"With Poets on the Peaks, writer-photographer John Suiter has created a literary portrait of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac centered around their experiences as fire lookouts in the early 1950s. Featuring Suiter's evocative photographs of the peaks, fire lookouts, and mountain vistas, as well as numerous historical pictures, the book is also a photographic homage to the Cascadian landscape.".

"Based on scores of previously unpublished letters, journals, and recent interviews with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and others, Poets on the Peaks traces the early development of a community of poets, including the famous Six Gallery reading that took place in San Francisco in October of 1955. It contains cameos by fellow poets and mountain-climbers Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia and Michael McClure.

It is also a book about Dharma and the years of Dharma Bums, from Snyder's 1951 road-side revelation in the Nevada desert that led him to drop out of academia and head for Japan, to Kerouac's lonely vigil with The Diamond Sutra on Desolation Peak, to Philip Whalen's ordination as a Zen priest."--BOOK JACKET.