author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
There aren’t many characters in Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void, and the main one spends most of the story entirely alone, contemplating existence as he crawls for three days along a glacier. How on earth were they going to make a stage version of this?
Read more
The ascent of Monte Amaro in the Italian Apennines is a magnificent skyline walk in a moonlike landscape over peaks and along ridges, but could it be that the mountain is named after an alcoholic beverage?
Read more
Budget climbing on its way out, cried a headline in the Himalayan Times. Nepal has often been seen as a cheap destination for mountaineering, but this perception is changing. I look at the reasons, examine whether it’s true and make some predictions.
Read more
Last year was an unusual one for me. There were few real plans, and my travels ended up evolving out of necessity and opportunity, but I kind of liked it that way and I believe a combination of loose planning and going with the flow is the way forward in travel.
Read more
With the news that a man climbed Snowdon pushing a brussels sprout with his nose, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at what other silly things have been done on mountains. So here are some of the world’s more improbable first ascents.
Read more
Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range offers a veritable playground for the mountain lover, be they a trekker, alpinist or high altitude snow plodder, with glorious scenery and a range of different climbing. Here’s what happened when I went there last month.
Read more
The photograph below shows Pasang Ongchu Sherpa crossing a ladder over a crevasse on Tocllaraju in Peru. A Himalayan veteran with multiple ascents of Everest and Manaslu to his name Pasang is no stranger to using ladders to get across crevasses, but even he looked a little nervous crossing this one.
Read more
By the time you read this I will be in Peru, setting out in the hope of climbing its highest mountain, 6768m Huascaran. It’s been a long time coming. My one and only visit to Peru was when I walked the Huayhuash Circuit as a novice trekker in 2002.
Read more
It’s time to say goodbye to another friend from South America who has lost his life in the mountains. The Argentine climber Leonardo Rasnik was found dead in the Peruvian Andes on Thursday. He was assistant guide when I climbed Aconcagua in 2010, and a more cheerful and enthusiastic human being you couldn’t wish to meet
Read more
No, the title of this post is not a euphemism, but a reference to the similarities between one of the great mountaineering survival stories, Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, and another less well-known survival story which happened in the Pakistan
Read more