Those Who Dared

December 14 1911: Roald Amundsen reaches the south pole

2011-12-14T18:43:00.002Z

On 14 December 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first people to reach the South Pole. The Guardian and Observer reported it - but not until three months later. Read the articles on the From the archive blog.

Blue plaque for Edward Whymper

2011-09-16T18:11:00.000+01:00

Edward Whymper has become the first mountaineer to be commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque. One hundred years after his death, the Teddington home of the first man to climb the Matterhorn now boasts one of the unique design icons. The plaque was unveiled by Mick Fowler, president of the Alpine Club - the great organisation of which Whymper was a prominent member.

It was on July 14 1865, after eight attempts, that Whymper finally made it to the top of the mountain. However, on the descent four members of the party were dragged to their deaths, as reported in the Manchester Guardian on July 21 1865:

This provoked a scandal with claims that the rope had been cut and there was even talk of Queen Victoria suggesting that mountaineering should be outlawed. Whymper was haunted by the deaths and he later wrote in Scrambles Amongst the Alps "I see my comrades of the Matterhorn slipping in their backs, their arms outstretched, one after the other". But not everyone blamed him for the accident as shown by the following article which appeared in the paper a week later:

Read about Whymper's London here.

The death of John Hanning Speke

2011-09-13T18:38:00.000+01:00

A new book reappraises 19th-century explorer John Hanning Speke's place in history. During his life, Speke's claim to have the found the Nile source was challenged and his achievements were diminished by fellow traveller Sir Richard Burton, who described him as a "deluded nonentity" - a view repeated by successive biographers. However, Tim Jeal reveals a very different man in Explorers of the Nile, someone who he believes should be in the pantheon of the world's greatest explorers. Read more about it in an Observer article and a piece by Jeal.

Speke's theory that Lake Victoria was the source of Nile was rejected by Burton, thus beginning a bitter public dispute between the two men. On September 15 1864, shortly before Speke and Burton were to debate the subject publicly, Speke was killed by his own gun while hunting. It remains uncertain whether it was an accident or suicide. It was a sad end to an eventful life, as shown in this Manchester Guardian news item from September 19 1864:

Not to be sold separately: The Observer Colour Magazine 1964-1995

2011-07-27T17:26:00.038+01:00

Not to be sold separately : The Observer Colour Magazine 1964-1995, is a new exhibition at Kings Place that celebrates the influence of the paper's magazine on British newspaper publishing. Launched on September 6 1964, the magazine was to combine the best of the Observer's own editorial staff with freelancers, aiming to compete with the Sunday Times magazine (launched in 1962) and titles such as Life and Paris Match. Photojournalism featured heavily on the pages and an introduction to the exhibition states "At a time when most art galleries did not show photographs, the magazine played pivotal role." Subjects covered in the exhibition include everything from punk rock, the new universities being built in the 1960s to Gypsies, with work by the likes of Don McCullin, Jane Bown and Ian Berry.

As shown in Those Who Dared passim, the magazine also published numerous essays on mountaineering and the outdoors. As well as an interview with Tryggve Gran, the only Norwegian member of Captain Scott's South Pole team, there was the famous 1965 Al Avarez article about the climber, Peter Crew. A few years later Crew wrote a detailed account, with pictures by Leo Dickinson, about the first ascent of North Gaulton Castle, a sea stack found on Orkney's west mainland (September 6 1970).

It is another Dickinson picture that has been chosen for the exhibition - this time a stunning shot from the north face of the Eiger. The words are by Michael Deakin, producer of a Yorkshire TV programme about the climb (directed and filmed by Dickinson and Cliff Phillips). The article appeared on December 5 1970.

What makes Not to be sold separately a unique exhibition is that this is the first time many of the images have been seen since publication. Unlike the rest of the paper, the Observer Magazine hasn't been digitised, nor is there an index. Read more about the magazine archive here.

Douglas Mawson on Twitter

2011-06-21T18:13:00.010+01:00

The diary entries of polar exlorer Sir Douglas Mawson can now be read on Twitter, one hundred years afer the Australian set out to explore Antarctica's King George V Land. The Tasmanian Department of Economic Development and Tourism, as part of Antarctic Centennial Year, is doing the tweeting. Given though that Mawson was a prolific diary writer it must a challenge to distill his words down to 140 characters. At this stage the expedition is still loading supplies in London.

