author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
I’ve recently been reading In Ethiopia With a Mule, about a trek across — you guessed it — Ethiopia, in the company of a mule, by the famously brave travel writer Dervla Murphy. She is widely admired for her intrepid travelling style, but does this come at a price?
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In the process of editing my new book about Chimborazo, I’ve had to chop the following excerpt. But it’s an interesting read, about a couple of places in northern Ecuador that are rarely visited by tourists, but should be: the mountain Cotacachi and its picturesque crater lake.
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The story of British climber Tom Ballard, who has been missing on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan for nine days now, is a particularly poignant one. Twenty-four years ago his mother Alison Hargreaves also lost her life on another mountain in Pakistan, K2.
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I was lucky to live and work for a year in Rome, where the highest peaks of the Apennines were accessible within a couple of hours. It was a hill walker’s paradise, with a feast of mountains of great variety,
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It’s become common practice for authors and publishers to give away free books to readers in exchange for a review on Amazon. It’s something I don’t do. I believe it’s in the interests of all of us to maintain trust in reader reviews by not trying to cheat the system.
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As we made our way from base camp for an acclimatisation hike on Ojos del Salado in the Puna de Atacama region of the Andes last month, we witnessed a strange phenomenon in the sky.
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How high Humboldt and Boussingault climbed on Chimborazo has been the subject of much debate. When Edward Whymper made the first ascent in 1880, he was baffled by their descriptions of the climb. So what happened, and how high did they really get?
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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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Christmas for me usually means some new ascents in a mountainous region of Africa or Latin America. When I received an email from Jagged Globe announcing a new trip to Ojos del Salado, I didn’t have any doubts that was the peak I wanted to climb.
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Last year I returned from the Himalayas and reported that I may have discovered the easiest 6,000m peak in the world to climb. But there is another place in the world where lots of easy 6,000m peaks can potentially be climbed on a day hike from the road.
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