Can you recommend some books written by people who climbed mountains (in the 1-3 week variety) before 1960 that share the details of eating, staying warm, sleeping, hydrating, and staying well mentally and physically?

Anything by Norman Clyde, Clarence King is good too.

Hmmmm, would love to read about this as well .... probably a ton to learn from their organic school of hard knocks lessons ....

You can read the accounts of the old Everest climbers in the 1920's, Mallory and Irvine and all that.

For clothing, they tended to wear many thin layers of silk and wool. For footware, they tended to wear full leather boots with hobnails driven into the soles. For cooking, they often had alcohol cookers that didn't work very good.

The Brits learned how to go a long way on kippered herring and a bit of lukewarm tea.

--B.G.--

Fred Beckey had his first book published in 1949 but most of his books are from the 60's and 70's.Born in 1923 he still climbs

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=9373

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Beckey

Edited by annapurna on 06/09/2012 12:36:07 MDT.

I was fortunate to attend a Kurt Diemberger presentation earlier this year - one of the original of the earliest 8000 meter summit mountaineers. A fantastic awe-inspiring presentation.

http://www.amazon.com/Kurt-Diemberger-Omnibus-Summits-Secrets/dp/0898866065

There is also the Smithsonian Mountaineers - gives a nice chronological order to the mountaineers, development of the tools and means of mountaineering advancement.

http://www.amazon.com/Mountaineers-DK-Publishing/dp/0756686822/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339359339&sr=1-1&keywords=smithsonian+mountaineers

Maybe "our own" Dan McHale might post some stuff. He climbed with folks like Galen Rowell and Fred Beckey when he was a teenager.