Legendary Canmore Alpinist Barry Blanchard Tells His Story in New Memoir

Barry Blanchard, one of Canada’s most influential alpinists and mountain guides, has a new book coming out on September 22, 2026.

The Echo: Stories from the Edge of Survival is Blanchard’s second memoir, picking up where his 2014 book, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains, left off.

“The Calling covered the first and second quarters of my life,” Blanchard explains in the introduction to The Echo, “but then there was a shift in my third quarter, when my daughters were born. Fatherhood changed me.”

The book follows Blanchard through some of the defining climbs and expeditions of his career, including the Infinite Spur on Alaska's Mount Foraker, attempts on Everest and K2, the first ascent of Infinite Patience on Mount Robson's Emperor Face and the first ascent of M-16 on Howse Peak.

But rather than simply recounting Blanchard’s many mountaineering achievements, The Echo reveals the heavy human cost behind them. It examines the grief of losing close friends in the mountains, the breakdown of relationships and the gruelling journey of physical and cognitive rehabilitation after a near-fatal 2021 brain injury left him relearning how to stand, walk and balance on the trails of the Canmore Nordic Centre.

It’s a fast-paced, engaging and emotionally honest memoir, divided into short, dated sections that bring the reader directly into moments in Blanchard’s life.

There’s Blanchard writing his first will alone in a tiny yellow tent as darkness falls over the Himalayas, the night before a dangerous ultralight solo climb he had repeatedly been warned against. There are the births of his daughters. And there’s the time he held hands with Sylvester Stallone to keep the actor from falling off a 3,000-foot peak in slippery green lizard-skin cowboy boots.

A Change in Perspective

Blanchard’s first book, The Calling, followed a young man whose dedication to alpinism was all-consuming and absolute. In The Echo, an aging Blanchard retains his love for the mountains but comes to place a higher value on the people and relationships that make life meaningful.

“The summit is what they define as a success in mountaineering,” Blanchard said in an interview. “But for me, the most important attempts we made on mountains, we never made the top. And some of the most trying and the greatest adventures I’ve had in my life are climbs that we didn’t make the top.”

Looking back, Blanchard said he realizes the most important part of his alpinism was never the feats he achieved, but the people he shared them with.

One key factor in that shift was the birth of his daughters in 2004 and 2007.

“Every time I made one of those hundreds of decisions you make every day during climbs about risk, I saw my daughter’s face. Every time,” Blanchard said. “It definitely changed my risk tolerance.”

Another was the traumatic brain injury he suffered in 2021. His recovery involved relearning how to balance on one leg, walking single blocks around his neighbourhood and lying awake at 3 a.m., terrified he would never be able to climb or guide again.

During his recovery, three climbers from one of the most important expeditions of his younger life, Nanga Parbat, travelled to Canmore to see him.

“They had to see me and touch me, and be physically close to me,” he said. “Looking back on Nanga Parbat, we were in our late 20s and very early 30s. We just couldn’t tell each other that we loved each other.”

That idea runs through The Echo: the mountains may provide the setting, but relationships are what endure.

Looking Back on a Life in the Mountains

The Echo has been many years in the making. Blanchard said he was already thinking about a second book while writing 2014’s The Calling, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 2015.

For The Echo, he originally submitted a 250,000-word manuscript to his publisher, enough material, he joked, for two books. He ultimately had to cut it roughly in half.

Even after that process, Blanchard said revisiting his past changed his understanding of what had mattered.

The book's structure is also personal in a less obvious way. Each chapter is accompanied by songs that were important to Blanchard at different points in his life.

His musical influences moved from the country and western music he heard growing up, including Hank Williams Sr., a favourite of his mother's, into punk rock and other music that became important during his climbing years.

The result is a memoir that isn't only a record of where Blanchard climbed, but of what surrounded those experiences: music, friendships, family and the culture of climbing at the time.

When asked what he hopes climbers and non-climbers will take from The Echo, Blanchard pointed to an idea borrowed from another artist he admires, Bruce Springsteen: people should leave a concert with “a little something” for themselves.

“Any kind of help or guidance or inspiration, vision, anything like that that someone might take away from reading the book,” Blanchard said, “definitely makes it worth writing.”

The Echo: Stories from the Edge of Survival will be available September 22 in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.