author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Situated at a confluence of the Bhote Khosi, Trisuli and Langtang rivers at the end of the road from Kathmandu, Syaphru Besi was the gateway to the Langtang trek, Tamang Heritage Trail, and pilgrimage route to Mt Kailash in Tibet. That was until last month.
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I’ve made several visits to the Black Mountains over the years, but I had never climbed its highest peak, Waun Fach (811m), so this year I decided to put this omission behind me by climbing it twice, once from the east and once from the west.
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Deep in montane forest above 1,500m in the Dominican Republic’s Cordillera Central, we heard a mournful sound like an orchestra tuning up. It was all around us, everywhere we travelled, but we never saw the bird that made it. The locals had their own name for it, but what was it?
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I climbed Lhakpa Ri on 11 May 2007 as part of a commercial expedition by UK mountaineering operator Jagged Globe. This follow up to my last post about the first ascent by Bill Tilman and Edmund Wigram features an excerpt from my diary describing my own ascent 72 years later.
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I’ve recently finished reading Mount Everest the Reconnaissance 1935 by Tony Astill. The book was interesting to me because it described the first ascent of 7,045m Lhakpa Ri by Bill Tilman and Edmund Wigram, a peak that I climbed myself in 2007.
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I only bring you the really important stories on this blog, and here’s one that will have you choking on your Kendal Mint Cake. With the Everest season over, along with the usual stories about traffic jams, it seems like a good time to report on a far more heinous example of queuing on mountaintops that has emerged in recent years.
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Record claims require scrutiny. People talk a lot about whether oxygen should or shouldn’t be used at high altitude. They don’t talk so much about HOW MUCH oxygen is used, and this is absolutely crucial. As someone who used different flow rates of oxygen at different times during my time as a high-altitude mountaineer, I thought I would give you my perspective.
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About four years ago, Edita and I decided to start bagging the highest point in each of the UK’s counties. A couple of weeks ago, we finished the last of the thirteen historic county tops in Wales. They contain some enjoyable hills that we may not otherwise have explored.
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A recent TV show on Channel 4 claimed that a well-known peak in South Wales resembled a set of trouser cushions, without producing photographic evidence. Was it true? There was only one way to find out: to climb it and see.
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If you lived a comfy life at the park entrance, why would you follow a pair of strangers for three days up 2,000m of mountain and back down again? That’s precisely what a dog did when we climbed Pico Duarte last year. Here’s Karim the dog’s ascent video. If you look closely enough, you may just catch glimpses of Edita and myself in some of it too.
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