author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Two mountains in Nepal are to be named after Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, according to a number of baffling media reports last week. Is this really true, and what mountains are they? Once again I will rummage through the detritus of mainstream media waffle, and try to shed some light on the story.
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The phrase Aladdin’s cave is often used to describe a place crammed full of interesting objects, and if ever there was a building worthy of the definition it was the Pilgrim’s Book House, Kathmandu. Squeezed between souvenir shops and tourist guest houses was an inauspicious shop front which led into a maze of rooms filled from floor to ceiling with books. Sadly, last week it burned to the ground.
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This is a post I have been meaning to write for a while. Much has been written by westerners about Sherpas over the last hundred years, but the voice of the Sherpas themselves is rare. I can’t provide it, but I can provide my own perspective of a people who have given me many happy memories, taken me to places I could never have been without them, and put their lives at risk to help me.
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While George Mallory, Edmund Hillary, Reinhold Messner and Eric Shipton all deserve their place in the Everest pantheon, if there’s to be an award for the greatest of all Everest climbers, then IMHO it should go to Tenzing Norgay, because he had to work so much harder to achieve his ambition than any of the other climbers.
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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.
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In my spare time I’ve recently taken up the role of trustee for a charity which provides sustainable aid for education in Nepal. It’s a privilege to be able to give something back to a country which has given me so much, and how I ended up doing this role has been an interesting story in itself.
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An obscure subject for a blog post if ever there was one, but one of the perks of writing a mountaineering blog is every so often I get asked some very obscure and intriguing questions by email out of the
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Book review: Abode of Snow by Kenneth Mason and Fallen Giants by Isserman & Weaver. It’s always interesting to read two books which cover the same subject 50 years apart. It’s even more interesting when that subject is Himalayan mountaineering, one very close to my heart. In the last couple of months I’ve read an epic modern work and an old classic.
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If you read the title of this post and think I’m about to slag off the Swiss climbing superstar, famous for his speed ascents in the Alps and Himalayas, then you should know upfront that I’ll be doing precisely the
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It made me very sad to hear about the last fatality on Manaslu this year before the weather closed in and the Himalayan climbing season ended for the winter. Eleven people had already died in a huge avalanche on the
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