Footsteps on the Mountain
It was the Easter bank holiday weekend. We had booked our flights from London, and we were going back to the Apennines, come rain or shine. It was the first time I had returned to these peaks in nearly two years, and they carried some special memories.
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I’m reaching the final stages with my follow up to Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest, and I’m keen to have your feedback about the book cover to ensure it conveys my story and reaches an even bigger audience.
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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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Maiella is a high tableland on the eastern side of the Apennines in central Italy. Recently I read a book about it that brought back a few memories. I made three visits there with Edita to climb Monte Amaro and its surrounding peaks from various directions.
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It’s almost the first anniversary of the day Edita and I climbed Drohmo Ri in the Kangchenjunga region of Nepal, and I thought I’d celebrate the occasion with this entertaining video.
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Like most normal people, I swear from time to time. More unusually, I also swear quite a lot in my writing, and recently I received some feedback that it might be excessive. So when is swearing acceptable in travel writing, and when is it too much?
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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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In the process of editing my new book about Chimborazo, I’ve had to chop the following excerpt. But it’s an interesting read, about a couple of places in northern Ecuador that are rarely visited by tourists, but should be: the mountain Cotacachi and its picturesque crater lake.
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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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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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