author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
There have been calls for Everest operators to cancel their expeditions and donate their oxygen to hospitals to help with the COVID-19 outbreak in Nepal. So far, there is little evidence of this happening. Here are some of the reasons why.
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We know that climbers and Sherpas have been flown out of Everest Base Camp with COVID-19, but we don’t know the extent of the outbreak. All climbers and operators need to take a hard look at 2021 and decide if the positives of their impact outweigh the negatives.
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A case is currently passing through the US legal system that may have immediate implications for Everest expedition operators, and wider implications for guided mountaineering in general. Here’s my take on it.
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How much does overcrowding, experience, age and sex affect how likely a climber is to reach the summit of Everest or die trying? A scientific paper was published last week that addressed these very questions. So what did it conclude?
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I’ve recently been reading The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs by the unusually named Tristan Gooley. It’s an excellent book that will cause you to look at nature in a different light (to paraphrase climbing writer Jim Perrin
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If you follow the Everest Today (@EverestToday) account on Twitter, you may be used to seeing the occasional photo of mountains taken from the International Space Station. Mountains look very different from above, and views from the International Space Station are not always recognisable. But this one of Everest is so distinctive that I had to annotate it and share it with you.
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Last week a team of Chinese surveyors climbed Everest and were among only a handful of people to climb it during the coronavirus pandemic. But aren’t we all supposed to be in lockdown? Not all of us, it turns out. I will try to explain.
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One of the side effects of coronavirus lockdown that many people have been talking about is the clarity of the air. Less traffic means less pollution. Nowhere illustrates this better than Nepal’s capital Kathmandu. Last week the Nepali Times posted a photo that purported to show a view of Everest from the city. Could it be true?
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Nepal’s flagship tourism initiative Visit Nepal 2020 got off to a flying start when 20 yeti statues were removed by tourism officials because they didn’t look anything like yetis. But was this fair and does anyone know what a yeti looks like anyway?
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A few days ago, a reader sent me the following video of a man climbing up a steep bank of snow, reaching the top and seeing two summits beyond. The video was a bit of an eye-opener for me, and solved a mystery that has been bugging me for several years.
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