At high altitude

There is a moment, when looking at certain mountain images, when you stop thinking about the summit and start imagining yourself inside the story. Call of the Mountains (Ed. Gestalten) begins exactly there: in that mental space where the desire to leave meets the need to slow down, observe, breathe. It is neither a “technical” book nor a simple coffee table book to flip through absentmindedly, but an editorial object that blends adventure, culture, and introspection, telling the magnetism of the great mountain ranges through powerful photographs and stories that stay with you. Here, mountains become places of transformation, extreme territories where physical endurance is tested, but above all emotional resilience, settings where silence weighs as much as effort and every gesture is essential.


"Photo Jeremiah Watt, Call of the Mountains, gestalten 2025" (United States)

From the wildest Alaska, with pioneering ski descents on untouched snow, to the great walls of Greenland and the plateaus of China, the book follows women and men who choose “human-powered” adventure, relying on their own bodies and a direct relationship with the environment. It is not a muscular celebration of achievement, but a narrative made of waiting, mistakes, listening, and respect, where endurance is not only athletic but everyday - especially for the communities who live at these altitudes and whom the book portrays with a curious and never colonial gaze.


"Photo Michael Dammer, Call of the Mountains, gestalten 2025" (Bolivia)

The selected stories move across different disciplines - skiing, climbing, trail running, paragliding - but share the same tension toward the limit and the same desire for discovery: there are those who learn hard lessons among ice and wind in Northern Canada, those who glide down untracked slopes in Alaska, those who explore the lost roads of the Andes to rediscover the very meaning of going to the mountains, and those who fly above the valleys of Pakistan chasing a fragile and powerful freedom. Call of the Mountains is also a book about joy, beauty, and hope, without hiding fatigue and risk, and it does so with a refined yet never glossy aesthetic, capable of conveying the roughness of the places and the vulnerability of those who cross them.