author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
When the Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen stood on the highest point in South America in 1897, as far as anyone knew it was the highest place man had ever been, but he stood there alone. His expedition leader Edward Fitzgerald had been left behind with altitude sickness at 6000m.
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In my spare time I’ve recently taken up the role of trustee for a charity which provides sustainable aid for education in Nepal. It’s a privilege to be able to give something back to a country which has given me so much, and how I ended up doing this role has been an interesting story in itself.
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I watched a fantastic documentary on BBC4 last night which demonstrated how the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in the United States benefited the entire ecosystem almost immediately.
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Pete Boardman was only 31 years old when he went missing with his climbing partner Joe Tasker on the Northeast Ridge of Everest in 1982, but already he was a climbing legend who had packed an enormous amount into his short life. He climbed Everest by a new route on the Southwest Face in 1975 at the age of only 24, and the world’s third highest mountain Kangchenjunga also by a new route in 1979.
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With the cities of York and Leicester engaged in an unseemly tug-of-war for the bones of King Richard III, I can exclusively reveal the city of New York has entered the contest to inter the corpse of the former English monarch, who died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
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An obscure subject for a blog post if ever there was one, but one of the perks of writing a mountaineering blog is every so often I get asked some very obscure and intriguing questions by email out of the
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Congratulations to the BBC for their fantastic documentary Climbing Everest with a Mountain on My Back, shown on BBC4 last night, which provided insight into the lives of the Sherpas who help western mountaineers climb Everest every year.
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