author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
At the end of last year, I mentioned that I would be slowing down the blog to concentrate on other writing projects. In case you’d forgotten I exist or were wondering if I’d boarded the Mars probe for an attempt
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If you did a double take when you read this headline then that’s OK: so did I. I can’t quite believe it, but today I’ve reached an important milestone. When I first started this blog in August 2010, I had no idea where it would go.
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In 2019, the mountaineering film maker Renan Ozturk and climbing writer Mark Synnott led an expedition to the north side of Everest to look for the body of Sandy Irvine. They didn’t find him, but they brought back a sumptuous feast of photography.
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In 1953, Jan Morris was the Times correspondent entrusted with sending the exclusive news that Everest had been climbed for the very first time. With rival journalists snooping around the Everest region, she decided to invent a secret code.
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A case is currently passing through the US legal system that may have immediate implications for Everest expedition operators, and wider implications for guided mountaineering in general. Here’s my take on it.
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I’ve not won many things in my life. I don’t write the sort of books that will ever be considered for an award and I’ve never been good enough to win a prize for being clever. As for winning something really prestigious? Don’t be silly. But then this happened.
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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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While I was busy publishing last week’s blog post, physicist Dr Melanie Windridge, who climbed Everest in 2018, published this short educational video that describes five surprising facts about Everest in a way that’s fun, educational and accessible all in one.
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How much does overcrowding, experience, age and sex affect how likely a climber is to reach the summit of Everest or die trying? A scientific paper was published last week that addressed these very questions. So what did it conclude?
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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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