Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs Released

So, I got the good news that Severed Press has released Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs. It is available on Amazon as a Kindle. The paperback usually follows in a week or two.

[image error]

Mountain Climbing was a story I envisioned almost a year ago. Like most everybody else, I’ve been intrigued with people who have the ability to climb massive mountain peaks around the world. It seems daunting to me, so the idea of climbing thousands of feet with only modest equipment and your skills to keep you up really inspired me. I wanted to jump into writing it immediately, but I was plowing through Ghost Dog at the time. Ghost Dog took most of 2019 to write (and it’s still not out yet), so I had to push off Mountain Climbing. I think that was a good thing.

First, it was good because I discovered Free Solo and The Dawn Wall on streaming. I’m sure you’ve watched these documentaries about Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell, and Kevin Jorgeson. I was intrigued with the “characters” (not to dehumanize them) in these documentaries, and I like a good character. I think there’s a little of them in the people ascending my mountain.

At the same time, I wanted to bite down on a topic. One of the things that really spoke to me about Backpacking With Dinosaurs was that it dealt with racism while also being a horror story about people being chased by dinosaurs. I wanted to write a similar story with real-world gravitas. In my part of Texas, the Santa Fe shooting happened only a couple years ago. So I decided to write about two mountain climbers who were memorializing their fallen friends and students who were involved in a mass shooting. My goal was to focus on the survivors and their struggles after the shooting. I did not want to glamorize the shooting. I don’t think you could. Shootings are tragic; the nadir of our society.

But for me, the story still had to be about the climb. It had to be about these twins, Travis and Brady, and everything they were going through. All the thoughts they had while climbing New Profanity Peak, but also all the obstacles they faced. Readers of Backpacking (which, by the way, you don’t have to read – these are standalone books about different sets of people and their encounters in Dinosaur Falls) will recognize some of the names of different landmarks, like New Profanity and the Seven Graves River. I wanted to concentrate on the wall, though. How do you climb a mountain that is off-limits to climbers, so there’s no data about it? What do you do when, inevitably, some of your research ends up wrong? (There’s only so much preparation you can do.) And of course, what kinds of dinosaurs live in the mountains?

That last question is especially tricky because fossils aren’t found in areas where mountains existed in the time that we associate with dinosaurs. Fossils are unearthed in sedimentary rock, not igneous rock. Imagine a dinosaur dying on a mountain. That mountain shifts and breaks and ruptures, as mountains do in geologic timescales. The bones are fractured and torn apart. Sometimes they are smashed together. So there is little evidence of what dinosaurs would actually live up in the mountains. This is where I had to take some creative control and work with the dinosaurs I had and figure out which ones are more suitable for mountain life. For that reason, I think this is the most colorful species pallet I will write for the “With Dinosaurs” books.

There really aren’t much of T. Rexes or Velociraptors, though there are some. But there is the Majungasaurus, a creature that looked like a smaller version of a T. Rex, but with a very different kind of bite. And there are lots of flying dinosaurs, like the Dimorphodons (aka, the “Wolves of the Sky.”). And I thought this adventure would be a perfect one to include the Brachiosaurus and its gargantuan heights. How did it interact with mountains, and how would it react to the mountain climbers?

I think Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs is a special book. It builds on concepts built in Backpacking, and like that book, it looks at humanity’s dark depths through the lens of creatures that haven’t existed for millennia. And yet, dinosaurs may have returned to our planet, but there have always been worse creatures.

Enjoy!

Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs is out on Amazon.