author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Be a good person and you too can become a demigod Trekkers and mountaineers who spend a lot of time travelling in the Himalayas often experience the feeling of being gompered out, ie. having visited so many Buddhist monasteries (or
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It’s an old cliché that there’s nothing quite like reaching the summit of a mountain, but the feeling of elation when you return to base camp and the achievement begins to sink in can be just as satisfying in a
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I was thinking about this question last week, when a friend emailed me after returning from an expedition to Island Peak in Nepal to say he hadn’t been able to reach the summit because a section of ice climbing on
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Well, I returned from my last trip to the Himalayas in November, and I’ve just got round to getting my travel diary from my expedition to Cho Oyu online, six months later. Does anyone care? Half the team who might
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I’m going to say something that I don’t believe many people say: some of my favourite hills in the English Lake District are the rolling grassy bogland hillsides of its northern fells. There are some impressive looking mountains in the
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While sitting in my tent the other morning deciding which Scottish mountain to tackle that day, I came across a couple of passages in Cameron McNeish’s book The Munros which struck me as out of place. “It’s interesting that the
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The photograph below was taken just beneath the Kang La pass in the Annapurna region of Nepal, and shows practically the entire northern sweep of the Annapurna range from Annapurna II on the left to Tilicho Peak on the right.
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Joking aside, I think the view up Fan y Big must be about the best in the Brecon Beacons, looking back across the cwm to Cribyn, with Pen y Fan, the highest mountain in South Wales, behind it. It was
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While every man and his dog were busy climbing Everest last year, including a 13 year old American boy, a few short miles away a handful of international teams were battling for their lives on Makalu, the world’s 5th highest
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“Every step was dogged by a presentiment of catastrophe, as if, out of the mists above, a white wave of death would engulf us.” Is it time for a mountaineer to begin questioning his sanity when he reads a book
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