author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Now that the pubs are all closed, I’ve been spending Saturday nights searching for mountain gems on YouTube. Here’s one. In the Shadow of Annapurna offers a glimpse into an earlier age in Nepal, when things were rapidly changing but many of the old ways remained.
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a great series on the Great Himalaya Trail. This inspired me to return to my old footage of the last time I was in Nepal. It’s now two years since Edita and I trekked the Kangchenjunga Base Camps circuit, and I still hadn’t completed editing my video footage from that trek. Well, now I have, and it’s been great fun going back and reliving it.
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Forest fires have been in the news recently. Some are natural, but many people believe that climate change is causing them to occur more frequently. Earlier this year, we witnessed a Himalayan forest fire that we believe was entirely man-made.
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The British Mountaineering Council (BMC) has just launched a new appeal, Mend Our Mountains, with the ambitious target of raising £1 million to repair footpaths in UK mountain areas. Here’s why I’m happy to dip my hand in my pocket for this worthwhile cause.
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In this era of fake news, the BBC has launched a Reality Check series to analyse popular news stories that sound plausible and assess whether or not they’re bollocks. I thought it might be fun to run one the BBC’s own stories through a reality check.
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I’ve talked a bit about the glaciers on Kilimanjaro, and how they are shrinking at an alarming rate, but what about the climate on the rest of the mountain? This aerial photo by the NASA Earth Observatory illustrates them as clearly as any map.
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The Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA) has recently lost a significant part of its annual income. In this week’s post I look at the NMA’s work to see what programmes will be affected and what this change is likely to mean for mountain tourism in Nepal.
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Recently I wrote a satirical piece about a fictional washroom at Everest Base Camp as a reaction to more sensationalised media reporting about Everest. But the reports contained a grain of truth that I intend to fertilise in this post.
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The government of Nepal made a number of announcements about mountaineering on Everest before and during the Spring 2014 season, which received widespread media attention. Here I examine some of the announcements and assess how successfully the government met their intentions.
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A new joke is doing the rounds in Kathmandu. How many Nepalese Ministry of Tourism officials does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to change the bulb and the other to issue a press release to the
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