Top rock climber accuses sunbathers of cheating

April 17, 2013 Humour bottled oxygen, interviews, mountaineering ethics, rock climbing 8 Comments

This week the Footsteps on the Mountain team caught up with champion rock climber Bill Scheidt, who has completed many first ascents on bold new routes. Bill is known for a very pure style of climbing, and over the years has become an outspoken critic of climbers who employ artificial aids to enable them to complete an ascent. But it’s not just use of pitons and supplementary oxygen that make his blood boil.

Herbert Tichy’s amazing discovery on the first ascent of Cho Oyu

March 27, 2013 Humour 8000m peaks, annapurna, cho oyu, frostbite, herbert tichy, himalayas, history of mountaineering, maurice herzog, mera peak, namche bazaar, nepal, pasang dawa lama, sherpas, tibet 9 Comments

Mountaineering history is full of stories of heroic ascents which have come at a cost: loss of fingers and toes (or worse) due to frostbite. We understand how to treat frostbite injuries much better now, but one method of treatment discovered by a little known Austrian mountaineer in the 1950s, seems to have been neglected by the medical profession, and it’s one that sounds quite appealing.

Is the mountaineer Phil Crampton Richard III’s distant relative?

February 8, 2013 Humour altitude junkies, phil crampton, tumblr post 2 Comments

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.

Introducing the Test Way, Hampshire’s unspoilt gem

August 27, 2012 Humour britain, long-distance trails, test way, tumblr post, walking 0 Comment

It was a glorious bank holiday Sunday yesterday, so I thought I would get out into the countryside and explore the Test Way, a 44 mile long-distance walking route in rural Hampshire.

Google invents armchair hiking

June 15, 2012 Humour google, tumblr post, walking 0 Comment

When I first saw this video of a bearded man who appears to be hiking a footpath with some sort of jetpack on his back, if it wasn’t June then I would have thought it was an elaborate April Fool’s

Is Prince Harry really going to climb ‘Mount’ Everest?

January 5, 2012 Humour acclimatisation, altitude sickness, everest, everest base camp, lukla, manaslu, north pole, olympics, prince harry, royal family, security, sponsorship, the telegraph, walking with the wounded 15 Comments

Or is The Telegraph talking out of its arse? A surprising headline appeared in one of Britain’s top newspapers earlier this week. In its article Prince Harry is all set to climb Mount Everest, The Telegraph went on to say:

How to escape from a yeti

August 24, 2011 Humour annapurna, don whillans, eric shipton, everest, frank smythe, garhwal, himalayas, legends and folklore, machapuchare, mountain literature, reinhold messner, sherpas, tibet, travel writing, wildlife, yetis 1 Comment

The great Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner famously claimed to have seen a yeti when he was camping alone in a clearing in Tibet in 1986. Whatever it was, it moved adeptly on two legs and was too big to be

Drukpa Kunley’s Rhubarb: an extraordinary Himalayan vegetable

July 26, 2011 Humour bhutan, blue sheep, drukpa kunley, flora, frank spencer chapman, himalayas, jangothang ri, jhomolhari, joseph hooker, paro, pasang dawa lama, rheum nobile, sikkim, tibet, trekking, weather, wildlife 3 Comments

I’m going to conclude my trio of posts about Bhutan by relating an incident that happened at a place called Jangothang on the Jhomolhari trek. In previous posts I’ve been moaning about the weather in Bhutan, and how the beautiful