Enduring Patagonia

Crouch does an excellent job of bringing the reader into the obsessive world of hard core mountaineers. His writing is exciting , crisp, and vivid. You feel his enthusiasm for his sport and can understand the sacrifices people like him make to climb the world's most challenging peaks. Anyone with an interest in adventure travel or outdoor sports will enjoy this book.

It's always good to read a mountaineering book that goes beyond the travelogue or that recites only overcoming the hardships. Gregory Crouch shows he has a knack for storytelling and a literary skill which makes this an enjoyable read. While the latter part of the story lacks the precission and insight of the first part, the narrative style still makes me hope this is not his only book. As an aging mountaineer of far less skill and experience as Crouch, I found Crouch speaks to the inner psyche of those who find themselves obsessed by the affliction for high places.

If you climb and have a deep-rooted passion for the emotions that climbing stirs in you then I would highly recommend this book. You don't have to be on the cutting edge of climbing to understand in your heart what Crouch talks about in Enduring Patagonia. Empathy, focus, inner-demons, harmony, determination, pain, self-realization and the laurels of success are the streams of conscious thought that are conveyed so beautifully in Crouch's book. If you climb you know that all these feeling come out in great strength throughout almost every climb. I've never been able to put into words all the emotions and the reason for ones passion of climbing but Crouch's book does a stellar job of wording our obsession with the sport and lifestyle.

Enduring Patagonia is an excellent read. Crouch is the real deal, and he gives the reader a full helping of what it's like to do battle in Patagonia: waiting for weather, climbing fast while the weather fuse burns, taking risks, dealing with committment, learning to love misery, and, sometimes, pure elation. It's all in here.If you want to climb inside the mind of an elite Patagonia climber, buy this book.

I've long loved Gregory Crouch's writing in the mountaineering magazines and was excited to see a full-length book written by him. I was even more thrilled to discover how he brought the world of mountaineering alive in "Enduring Patagonia" -- the way he describes these otherworldly places is unimaginatively beautiful. It's a literary book many readers will place among the classics of adventure literature, to be sure. And for those who read "Into Thin Air," it's the next step in breaking open the world of cutting edge alpinism. Now even my mother wants to read it!