author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
This is the second of two posts about our recent visit to the mountainous island of Hispaniola. In the first post, I introduced you to the Dominican Republic, and how we came to trek there. In this post, I describe our assault on Pico Duarte (3,101m), La Pelona (3,095m) and La Rusilla (3,040m), the three highest mountains in the Caribbean.
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A few years ago, I wrote a blog post to explain that from that moment on I would aim to climb more obscure mountains that hardly anyone writes about. But how to decide which unusual peaks to climb? Well, that was the easy the bit. I would ‘go with the flow’.
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A Dickson Step is a small step around 5 to 10 centimetres high in a hotel bathroom doorway. The step is designed in such a way to be a trip hazard for unsuspecting guests who get up to relieve themselves during the night.
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The handful of you who are fans of my audiobooks will be delighted to learn that I’ve just released another one. Islands in the Snow, about a trek through the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal, is now available on all the best audiobook channels, including Spotify, iTunes and Audible.
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Wedged between the foothills of three huge mountain ranges – the Karakoram to the south, Pamirs to the north-west, and the Kunlun to the west – is Kongur, a complex massif of interlinked peaks and ridges. It was completely unexplored in 1980 when Michael Ward and Chris Bonington set off an a reconnaissance.
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The whole of Europe is in the middle of a scorching heatwave. Here in the Cotswolds the grass is as brown as a hay bale and the thermometer has been touching 30°C. It seemed like a good time to go hill walking in the Lake District, where good weather seemed guaranteed for a change.
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Much of the media coverage around Everest this year has focused on a brace of unusual speed ascents that have been framed as a game changer for aspiring Everest climbers. But there was another technological advance that is likely to change the job description for Sherpas much more significantly.
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Standing just 1.65m tall and weighing 82kg, nobody would ever have suspected Babu Chiri of being an athlete if he walked into a bar. But in 1998, he was one of the top three in the world at his specialist event of climbing Everest.
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There have been many books about Sherpa mountaineers over the years, but few have been written from the perspective of Sherpas themselves. One that comes close is Sherpa by Pradeep Bashyal and Ankit Babu Adhikari, which I read recently.
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There was forecast to be one day of glorious weather over the Easter weekend. I nabbed it to take a day trip to the Brecon Beacons in South Wales, now known as Bannau Brycheiniog, and climb its highest peak via an extended route through a quieter part of the range.
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