author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
We saved the best walk for the best day. Edita and I had spied Ben Cruachan’s airy summit and hair-raising summit ridge from the top of Ben O’Cockle two days earlier. I could also see from the map that the walk across its top and that of its companion Munro Stob Daimh featured an enormous ridge.
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A short distance east of our previous day’s Munros lay Ben Lui, a mountain considered by many to be the finest peak in the Southern Highlands. I once took a photo of it from the north-east, rising majestically like a marble throne above arctic tundra. From that moment I wanted climb it. But would it live up to the promise?
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It was the fifth year in a row that Edita and I would be spending the Christmas period in Scotland trying to get up some hills, and our expectations weren’t high. Icy blizzards, deep snow, freezing fog and murderous summit winds had been our usual fare for the previous four. Would this year be any different?
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There are a lot of adjectives in the title of this post. What does it mean, precisely? There was a time in history when neither Everest nor the other 10 highest mountains in the world had been climbed. What was the highest mountain ever climbed back in those days? And what was the one before that? If you’re intrigued to find out then read on
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A short distance south of Pen y Fan, the highest peak in the Brecon Beacons is a range of peaks less well known to the outside world. The Rhigos Hills are home to the highest point in the county of Glamorgan.
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Ever since an incident in the Italian Apennines, the promise of ladders on a hiking route has made me nervous. As we approached the 11 ladders of the Grand Balcon Sud on the Tour du Mont Blanc, I wondered: would they be like the cakewalk on Everest or the sphincter ticklers on Corno Piccolo?
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Without requiring technical skills, crampons or a down-suit to fend off the biting cold, Mont Blanc trekkers cover more cumulative metres of altitude than Everest climbers. So my guidebook says about the TMB, but how did did we find it, and was it really like climbing Everest?
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This is the second of two posts about our recent visit to the mountainous island of Hispaniola. In the first post, I introduced you to the Dominican Republic, and how we came to trek there. In this post, I describe our assault on Pico Duarte (3,101m), La Pelona (3,095m) and La Rusilla (3,040m), the three highest mountains in the Caribbean.
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A few years ago, I wrote a blog post to explain that from that moment on I would aim to climb more obscure mountains that hardly anyone writes about. But how to decide which unusual peaks to climb? Well, that was the easy the bit. I would ‘go with the flow’.
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A Dickson Step is a small step around 5 to 10 centimetres high in a hotel bathroom doorway. The step is designed in such a way to be a trip hazard for unsuspecting guests who get up to relieve themselves during the night.
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