Don Forest

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Annotation Don Forest: Quest for the Summits tells the story of one of the most colorful-perhaps eccentric-people of the Canadian West, who is also an award-winning mountaineer. Yet Don Forest didn't take up the sport until he was in his mid-40s. At a time when most men are thinking of retiring from strenuous activities, Don was busy setting records: He was the first person to climb all 27 of the 11,000-foot peaks in the Canadian Rockies and Columbia Mountains in one year, and in 1991, at age 71, he was the oldest person to climb Mount Logan, Canada's highest mountain. In 1992, he celebrated his 72nd birthday with friends, cake, and champagne on the summit of Holy Cross Mountain-a 9000-foot-high mountain in southwest Alberta. Kathy Calvert's biography of Don Forest runs the gamut of emotion: Her narrative swings from the humor in Don's eccentricities and the pathos of Don's dealing with close friends lost in the mountains to the pride and satisfaction felt when Don's climbing career was recognized by his peers across Canada.