$55.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
280 pages with 228 color photographs by the authors, 18 line-art maps, and 1 full-spread map = 247
12.0″ x 10.0″ landscape
ISBN: 978–1–938086–93–9
Published in August 2022
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the
Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
Friday, December 29, 2023
Exhibition opening reception
December 2023 – February 2024
“William Frej – Rock Art of the Greater Southwest”
Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Friday, October 7, 2022
Exhibition opening reception
Saturday, October 8, from 1- 3 p.m.
Lecture
Friday, October 7 – November 8, 2022
Exhibition: “Travels Across the Roof of the World: A Himalayan Memoir” by William and Anne Frej
Peyton Wright Gallery, 237 E Palace Ave, Santa Fe, NM
Article with photographs about the book in Blind Magazine 2023
Summer Reading List (Ralph Lauren Magazine, 2023)
by William Frej with Anne Frej
with a foreword by Michael Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison
and an essay by Edwin Bernbaum
Winner of the Silver Medal for Travel Books from the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation
Winner, Best Coffeetable Book, 2023 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards
Honorable Mention in Books/Nature from the International Photography Awards 2023
Winner of the Best-in-Show Award, Winner in Art and Photography, Winner for the best Memoir, 2023 Southwest Book Design and Production Awards
Winner of the Silver Medal 2023 Prix de la Photographie de Paris
Finalist in the 2023 Southwest Book Design and Production Awards (SWBDA)
2023 International Book Awards for Photography/Coffee Table Books and Travel: Guides and Essays
2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist in the Coffee Table/Photography category
2022 INDIES Gold Medal Winner for Travel and Gold Medal Winner for Coffee Table Books
2022 Silver Medal for Books, Tokyo International Foto Awards
2022 BIFA Silver Winner in Nature Category (Budapest International Foto Awards)
Travels Across the Roof of the World provides a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of this vast region, from the Pamir Mountains in Kyrgyzstan through Afghanistan’s fabled Hindu Kush, the Karakoram in Pakistan, and the Great Himalaya Range that stretches across northern India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan.
Unique in scope among photo books on the Himalaya, Travels Across the Roof of the World chronicles William and Anne Frej’s more than twenty pilgrimages throughout the area, spanning forty years and 3,000 miles through some of the world’s most remote and difficult-to-reach country. Inspired by the devotion to Tibetan Buddhism of the villagers whom they met on their first trek to Nepal in 1981, the Frejs set out on an epic quest to document Asia’s highest peaks as well as the lives of the resilient people living in these remote mountain communities.
When they began, trekkers from the West through these regions were few. Even now, trips are demanding––but not nearly as harsh as the daily lives of the residents, who continue to exist in a kind of stunning isolation that has allowed them to maintain rich cultural traditions and spiritual practices that have sustained them over many centuries. Michael Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison’s foreword provides an intimate, human perspective on the people of the area while Edwin Bernbaum’s essay adds to the depth of the pictures, with his focus on the symbolism, religious importance, and associated legends of these sacred places. The authors also share extensive encounters about the places they saw and how they have changed over time.
About
About the Authors
William Frej has been photographing indigenous people for more than forty years while living in Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and other remote, mountainous regions of Asia as a career diplomat with the United States Agency for International Development. His work has been featured in a number of exhibitions, galleries, and museums in the U.S. and Mexico. His recent book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (2020), is the recipient of eight awards, including the Silver Medal from both the Independent Publishers Book Awards and the Moscow International Photography Awards.
Anne Frej is a retired urban planner who focused on feasibility studies and design concepts for real estate projects in the United States, Indonesia, Central Europe, and Central Asia. At the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., she directed books on real estate development, and at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, she served as a cultural resources planner.
About the Contributor
Edwin Bernbaum, Ph.D., is a lecturer, author, and scholar of comparative religion and mythology whose work focuses on the relationship between culture and the environment. He is the author of Sacred Mountains of the World (1990), which won the Commonwealth Club of California’s gold medal for best work of nonfiction, and The Way to Shambala (1989), a study of Tibetan myths and legends of hidden valleys and their symbolism.
Praise
“A simply gorgeous coffee-table style volume, Travels Across the Roof of the World: A Himalayan Memoir is a stunningly beautiful series of full color photographs graced with occasional commentaries by the husband and wife team of William and Anne Frej. An armchair traveler’s delight, Travels Across the Roof of the World is a strikingly memorable and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, community, and academic library Tibet/Pakistan Travel Guide and Landscape Photography collections.”
—James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Midwest Book Review
“William and Anne Frej have created a magnificent book that provides intimacy, acute detail, context, history, and ethnography of a vast swath of incomparable, and ecologically critical geography—the Himalaya. With nearly forty years of passionate exploration of this region—from one end to the other, beginning with Manaslu in 1981—they offer an engaging and deeply felt perspective on a subject more typically associated with the fever of conquest on the world’s highest peaks.”
