National Outdoor Book Awards

Award Year	Title and Author(s)
2005	Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women who climbed K2, the World's Most Feared Mountain by Jennifer Jordan Savage Summit is a brilliantly written account which follows the lives of five women who climbed K2. Shifting through hours of interviews and written materials, Jennifer Jordan weaves together a riveting tale of adventure, ambition, love and tragedy.  This book is so well written that it reads like a novel. Mark these words: Savage Summit is destined to assume an honored place among some of the best climbing books ever written.
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2004 (tie)	Out There: In the Wild in a Wired Age by Ted Kerasote Ted Kerasote has a friendly style of writing, and in Out There you feel like you've settled in a chat with an old friend. The chat, in this case, centers on a trip that Kerasote has taken down the Horton River of Canada's Northwest Territories. This not a trip where death is lurking around every corner; rather it's a fine and thoughtful journey in which Kerasote grapples with the use of GPS, satellite phones, and other technology in the wilderness. Honestly written and well-crafted, it says much about what has become of the outdoor experience.
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	Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: The Dark Side of Extreme Adventure by Maria Coffey This is a moving and gracefully written story, one that has been waiting to be told for a long time. This is what it's like for the families and friends of mountaineers who die or who are injured on expeditions. Maria Coffey, who intimately knows the pain of losing a loved one to the mountains, could have easily turned the book into a tirade against climbing. Instead she embraces adventure, emphasizing again and again that risk serves an important role in contemporary society. Nonetheless, she cautions that, when we venture into the unknown, we should never forget the terrible costs of adventure gone awry.
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2003	The Beckoning Silence by Joe Simpson My Review This is the story of a mountaineer in the autumn of his career coming to grips with his own mortality and dwindling physical resources. An extraordinary storyteller, Joe Simpson takes us on a series of adventures which span the globe, culminating in one final, career-ending climb of the North Face of the Eiger. Simpson is at his best when the chips are down and the line between life and disaster is stretched paper thin.
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2002	Rowing to Latitude by Jill Fredston In her debut book, Rowing to Latitude, Jill Fredston emerges as a fresh new voice in outdoor literature: witty, touching, literate, bold and honest. She also emerges as a true adventurer. Pioneering the use of a recreational rowing shell, similar in shape and size to a sea kayak, she and her husband travel more than twenty thousand miles through the Arctic and sub-Arctic. This book is the story of those journeys, but intricately woven among them are the joys and struggles of her life. It's a marvelous book, one that will carry you away to the great hinterlands of the north latitudes.
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2001	Where the Pavement Ends: One Woman's Bicycle Trip Through Mongolia, China & Vietnam by Erika Warmbrunn Vivid, often light-hearted, and honestly written, Where the Pavement Ends is the story of Erika Warmbrunn's incredible 8-month, 5,000-mile mountain bike ride across middle Asia. Skillfully crafted with a sense of excitement and momentum that resembles coasting downhill on a bicycle, Where the Pavement Ends provides fascinating glimpses of East Asian life and landscapes along Warmbrunn’s journey. You'll be drawn in by her openness and curiosity about life and rejoice in her hard-earned accomplishments.
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2000	On Celtic Tides: One Man's Journey Around Ireland by Sea Kayak by Chris Duff A transfixing memoir, Celtic Tides is the vivid account of the first ever circumnavigation of Ireland by kayak. Told with sensitivity and care, Duff's odyssey is about a lone man and a capricious sea and its moods of tranquillity and contrasting terror. But the book is more than an adventure story. It's also about haunting beauty, ancient history, and spiritual renewal found along the storm-lashed coasts of an enchanting land.
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1999	The Lost River: A Memoir of Life by Death by and Transformation on Wild Water by Richard Bangs Since the early 1970s, Richard Bangs has been in the vanguard of river exploration. He is particularly known for his bold ventures deep into the recesses of Africa. In nearly a dozen books, Bangs has written of his experiences, but in this book we see and learn more of him than ever before. Primarily this book is about his 1996 pioneering run of Ethiopia's Tekeze River, but the most interesting and telling part of the story is the long, and sometimes tragic, path which led him there.
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1998	Postcards from the Ledge: Collected Mountaineering Writings of Greg Child by Greg Child My Review Postcards from the Ledge establishes Greg Child as one of most talented and versatile writers of the mountaineering genre. A competent and experienced climber, he is an astute and objective observer. He is humorous and serious, and as adept at elegant descriptions of the high moments of life in the mountains as he is describing the sordid and repulsive side of the sport.
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1997	Landscapes of the Interior: Re-Explorations of Nature and the Human Spirit by Don Gayton Don Gayton does with the concept of landscape what writers like Edward Abbey have done with the desert. It is a pioneering, personal journey across a succession of landscapes from the Kokanee Range to the Columbia Plateau to the tall grass prairie of Manitoba. Gayton is sometimes scientific and other times lyrical and deeply philosophical. Through it all, he is always original and fresh.
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Honorable Mentions

	At the Mercy of the River: An Exploration of the Last African Wilderness by Peter Stark (2005)
	A Blistered Kind of Love: One Couple's Trial by Trail by Angela and Duffy Ballard (2004)
	The Sacred Place: Witnessing the Holy in the Physical World by Scott Olsen & Scott Cairns (1997)

The National Outdoor Book Award Categories This is a non-profit, educational program. The winners are chosen by a panel of judges consisting of respected outdoor columnists, authors, educators, and book reviewers from throughout the country. In early November, the NOBA committee announces the winners of the nine categories that make up the awards program plus a set of books that achieved honorable mentions. The NOBA awards are given in nine different categories. Children's Books Design and Artistic Merit History and Biography Instructional and How-To Natural History Literature Nature and Environment Nature Guidebooks Outdoor Adventure Guidebooks Outdoor Classics Outdoor Literature

If you like this list of outdoor award winners, you may enjoy these additional lists of award winning books on mountaineering. Check out the winners (and finalists) of the following awards:

	American Alpine Literary Award
	Banff Mountain Book Awards
	Boardman-Tasker Memorial Award for Mountain Literature