author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
If, like me, you’ve never wondered why Google don’t feature mountaineers on their daily Google Doodle, then you would have been surprised to open your web browser on Wednesday to find a cartoon line drawing of somebody in a pith helmet tugging on a rope.
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Yes, I know that a number of pedants will read the title of this blog post and mutter under their breaths with a shrug of indignation: ‘What was the highest mountain in the world before Everest was discovered? Why, Everest
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Nobody knows if Edward Whymper made the first ascent of Carihuairazo in 1880. Nor was Whymper very sure himself. He made an ascent of a summit, but whether it was the main one is open to debate. In this post I examine the evidence.
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The story of British climber Tom Ballard, who has been missing on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan for nine days now, is a particularly poignant one. Twenty-four years ago his mother Alison Hargreaves also lost her life on another mountain in Pakistan, K2.
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How high Humboldt and Boussingault climbed on Chimborazo has been the subject of much debate. When Edward Whymper made the first ascent in 1880, he was baffled by their descriptions of the climb. So what happened, and how high did they really get?
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A Chinese cyclist has recently completed the first ever Everesting – where a cyclist repeatedly climbs the same hill until they’ve biked the height of Everest – on the side of Everest itself. It’s a story I first reported on a few months earlier.
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No fewer than seven countries have mountains on their national flags. To spare you from ruining your eyesight by squinting at a database of world flags to find out which ones, and to give you more time to read angry social media posts, here’s the full list.
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It’s a little-known fact that in 1738, during a boring period of the French Geodesic Mission to Ecuador, the scientist Pierre Bouguer decided to use Ecuador’s highest mountain, Chimborazo, to prove Newton’s theory of gravity.
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Tomek Mackiewicz’s death on Nanga Parbat carries a number of characteristics of a Shakespearean tragedy. It has a tragic hero with a tragic flaw that will ultimately lead to his downfall. It involves a tragic waste, an external conflict, and even a catharsis.
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I’ve seen all sorts of strange things on mountain summits, including crosses, prayer flags, statues of the Virgin Mary, radio masts, Ordnance Survey trig points, and even one or two restaurants, but this has to be the strangest thing yet.
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