—Michael Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison, from their Foreword
“In the vertical world of the Himalaya, it is hard to say which is more seductive: the stupendously stern and spacious land or the layer upon layer of deep-time culture, so rich in color, diversity, and sinewy strength. Bill and Anne Frej explore both of these dimensions in their opulent book, Travels Across the Roof of the World,which will lift you out of your armchair and send you looking for your trekking boots.”
—William deBuys, author of The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, and The Last Unicorn: The Search for Earth’s Rarest Creature
“William Frej’s enticingly sharp and magnificent photographs of the Himalayan landscape present pristine white ice-mountain walls, deep blue skies, and earthen, wood, and stone villages unblemished by the accouterments of modernity. Taken over the past four decades, these images provide a powerful and important record of the Himalayas long before motor roads cut deep scars into the mountainsides where he and his wife trekked, and large groups of explorers and climbers started leaving behind acres of trash. Frej’s evocative photographs of the Himalayan people he encountered also seem from another era—and indeed, many of them are–reminding the viewer of Roland Michaud’s or Eric Valli’s portraits: romantic and crisp like the landscapes they inhabit.”
—Kevin Bubriski, photographer and author of Kailash Yatra, with Abhimanyu Pandey, Mustang in Black and White, Nepal, 1975-2011, with Sienna Craig.
“Part travel picture book, part memoir, Willam and Anne Frey’s Travels Across the Roof of the World (photos by Bill, memoir text by Anne) is a luxuriously printed book. It is heavy in the hand, its pages are thick, and the printing, the design, and the maps are superlatively done.
… A third word that I hear in my ears—or, if it makes any sense at all, in my eyes—is the word “Kodachrome.” We’re taking a kind of religion here so let me explain to the uninitiated. In the film days, there was black and white film and color film, and in color film there was negative film (which most people used, the orange-colored stuff that made prints) and there was slide film (also called reversal film or just transparency film). Slide film came in two types: Kodachrome and then all the rest. For many photographers of the color film era Kodachrome was less choice and more sacrament. There is sad news here. They no longer make Kodachrome nor process it. It is gone. But not entirely gone. Bill Frej knows Kodachrome, knows its special color palette, feels its warm presence, and he has had his Kodachrome slides lovingly scanned and then sequenced along with his digital files (apparently set to mimic Kodachrome colors the best that they can), printed in ink with much of the glory of the slide film right there on the page. The mountains reflect more color than seems possible, the faces of people are radiant, the skies too blue to be any real skies of this Earth. Some of the images hint at a brightness and a richness last seen on a glass-beaded screen in a dimly lit room. Books are funny things. You open them thinking you are going to see one thing and then you feel something else quite altogether unexpected. Bill and Anne chronicle their many wanderings in the highest mountains, decades of adventures, and I’m looking at those Tibetan faces and those mountains and I’m casting about for what is missing, not inside the book but outside of it.”
—Darin Boville, The Bigger Camera (read full review here, pdf)
Slide Show
My Place
Moving to California from Chicago in 1973 opened my eyes and mind to a whole new geography—the grand Sierra Nevada Mountain range. Its accompanying pleasures—hiking, climbing, and skiing—and meeting the people involved with these outdoor disciplines provided a new direction in my life that I have embraced for the past fifty years.
Berkeley, my new home, was a perfect location for exploring this mountain culture. The Sierras were only a three-hour drive away, and the Sierra Club’s national headquarters in San Francisco were just a short drive across the Bay Bridge, where slide shows and lectures by important mountain explorers were held monthly. A number of exceptional bookstores on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue carried first-edition books on subjects ranging from historic Himalayan explorations to Tibetan Buddhism. Mountain Travel and Inner Asia had just opened their new trekking businesses. North Face and Sierra Designs opened their flagship stores and factories for the first time in West Berkeley. For someone interested in mountains and mountain lore, Berkeley was the center of the universe.
Berkeley and the Bay Area were also meccas for photography My hiking and trekking trips throughout the Sierras, Cascades in Washington, and Andes in Peru provided ample opportunities for me to pursue this passion. And it was easy back then to meet the luminaries in the field as well as those who were also stars in the mountain-climbing world. Meeting Ansel Adams in Yosemite and taking photography workshops with Galen Rowell, a brilliant photographer and author who lost his life too early in his career, guided my pursuit of photography. Galen’s compelling books on his climbs in the Himalaya, the Karakoram, and Inner Asia inspired not only my photography, but also my expanding interests in mountains in that part of Asia.
Another Berkeley mountaineering legend is Arlene Blum. Her participation in the 1976 American Bicentennial expedition on Mount Everest established her mountaineering credentials. In 1978 she led a successful all-women’s climb of Annapurna, the tenth-highest mountain in the world. Her book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (1980), detailed this major feat, as well as its tragedy, when two of her team members died during this climb. Her book and subsequent lectures and photographs were inspirations for both my photography and mountain pursuits.
