Dawn L. Hollis is a historian and hill-lover, despite being born in low-lying East Anglia. Over the course of her studies and research at Oxford, Cambridge, and St Andrews she became fascinated with the question of how people experienced mountains before the birth of mountaineering. She has spoken and written widely on the topic in academic contexts but has always felt that the stories of her early modern 'friends' deserved to be shared with a wider audience. She lives in Scotland, by the sea, with her family and a nineteenth-century iron printing press.