, then lost.
When the railway went through at the end of the 1800s the British and American climbers swarmed this new land of unclimbed peaks and saw them on the blank edge of the maps and raced to climb them, in the process discovering all the major wonders of the Rockies.
But the mountains didn't exist. Our friends, perhaps the first generation in human history that have no white spaces on their maps, quest after Hooker & Brown, not necessarily for the mountains themselves, but what they inspired. As they tell each other the stories of the early explorers and follow their trails north, they find even modern charts are just interpretations.
They're compelled to see for themselves, yet they don't want to lose the power of inspiration that's drawing them forward. This they need to reconcile: how to solve the mystery without losing it's attraction, and they need to do it before they reach the pass.
"With this powerful and highly poetic first novel Jerry Auld achieves a new peak in the literary interpretation of the nature, history and culture of the mountain West. It is a book about the power of maps and dreams that explores our relationship to gravity and ghosts, rock, water and place with an ending that will leave you breathless."
A highly technically accomplished mountaineering novel with a clever plot-line and convincing characters.
"Like a polished stone, Hooker & Brown reveals layers of time, meaning and beauty."
