Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin · 2006 · overland

Greg Mortenson's 2006 bestseller, which sold four million copies and put schools in the Karakoram. Read alongside Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit and the 2011 Montana investigation: the schools were real, the money was not always, and the founding journey mapped here is the one the book describes rather than the one that happened.

1. 1
   Berkeley

   A trauma nurse living out of his car between shifts, saving for an expedition - the Bay Area years before any of it, and the sister whose death he means to climb K2 in memory of.

2. 2
   Islamabad

   1993, and the flight in - the start of a journey the book describes in detail and which later reporting established did not happen in the order given here.

3. 3
   Skardu

   The Baltistan town where expeditions organise: porters, flour, kerosene, and the last road head before the Braldu gorge and the walk in.

4. 4
   Askole

   The last village, and the beginning of the glacier trek - a week's walk from here to the mountain, with everything carried.

5. 5
   Concordia

   Where the Baltoro meets the Godwin-Austen, and four of the world's fourteen highest peaks stand within sight of one campsite.

6. 6
   K2

   The 1993 attempt, abandoned at 24,000 feet to bring down a sick climber - after which, in the book's telling, Mortenson comes off the mountain exhausted and takes a wrong turn.

7. 7
   Korphe

   The village on the Braldu where he is said to have been nursed back to health, and where he promises to build a school - the founding scene of the whole enterprise, and the part Krakauer showed was not true.

8. 8
   Bozeman

   Montana, and the Central Asia Institute - which did build schools, and whose accounts a state investigation later found had been used as the author's private travel fund.