author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
In the early 1970s, the slopes of K2 were still relatively untouched. Although Italians had first set foot on the summit, American climbers considered it to be their mountain. Two expeditions in 1975 and 1978 produced a pair of expedition books that were oozing with drama and intrigue.
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There is currently an unmissable 1 hr 45 min documentary film, The Last Mountain, available on BBC iPlayer for the next year. The film follows the last climb of elite mountaineer Tom Ballard, who died on Nanga Parbat in 2019.
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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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A quick book update. I’m in the process of publishing revised editions of the Footsteps on the Mountain Travel Diaries, and making them available as paperbacks for the first time ever. Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers is now available in paperback form.
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A quick book update. I’m in the process of publishing revised editions of the Footsteps on the Mountain Travel Diaries. The revised digital version of Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers is available now at a bargain price from the main online bookstores.
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When Bill Tilman travelled to the Pakistan Karakoram in 1937, he hoped to solve two unexplained geographical riddles: the existence of an icecap in Central Asia, and a glacier without any river outlet. He relished the opportunity to prove the scientists wrong.
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When I first became aware of a crowdfunded appeal to search for two climbers who had been missing for days on a remote peak in Pakistan, my immediate impression was that it was both desperate and futile. Not everyone saw it that way, and what happened next was remarkable.
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I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time in the last couple of years blogging bad news from the Himalayas and Karakoram. It’s only fair I help to restore the balance by reporting on a mountaineering story with a happy ending.
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Have you ever been so exhausted on a mountain that you wish you could crawl back down? I’ve been there and written a book about it. But which mountains provided the hardest physical challenge? Here are my top five.
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There were remarkable events on K2 this week, with record numbers of climbers reaching the summit. K2 is regarded as one of the hardest mountains in the world, but has it now become within the range of less experienced commercial climbers?
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