author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Himalayan travel writing is peppered with stories of yeti sightings or yeti footprints. But if yetis still exist why hasn’t someone filmed one by now? I may have stumbled upon the answer in a long-forgotten work of Himalayan travel writing.
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The title of Hamish MacInnes’s book Look Behind the Ranges is taken from Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Explorer about a man who is urged to cross the mountains behind his home by an inner voice. But what would Kipling’s explorer have made of Hamish MacInnes?
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When I woke up inside my tent on the morning after our Dzo Jongo double header, I was very much looking forward to the final few days of relaxing trekking after the strenuous grind of the two climbs. But I didn’t realise quite what a treat I was in for.
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I hadn’t been intending to do anything too technical on my first return to the mountains, but perhaps I should have expected to. Our ascent of Dzo Jongo West was my first proper mountaineering for several years. Would I remember what to do?
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Our plan to climb Kang Yatze I was abandoned after looking at it from a distance and deciding it would be too epic. The popular Kang Yatze II looked about as interesting as a round of golf, so we set our sights on the two Dzo Jongo peaks at the top of the Nimaling valley.
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After three years without a foreign holiday, how would I respond to a multi-day remote camping trek? My axe and crampons had been gathering cobwebs. Would my climbing skills still be up to the job? I headed to Ladakh in northern India to find out.
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Wow, it’s been a hectic last few weeks for me and my apologies for not posting for a while. The good news is that I’ve made it to the end of all the hecticness, and I will soon be leaving for my first real foreign holiday since December 2019 – which now seems an age away in a parallel universe (and for all I know, it probably is).
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A few months ago someone recommended to me a lesser known volume in the Everest canon, written by Sherry B Ortner, an American anthropologist who spent over 30 years studying Sherpa culture, including fieldwork in the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal.
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Most of us have used Google Street View at some point, but not so many of us know about Street View’s kinder, mellower, more refined, engaging and adventurous younger brother, a website that specialises in mountain panoramas.
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It’s ages since I last published a book, and I’m very excited about my latest one. Sherpa Hospitality as a cure for frostbite takes us from the early years of Himalayan mountaineering to the present day when Sherpas have become superstar climbers in their own right.
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