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Battle of the blockbusters: Herzog’s Annapurna vs. Tichy’s Cho Oyu
I've recently finished reading Cho Oyu by Herbert Tichy, an account of the first ascent of Cho Oyu in 1954. The book is hard to get hold of, but it's as good as Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, regarded by...
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Farewell Samuli Mansikka, the fearless Finn
It's time once again to pay tribute to a friend who has sadly lost his life in the mountains. Last week Samuli Mansikka stood on the summit of Annapurna, his tenth 8000m peak, but he did not return....
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An early history of the 8000m peaks: the first ascent of Annapurna
This is the third in a short series of posts about the early history of the 8000m peaks. In the first post I introduced three memorable characters and in the second I looked at the Sherpa contribution....
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The first ascent of the South Face of Aconcagua
A day’s drive up the Trans-Andean Highway from Mendoza, in one of Argentina’s prime wine-growing regions, is the ranger station at the entrance to Aconcagua Provincial Park. Here climbers on...
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Book review: Summit 8000 by Andrew Lock
I couldn’t bring much of my mountaineering library with me when I moved to Rome, but luckily Edita had a book on her shelf that I was very interested in reading: Summit 8000 by Andrew Lock. In 2009...
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What Ueli Steck meant to ordinary people like me
I genuinely believed that Ueli Steck was one of those extreme climbers who would end up living to a ripe old age – not because I thought he would be one of the lucky ones, but because he was that good....
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An evening with Kenton Cool … Aha!
Kenton Cool is one of Britain’s best-known high-altitude mountaineers, perhaps the best known of all. He has a record number of British ascents of Everest (12), he once guided the famously fingerless...
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Learning about the Manang Valley in the early days of the Annapurna Circuit
A rain shadow world where time passes to the ever-present wind and cold, snow leopards stalk the crags and Buddhist mantras fill the air. Now that the pubs are all closed, Saturday nights for me have...
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If Reinhold Messner wasn’t the first person to climb all the 8,000m peaks,...
There have been rumours in the mountaineering world for a couple of years now that all the records about ascents of the world’s fourteen 8,000m peaks might need to be rewritten. The rumours were...
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The most shocking first page in mountaineering literature
One of the things that sometimes annoys me about quite a lot of mountaineering writing is machismo: the equating of various attributes such as physical strength and endurance, single-mindedness and...
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