After almost 35 years photographing the people who live in the mountains of the Himalaya, Pat  and Baiba Morrow have produced their most extensive photographic tribute to the region. Heart of the Himalaya offers 170 beautiful images from Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, northern India  and China’s Xinjiang Uygur and Sichuan provinces.

Heart of the Himalaya is a multimedia/multi-touch ebook for Apple’s stunning iBook platform, best viewed on an iPad, but also readable on a Mac with the latest OS. It grew out of an acclaimed photo exhibit of the same name that opened in Banff’s Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in late October 2014.

“We sorted through 22,000 slides in search of a few dozen memorable pictures that would represent the Tibetan culture of the Himalaya for the exhibit. Eventually the book mushroomed to include mountain cultures from the Sacred Peaks of Muli in Sichuan province to the Shimshal Valley in northern Pakistan, ” explains Pat Morrow, a respected adventure photographer and videographer who happens to have been the first person to complete mountaineering’s Seven Summits challenge. (The B.C. native climbed the highest peaks on each continent, including
Everest and Australasia’s Carstensz Pyramid.)

After completing his Seven-Summits grand slam in 1986, Pat turned his attention from summits to the exotic people and sacred valleys in their shadows, joined by his photographer wife Baiba, who had first trekked through Nepal in 1980. Together, they travelled the trails and mountain passes that criss-cross the Himalaya and focused their cameras on the harsh but inspiring life of the people living at the upper levels of human existence.

The Morrows, who live in the Rockies of southeastern British Columbia, have visited the Himalaya nearly three dozen times and have spent the equivalent of three and a half years there on assignment for magazines, book publishers and television broadcasters. Their journeys included six mountaineering expeditions for Pat, three of them on 8000-m peaks, a 10,000-km overland journey around the Himalaya, part of it along Asia’s Silk Road — 1,000 km of it by  bicycle —and an 80-day trek from Annapurna to Everest that entailed 40,000 metres of ascents and descents.

Heart of the Himalaya is published by Bungalo Books. Bungalo also produced Pat Morrow’s Everest: High Expectations iBook in 2012.
For review copies, cover shots, sample photographs or more information, contact publisher Frank B. Edwards at fedwards@bungalobooks.com or (613) 374-1243.
For interviews with the Morrows, contact focus@PatMorrow.com or call (250) 341-3554.

The Canadian link is: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/heart-of-the-himalaya/id931957009?mt=11
The U.S.A. link is: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/heart-of-the-himalaya/id931957009?mt=11