author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
I hadn’t been intending to do anything too technical on my first return to the mountains, but perhaps I should have expected to. Our ascent of Dzo Jongo West was my first proper mountaineering for several years. Would I remember what to do?
Read more
A book review of A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor Hundreds of books have been written about the world’s highest mountain, Everest, and dozens about its second highest, K2. There have not been so many about the
Read more
Our plan to climb Kang Yatze I was abandoned after looking at it from a distance and deciding it would be too epic. The popular Kang Yatze II looked about as interesting as a round of golf, so we set our sights on the two Dzo Jongo peaks at the top of the Nimaling valley.
Read more
After three years without a foreign holiday, how would I respond to a multi-day remote camping trek? My axe and crampons had been gathering cobwebs. Would my climbing skills still be up to the job? I headed to Ladakh in northern India to find out.
Read more
Wow, it’s been a hectic last few weeks for me and my apologies for not posting for a while. The good news is that I’ve made it to the end of all the hecticness, and I will soon be leaving for my first real foreign holiday since December 2019 — which now seems an age away in a parallel universe (and for all I know, it probably is).
Read more
A few months ago someone recommended to me a lesser known volume in the Everest canon, written by Sherry B Ortner, an American anthropologist who spent over 30 years studying Sherpa culture, including fieldwork in the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal.
Read more
There have been rumours in the mountaineering world for a few years now that all the records about ascents of the world’s fourteen 8,000m peaks might need to be rewritten, including whether the great Reinhold Messner was first to climb them all.
Read more
Thanks to Vertebrate and their Norwegian translator Bibbi Lee, the meagre pot of mountaineering mirth has become a little merrier with the unearthing of a little known gem of Norwegian literature.
Read more
Our beloved monarch Queen Elizabeth II has now been sitting on the throne for 70 years. To celebrate this event, and because the people of Britain had been granted an extra day of public holiday to mark it, I decided to do something special.
Read more
I have recently completed narrating my latest book Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite, and it’s now available as an audiobook on a number of platforms, including Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Nook, Scribd, Libro.fm, Audiobooks.com and many more.
Read more