author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
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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Have you ever been so exhausted on a mountain that you wish you could crawl back down? I’ve been there and written a book about it. But which mountains provided the hardest physical challenge? Here are my top five.
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Today’s Everest climbers are often compared unfavourably with the heroic expeditions of the past. But are we so very different from our predecessors? In today’s post I profile an infamous expedition from 1972 that was dogged by controversy.
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Responding to reports that Everest has become too easy to climb, the government of Nepal has announced a new set of arbitrary criteria in an effort to limit the numbers and produce a better quality of climber.
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I expect most of us have experienced it at some time in our lives: escaping the office for a few weeks of sunshine, only to end up somewhere wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume. Nobody likes rain, but sometimes it just won’t stop.
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I sometimes get asked for photography advice, including detailed questions about what equipment to use, tips on exposure, focal length and aperture size. I’ve answered the question a few times now, and in doing so have managed to distil my advice into just 5 easy steps.
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There is now so much human excrement on Mount Everest experts predict that by 2015 it will reach the Moon. Luckily Nepal’s government has announced it will be building a new state-of-the-art toilet at Everest Base Camp.
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With the news that a man climbed Snowdon pushing a brussels sprout with his nose, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at what other silly things have been done on mountains. So here are some of the world’s more improbable first ascents.
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With vicars treated like lapdogs by cretinous narcissists, a crisis in church matrimony was inevitable. This week on the Footsteps of the Mountain blog we welcome Tony Gould as our special guest blogger, who will be talking knowledgeably about one of his favourite topics, marriage and road traffic accidents.
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There have been some strange names given to mountains over the years, often for very obscure reasons. Recently the Nepal Mountaineering Association has been applying more modern names, and has just given two peaks onomatopoeic titles that resemble the sound of somebody throwing up.
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