first ascents

I’ve lost count of the expedition accounts where the hardest route to the top is the only one worth considering, or where stronger climbers are cast as heroes and weaker ones clowns. All of these accounts were written by men, so it’s always refreshing to read a woman’s perspective.

The trustees of the world’s most prestigious mountain book award have announced updated rules for entries following new research alleging that hundreds of historical mountaineering books have been published without reaching the true end of the story.

There’s been a lot of hype about the new chatbot ChatGPT. If it can impersonate a real person, then it occurred to me that I could interview George Mallory and find out if he actually reached the summit of Everest in 1924. So I did, and here’s what happened.

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.

It’s not very often that the ascent of an 8,000m peak makes international news headlines, but earlier this month something rather special happened when a team of 10 Nepali climbers stood on the summit of K2.

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.

On 7 August, an earthquake in the Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, caused a famous rock feature known as Baron Spire, affectionately known as Old Smoothie, to collapse. It also caused a man to shoot a video with the most entertaining commentary ever recorded.

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?

Last week was one of those weeks when a mountaineering story is so big that it makes it into the popular press. On the face of it, it was a straightforward story of someone smashing a record to smithereens. But if you dig a little deeper, there is another side to it.

Nobody knows if Edward Whymper made the first ascent of Carihuairazo in 1880. Nor was Whymper very sure himself. He made an ascent of a summit, but whether it was the main one is open to debate. In this post I examine the evidence.

The most shocking first page in mountaineering literature

Bookman Plaster Award announces new rules for mountaineering books following recent controversies

Did George Mallory climb Everest in 1924? I asked ChatGPT for an answer

If Reinhold Messner wasn’t the first person to climb all the 8,000m peaks, who was?

Is the first winter ascent of K2 a turning point for Sherpa mountaineers?

What was Jan Morris’s secret code to say that Everest had been climbed?

If you climb a peak that collapses in an earthquake, did you still climb it?

Review: Touching the Void, on stage in London’s West End

Nirmal Purja’s ascent of all fourteen 8,000m peaks: why is it controversial?

Did Edward Whymper make the first ascent of Carihuairazo?