Hiking Books for Christmas

Okay, so it’s a little late in the day to still be Christmas shopping, but I suspect there are a few of you out there that are still searching for a stocking filler for your hiking mad loved one. Here’s three recommendations for you - two I have read in recent months, another is a favourite I reviewed a couple of years ago.

Paul Besley’s new book The Search is, in his own words, “a search for people, and also a search for me.” This journey is led by Scout, an energetic Border Collie that Paul adopts, and together they train to become a qualified mountain rescue dog team. They go on to find the lost, the broken, and the vulnerable.

However, the real story isn’t about the thousands of hours of training, the rescues, or the landscape; it’s about the bond between man and hound. With the support of his partner Alison, this bond helps Paul confront the early life experiences that continue to haunt him—not just mentally, but physically, as the legacy of his time in the steel industry resurfaces with terminal consequences.

That might sound grim, but The Search is far from bleak. Scout teaches Paul to live in the moment, to break free from past demons, and to embrace a life of greater freedom. The book’s message is powerful, and I think Paul shows great courage in sharing his life, struggles and all. His wisdom and humour shine through, and his writing style draws you in. You’ll feel as if you’re sitting in his living room, listening to him recount stories of characters from a bygone industry that shaped the lives of many men of Paul’s generation.

In a world full of outdoor literature, Paul and Scout’s story stands out. It’s one that deserves to be told and, more importantly, deserves to be read.

I recently shared a YouTube live discussion with Tony Hobbs and Chris Townsend. Chris is arguably the UK’s most experienced backpacker and the author of 26 books. I thought it was time I read one of his works, so I started with the newly republished edition of High Summer. The book recounts Chris’s 1988 continuous walk along the length of the Canadian Rockies, a journey that had never been done before. The 1,600-mile trek began in the southern national parks, such as Banff and Jasper, which have well-marked trails and are frequented by many visitors.

It became clear very quickly that the northern part of the Rockies was a true wilderness then. Chris was essentially venturing into mountains rarely visited, disappearing for weeks at a time without any means of communication or immediate access to rescue. To put that into perspective, in 2024, if a skier in Antarctica doesn’t check in every 48 hours, a rescue plane is sent to search for them.

Like every good travel story you become immersed with Chris as he bushwhacks dense forest, fords rivers, makes camp, climbs lofty passes, and encounters the kindness of strangers on a truly remarkable journey that is very well told.

Many of us gaze out longingly from our office windows and dream of a more adventurous life, to live with more freedom and variety. But for the odd exception, there are very few who end up going after these fleeting daydreams. Instead, we usually make do with burning a week or two of allocated vacation to hike part of a long-distance trail, or clip bolts on a sun-drenched coastline.

British hiker Andrew Terrill, and author of a new book The Earth Beneath My Feet, is one of those exceptions. After a potentially fatal tumble down a snow slope in the Swiss Alps, he wanted more from his quiet life in the suburbs of London. So off he went on a 2,200-mile jaunt across the Alps. But that didn’t quite hit the spot, so he tried three months hiking in the Pyrenees.

“Once home from the Pyrenees I began considering the possibility of something bigger,” writes Terrill in his debut book The Earth Beneath My Feet. “I wanted a journey I could lose myself in completely…I didn’t want a journey that ended with the summer. What I wanted was a new way of life.”

This new way of life took the form of a mammoth undertaking - a 7,000-mile walk from the very toe of Italy to the far north of Norway. In The Earth, Beneath my Feet, Terrill tells the story of the first eight months of the walk, which he set out on in Spring 1997, as a wide-eyed twenty-something.

It would have been easy for Terrill to focus his tale on the landscape or the physical hardship of the walk alone, but instead, The Earth Beneath My Feet is a multi-layered narrative of toil, landscape, history, and self-growth. At its heart, it is a story of an outside journey inward. Of a young man on a life-changing walk, during which he developed a closer kinship with not only the natural world but his inner self.