In 1980 I met Anne, my future wife, on a ski trip to Lake Tahoe. Our common interests in mountains—their people and cultures as well as walking their remote paths—motivated us to do two long treks in Nepal during the early 1980s. We fell in love with the Himalayas, as well as each other, and married in Berkeley in 1982. Desiring more engagement with the Himalayas, we conferred with another close Berkeley friend, Hugh Swift, one of the two individuals to whom our book, Travels Across the Roof of the World, is dedicated. Hugh personified what trekking is all about, walking to and through every corner of the Himalaya. He always shared his insights, knowledge, and special stories about this culturally rich mountain range. He is the one who inspired us to take a two-year “sabbatical” to walk to the base camps of the world’s ten highest peaks, which we chronicle in our book. Along the way, he strongly advocated that we make a pilgrimage to the sacred Mount Kailas in western Tibet.
For Anne and me, the rest is history. We were among the first Americans to trek to the base camps of the world’s ten highest peaks. We were among the first Westerners to circumambulate Mount Kailas, a thirty-mile pilgrimage, in a single day, in keeping with the Tibetan pilgrims we joined. We have returned to the Himalayas many times over the past forty-two years, lugging duffel bags filled with Kodachrome 25 film and, most recently, digital cameras to capture well over 50,000 images of this vast region. We have lived and worked in Central Asia and Afghanistan, homes of Central Tien Shan, the Pamir, and the Hindu Kush mountain ranges, all at the edges of the Great Himalayan Range.
Hugh Swift is no longer with us, after his tragic death in Berkeley in 1991, but his spirit lives on in our memoir and in my photographs. While we do less trekking now, our on-going relationship to this region is as strong as ever and includes our support for the higher education of Chandra Rai, the charming and studious son of the second individual our book is dedicated to, Ram Rai, our longtime guide, mentor, and friend.
Copyright © 2022 William Frej. All rights reserved.
My place is Augusta, a tiny town in Missouri where I spent my early childhood and where my family lived on a beautiful ten-acre farm that had been a winery before Prohibition. It was an idyllic childhood that clearly influenced my love of spending time outdoors.
The town was founded during the 1830s by German immigrants who must have found the green, rolling hills in that section of Missouri similar to the places they left for various reasons. Originally it was located on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, about forty miles from its confluence with the Mississippi River, near St. Louis. After a big flood in 1872, the Missouri changed course, leaving acres of fertile farmland behind. With the right soil and climate for growing grapes, Augusta became a major wine-making region in the early twentieth century. This came to an abrupt stop in 1917, thanks to the 18th Amendment, also known as Prohibition. The thriving wineries, restaurants, and saloons were forced to shut down. By the late 1940s, when my dad bought ten bluff-top acres with a house, barn, and wine cellar plus forty acres of farmland, the town numbered only about 200 people.
Our place was the one-time Mount Pleasant Winery. Located on the edge of the river’s former bluff, the property looked out over a patchwork design of fields of corn and soybeans that ended at a line of trees along the Missouri River some ten miles away. The old grape vines were gone, and in their place were flower beds, a vegetable garden, an orchard with peach and cherry trees, and several old wooden “out buildings.” There were two large wine cellars still filled with large, wooden wine casks that smelled faintly of wine. My dad called it a “Gentleman’s Farm” because he leased the agricultural land below our house to a local man, and the only things close to farming that he did were to cut the grass and grow vegetables. Our animals included many cats, a Beagle named Pokey, and a donkey named Pedro.
I suspect there are many reasons why my memories of Augusta and our home are so vivid. My parents told us to pay attention to the little things that we saw around us there because the world was modernizing and these slices of life from an earlier time would not be around much longer: the still-operational blacksmith shop, the general store with bins of nails and farm equipment in the back, the Model T car that Mr. Fore drove, and the recognizable German accents of the town’s second- and third-generation residents. Images are also seared into my mind, thanks to the black-and-white photographs my dad took of us in those days. I can picture my sister Janey and myself in baggy swimming suits proudly standing in the cattle water tank that we used as a swimming pool or my brother Jim and myself sitting on a stoop and cradling a new puppy. My brother Bob was the little kid always in a dirty t-shirt and big smile, and my youngest sister Laura was the little girl looking over at her older siblings for acceptance.
Another reason for my still-strong and colorful memories of Augusta date from a State Department training class that my husband, Bill, and I took before taking off for his first assignment with USAID in Jakarta, Indonesia. The course, which was called “SOS,” provided tips on topics such as road safety and how to detect surveillance while living overseas. At the end of the second day a distinguished-looking older man told us he was going to teach us about hostage survival. This was an issue I never imagined I would need to worry about, but I paid attention. His advice was practical and made me wonder if he had a specific experience that informed his commentary. In short, he said that one of the worst aspects of being held hostage is boredom and that a useful way to pass time is to pick a place and go through every inch of it in your mind. I chose our home in Augusta, and to this day I picture its corners and hidden places when I am bored.
I have lived and traveled in many places since my childhood in Augusta. Bill and I spent nearly forty years living in Indonesia, Poland, Kazahkstan, and Afghanistan and traveling extensively throughout regions of the Himalaya. We spent many days hiking through remote areas and small villages, meeting people whose lives focus on their immediate environment, including their fields and animals. These experiences bring me back to my early years in rural Missouri and keep me interested in exploring more.
Copyright © 2022 Anne Frej. All rights reserved.