author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Last week a commercial group from mountaineering operator Imagine Nepal made an historic ascent of 8,163m Manaslu. One of the climbers took some drone photographs that help to set the record straight about Manaslu’s myriad summits.
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Here is some essential reading, not only for those of you interested in Everest history, but as a salutary lesson in human psychology. It will also be of interest to potential Everest climbers wondering which operators to avoid when the pandemic is over.
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There have been calls for Everest operators to cancel their expeditions and donate their oxygen to hospitals to help with the COVID-19 outbreak in Nepal. So far, there is little evidence of this happening. Here are some of the reasons why.
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We know that climbers and Sherpas have been flown out of Everest Base Camp with COVID-19, but we don’t know the extent of the outbreak. All climbers and operators need to take a hard look at 2021 and decide if the positives of their impact outweigh the negatives.
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Today’s post comes with apologies to the 110,994 people who wrote to the BBC last week (a national record, apparently), complaining about the dawn to dusk coverage of Prince Philip across all their TV channels, after the Queen’s consort and
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It’s not very often that the ascent of an 8,000m peak makes international news headlines, but earlier this month something rather special happened when a team of 10 Nepali climbers stood on the summit of K2.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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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