frank smythe

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,

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.

By the time you read this I will be somewhere in the Kangchenjunga region of Nepal, in the far east of the country near its eastern border with India. It’s a region dominated by one huge mountain, 8,586m Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world.

The headline ‘Mallory’s body discovered on Everest in 1936’ appeared widely on social media sites last week. Had new revelations emerged about whether Mallory reached the summit of Everest? No, the real subject of the story wasn’t George Mallory at all, but arguably a much more interesting character.

The importance of keeping a good pace and rhythm when walking up a mountain During his expedition to Kamet in the Garhwal Himalaya, Northern India in 1931 – at the time the highest mountain that had ever been climbed –

The great Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner famously claimed to have seen a yeti when he was camping alone in a clearing in Tibet in 1986. Whatever it was, it moved adeptly on two legs and was too big to be

His father, Frank Smythe — biography of a Himalayan legend

Is The Last Great Mountain by Mick Conefrey the last great book about Kangchenjunga?

My first visit to Kangchenjunga

Frank Smythe is more interesting than George Mallory

The high-altitude slow plod

How to escape from a yeti