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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It takes me so long to get round to editing my videos these days that I know some of you die of excitement waiting for the next one to appear. Lockdown has provided me with a window of opportunity and I’m hurtling though them like a snail. Here, finally, are the videos of my trip to Ojos del Salado a year and a half ago.
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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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Edita was in Africa last week, so last weekend I had a day to myself. What better way to spend it than pulling up YouTube on the TV and spending the evening watching porn… Mountain porn, that is – and I found an absolute gem.
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Eight years ago I hiked the Cocuy Circuit trek in Colombia. To whet your appetite for this beautiful country, here are five videos covering all five days of the trek I completed in 2011. The smiles in these videos tell it all.
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There aren’t many characters in Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void, and the main one spends most of the story entirely alone, contemplating existence as he crawls for three days along a glacier. How on earth were they going to make a stage version of this?
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A chance meeting at Refugio Carrel on Chimborazo on the evening before our second ascent reminded me of another favourite climb in Ecuador a few years earlier. It was a climb that produced a unique video that lives long in the memory.
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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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I don’t often go to the movies, and last time I did the film started with a crazy man standing alone on a wall up a sheer cliff face. There was a feeling of déjà vu when I went to a local cinema again a couple of weekends ago.
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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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