Footsteps on the Mountain
Last week was one of those weeks when a mountaineering story is so big that it makes it into the popular press. On the face of it, it was a straightforward story of someone smashing a record to smithereens. But if you dig a little deeper, there is another side to it.
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Ecuador has some impressive volcanic craters. Some, such as Cotopaxi and Tungurahua – both of which I’m going to talk about later – take a bit of effort to get to. But first, a more relaxing interlude. Not all volcanoes
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Queues of slow moving traffic, people who don’t know how to drive, human faeces by the side of the road – are we talking about Everest again? No, it’s the North Coast 500, a magnificent road trip in north-west Scotland which I once pedalled round.
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What to do when you spend an evening answering interview questions for a journalist, only for them not to be published? Of course, it’s obvious: publish them yourself on your own blog. So here is the world’s first ever interview with Mark Horrell.
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The problems which occurred on Everest this year are nothing new, but they have now reached such a degree that it’s time for operators who value their reputation and for those who dream of climbing Everest to take a principled stand.
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If you’ve been following my adventures on a bike in Scotland and Ecuador, you will know that cycle touring is an acquired taste that I’m still struggling to acquire. By contrast, I love hiking and I was recently given a good lesson why.
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I’ve recently been reading In Ethiopia With a Mule, about a trek across – you guessed it – Ethiopia, in the company of a mule, by the famously brave travel writer Dervla Murphy. She is widely admired for her intrepid travelling style, but does this come at a price?
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I was lucky to live and work for a year in Rome, where the highest peaks of the Apennines were accessible within a couple of hours. It was a hill walker’s paradise, with a feast of mountains of great variety,
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As we made our way from base camp for an acclimatisation hike on Ojos del Salado in the Puna de Atacama region of the Andes last month, we witnessed a strange phenomenon in the sky.
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Last year I returned from the Himalayas and reported that I may have discovered the easiest 6,000m peak in the world to climb. But there is another place in the world where lots of easy 6,000m peaks can potentially be climbed on a day hike from the road.
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