Footsteps on the Mountain
If you follow the Everest Today (@EverestToday) account on Twitter, you may be used to seeing the occasional photo of mountains taken from the International Space Station. Mountains look very different from above, and views from the International Space Station are not always recognisable. But this one of Everest is so distinctive that I had to annotate it and share it with you.
Read more
Last week a team of Chinese surveyors climbed Everest and were among only a handful of people to climb it during the coronavirus pandemic. But aren’t we all supposed to be in lockdown? Not all of us, it turns out. I will try to explain.
Read more
One of the side effects of coronavirus lockdown that many people have been talking about is the clarity of the air. Less traffic means less pollution. Nowhere illustrates this better than Nepal’s capital Kathmandu. Last week the Nepali Times posted a photo that purported to show a view of Everest from the city. Could it be true?
Read more
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.
Read more
A quick book update. I’m in the process of publishing revised editions of the Footsteps on the Mountain Travel Diaries. The revised digital edition of The Baruntse Adventure is available now at a bargain price from the main online bookstores.
Read more
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.
Read more
There is no shortage of advice at the moment about how to protect yourself from COVID-19, a.k.a. the coronavirus. Since many of you are regular travellers, I’m going to chip in with some simple advice of my own that will be familiar to anyone who has trekked a lot in Nepal.
Read more
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.
Read more
Nepal’s flagship tourism initiative Visit Nepal 2020 got off to a flying start when 20 yeti statues were removed by tourism officials because they didn’t look anything like yetis. But was this fair and does anyone know what a yeti looks like anyway?
Read more
There were several hours of mayhem on Everest yesterday when the tracking device of German climber Jurgen Kobblers showed that he had strayed off route into dangerous territory. Rescue parties sprung into action, but in the end it turned out to be a false alarm.
Read more