Quest into the Unknown: My life as a climbing nomad

Highly Commended, Outdoor Book category, Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild Awards for Excellence


We are all climbing where we are and with the gear we use in no small part due to Tony Howard’s quest for adventure.


Tony Howard rose to fame in 1965 as a member of a group of young climbers from northern England who made the first British ascent of Norway’s Troll Wall; a climb described by Joe Brown as, ‘One of the greatest ever achievements by British rock climbers’. Tony went on to design the modern sit harness, now used worldwide by most climbers. He founded the company Troll Climbing Equipment but never stopped exploring. Quest into the Unknown is his story.


Tony has dedicated his life to travelling the world in search of unclimbed rock faces and remote trekking adventures. The scale of his travels is vast: he has visited all of the North African countries, much of the Arab land of the Middle East, the mountainous regions of Scandinavia, Canada and the rocky spine of the Americas, the Himalaya, remote Indian provinces, South East Asia, Madagascar, South Georgia and Antarctica. This book, the last word in adventure travel, takes the reader from Tony’s youth spent developing the crags of the English Peak District, via whaling ships in the Southern Ocean, thousand-mile canoe trips in the Canadian Arctic, living amongst the Bedouin in the rocky mountains of Jordan, to the isolated opium tribes of Thailand.


Tony Howard’s Quest into the Unknown is the jaw-dropping account of a life of adventure that is the very definition of true exploration.