author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
In today’s post I’m going to show you the most terrifying thing you’ve ever seen (at least on this blog). If you’ve been following my series of posts about the Cuillin Ridge, you will know that it’s not a place to venture without a rope — or with a bike.
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When I published The Chomolungma Diaries in 2012, there were very few books about climbing Everest written from the perspective of a commercial client. Now there are several and one runaway success has been Ascent into Hell by Fergus White.
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It’s been a while since I wrote at length about Frank Smythe, the legendary British mountain explorer who was something of a celebrity in the 1930s when he became one of the first people to make a career of climbing,
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I can confidently say that Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris is my favourite of all the Boardman Tasker Prize winners that I’ve read. It reminded me of Dervla Murphy, but how similar is it? I read Dervla Murphy’s book Full Tilt to find out.
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It’s not clear why Kangchenjunga should be considered the last great mountain, but whatever: this book is a comprehensive history of all expeditions up to its first ascent in 1955. I learned a lot from it, and I can thoroughly recommend it, however well acquainted you are with Kangchenjunga’s history.
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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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So far I’ve not been finding lockdown too bad. I don’t know whether this makes me unusual. I know I’m lucky in many respects. We have a nice garden beside the river here in the Cotswolds and we’re able to
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As coronavirus lockdown takes hold, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane has started running a reading group on Twitter about Nan Shepherd’s classic nature book The Living Mountain. It was a no-brainer for me to join, and it’s helping me to see the world differently.
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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.
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There aren’t many characters in Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void, and the main one spends most of the story entirely alone, contemplating existence as he crawls for three days along a glacier. How on earth were they going to make a stage version of this?
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