Inside the High Sierra

About the book

The most beautiful Sierra book ever?

Inside the High Sierra is a meticulously produced coffee-table book that will delight anyone who loves the High Sierra, fine-art-outdoor photography, or beautiful books in general. The landscape photography featured here is on par with the very best we have ever seen. Behold the crowning achievement of a climber and photographer who spent most of his life hunting beauty in California’s most iconic mountain range. Hard-bound in linen on the outside, with 55 full-color plates printed on Japanese archival paper on the inside in a 10” x 12” coffee table format. There is also plenty to read here: in addition to stories and extensive notes on the images by the author, the book features diverse and insightful contributed essays by Joseph Holmes, Michael Cohen, Laurel Fiddler, Peter Croft, Dick Dorworth, and a foreword by Thomas Hornbein.

The author’s website has a thorough preview of the book, as well as critical acclaim, reviews, and words about Claude and his artistic process.

In Claude’s words:

The work invites viewers to behold visions of wonder from this world, but more to explore what is touched within. We come to sense the majesty of the world doesn’t come only up exhausting mountain trails but waits for us also within our own luminous space of attentive awareness.

Praise

Inside the High Sierra is a luminous glimpse into what Claude Fiddler calls a “…restless uncertainty that I was in an unfamiliar reality.” His photographs are exquisitely crafted, in turns as subtle or as dramatic as they should be. They express an infatuation with the outer and inner landscapes he’s spent a lifetime exploring. So, too, do the essays that accompany this visual banquet. “I could see Half Dome and the beach at Tenaya Lake where I grew up swimming,” writes Fiddler’s daughter, Lauren. “This could be enough, I thought.” Would that we were all able to so directly experience the acute love of place celebrated in this sumptuous book. 

— Michael Kennedy, Former Publisher and Editor of Climbing Magazine

Loving a place is easy; capturing its essence is something else entirely. In this gorgeous book, Fiddler reveals the wonders of light, highlighting the Sierra’s many textures and moods. His photographs offer decades-long study in paying attention, one stunning, thoughtfully conceived frame at a time. The essays that accompany the images, from harrowing climbing tales to meditations on the properties of granite, give voice to the transformative and ultimately fragile nature of this landscape.

— Caroline VanHemert, author of The Sun is a Compass

About the author

Since the 1970s and before he became a renowned photographer, Claude Fiddler was a prominent figure in the Sierra climbing community, with high-standard first ascents in Yosemite Valley, Tuolumne Meadows and the High Sierra. He has co-authored a climbing guidebook to the range, and worked for many years as a ski patroller and mountain guide. He still lives at the foot of the mountains, with his wife and adventure partner Nancy.

Please note that including this coffee table book in your order will raise the flat rate shipping fee to $9.99 for USPS ground mail and $17.99 for USPS priority mail.