Coffee Table Book of: Mountains (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Mountains is a large format book of mountains, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: peaks, ridges and great faces, volcanoes and flat topped mountains, glaciers and the valleys they carve, snow, high flowers and trees, and the skies, weather and wildlife of the heights, at many hours and in every season.

Needle spires rise above a small glacier, a blocky pinnacle stands on a snowy ridge, a sharp horn rises alone above a white glacier and a broad peak shows its level bands of rock, with pale limestone towers glowing at dusk, a sheer granite wall split by long cracks, a steep gully of snow and a shaded face streaked with ice.

Snow curls in cornices over a high ridge, avalanches cut bare lanes through dark forest and heap up in gullies, blades of hard snow cover a high dry plateau and old summer snow turns pink. On the high pastures stand an old log hay hut, edelweiss, deep blue gentians, moss campion, purple saxifrage and yellow glacier lilies at the edge of a melting snowbank, with a lone golden larch, an aspen grove in autumn gold, a tiny dwarf willow, a pine twisted by the wind and the last trees at the tree line.

Around the summits gather a sea of cloud, a stack of smooth lenticular clouds, a banner of cloud and a round cap cloud, while a peak glows rose red after sunset, a pink band rises over a snowy dome at dusk, a full moon silvers a range, the band of the galaxy arches over a dark peak and a thin crescent moon hangs beside another.

Short notes run through the book, on how mountains are raised and carved, the ice, snow and weather of the heights, and the plants and animals that live there: a slender, pointed spire of rock is called an aiguille, a word that means a needle, a horn is a sharp peak left where three or more glaciers have carved into a mountain from different sides, the white star of an edelweiss is not petals but woolly leaves around a cluster of tiny yellow flowers, and shafts of sunlight through gaps in cloud are almost parallel, and only seem to fan out from the sun.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.