author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
While surfing YouTube the other day, feeling nostalgic for the mountains of Africa, I stumbled across David Breashears’ 2002 IMAX documentary Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa. It was an enjoyable film which had me yearning to go back.
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We hear many stories of blame on Everest, but rarely stories of heroism. This isn’t because they don’t exist, but because the media prefer to focus on the negative. In this week’s post I do my bit to rectify this with the help of an old friend.
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There are rumours that the iconic Hillary Step, Everest’s most feared obstacle on summit day, collapsed in last year’s earthquake, and has become little more than an easy snow slope. Can it be true? I examine the evidence.
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Andrew Lock was the first Australian to climb all fourteen 8000m peaks. I agree with Sir Chris Bonington: his book is honest, gritty and riveting. It’s also refreshing and humorous in places, and well worth a read if you can get your hands on a copy.
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The South Face of Aconcagua, with its tumble of icy seracs and snow chutes, has long been attractive to extreme alpinists who need a liberal sprinkling of danger with their climbing. The first team to climb it certainly got that.
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Western operators say cheap Nepali operators who employ inexperienced Sherpas are making Everest more dangerous. There are two sides to this issue, and I will do my best to outline both as I provide the commercial client’s perspective.
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Last year fifteen million people, a quarter of the population of Britain, watched the final of a cake-baking competition. In 1967 the same number watched a live broadcast of the second ascent of an obscure sea stack off the coast of Orkney.
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Any search for books about the Apennines which aren’t travel guides, leads inexorably to one book: Eric Newby’s ‘Love and War in the Apennines’. It’s a book I can relate to in two very important respects.
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I believe the Everest debate has progressed in the last couple of years, but then a badly-informed article appears in a mass-market publication which takes it back a few years, and reignites hatred against those who dream of climbing high mountains.
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One of the things that shocks people when I tell them about Everest is that I had to walk past dead bodies on my summit day. In this post I debunk a popular media myth, and discuss how we need a more mature attitude towards death.
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