The publishing of old diaries on Twitter is hardly a new idea as Captain Scott's appeared back in 2009. However, there is a Mawson link with communication technology as he was involved in establishing the first Antarctic wireless radio connection, linking Hobart via a radio relay station established at Wireless Hill on Macquarie Island.

Colin Kirkus

2011-06-16T10:31:00.005+01:00

An excellent profile of the rock-climber Colin Kirkus recently appeared on the Footless Crow blog. It tells the story of how the clerk from a Liverpool insurance office "strode like a Colossus across the British climbing scene", putting up a series of hard routes during the late1920s and early-1930s, However, after a fatal accident on Ben Nevis in 1934 in which he was seriously injured and his climbing partner, Maurice Linnell, died, Kirkus never fully recovered - both physically or the urge to create new lines.

I always wanted to include a piece about Colin Kirkus in the Guardian Book of Mountains, particularly a review of his 1941 book, Let's Go Climbing! Alas, the paper didn't cover it. On a more sombre note, on April 2 1934 it carried a detailed report of the Ben Nevis accident and on April 20, an interview with him. (click on images to enlarge)

Tarnbagging in the Lake District

2011-04-26T11:25:00.009+01:00

Tarnbagging is the sport of visiting as many English Lakeland tarns as possible. There are over 300 of them so adventurous walkers have the perfect excuse to visit remote parts of the national park. However, as I point out in a Guardian travel piece, this is hardly a new trend. In November 1959, Harry Griffin, the Guardian's legendary Lakeland Country diarist, reported in the paper that two Grasmere men, Colin Dodgson and Timothy Tyson, had bathed in approximately 463 tarns. Tyson was aged 75 when he finished the challenge.

The Abalakov thread

2011-03-24T12:28:00.024Z

March 24 is the anniversary of the death of Yevgeniy Abalakov, the Russian mountaineer who died in 1948 at the age of 41. As Soviet mountaineer No.1, he was the first to climb Stalin Peak (renamed Communism Peak in 1962, Ismoil Somoni Peak in 1998). On February 17, 1943, Alabakov was part of a group of military mountaineers who worked their way through mine and ice fields on Mt Elbrus to throw off Nazi flags and set up Soviet ones. This symbolic event crowned the 15-month-long battle for the Caucasus.

These days the name Albalakov is more often associated with Yevgeniy's older brother Vitaly - also a mountaineer and regarded as the 'father' of Russian climbing. Vitaly Abalakov made many difficult ascents including Lenin Peak in 1934. He also did considerable work on climbing equipment development and most mountaineers will be familiar the Abalakov thread, his most famous invention, This simply consists of two holes being drilled into solid ice to form a v-like channel. Tape or cord is then threaded through and tied together to form a loop, which is then used for belaying or abseiling.

I was introduced to the thread on a recent ice climbing trip and must admit to feeling extremely nervous at the thought of putting my trust in what is essentially a bit of tat wrapped around some frozen water. It was soon demonstrated just how strong the belay actually is, although I'll leave it up to mountaineer Andy Kirkpatrick to give a full explanation.

Of course with great inventions there can be conjecture as to who came up with the original idea. It has been said that it was actually the American climber Jeff Lowe who developed the technique which may explain why in certain parts of the globe the anchor is known as the V-thread. Good historical background can be found in this article from Glenmore Lodge.

I was hoping to find a great article about one of the Abalakov brothers unfortunately there were only a few mentions in the archive. The following article mentions Vitaly but I reproduce it merely to illustrate what elite Scottish mountaineers were wearing circa 1974.

(The Guardian, July 15 1974)

Climbing up the Eiffel Tower

2011-03-21T13:58:00.027Z

Sad to hear that Guardian journalist, Peter Lennon, has died at the age of 81. Peter was a junior Paris correspondent for the paper in the 1960s, before leaving to freelance. He re-joined as a feature writer and interviewer in 1989 and stayed until 2005, although continuing to contribute pieces until quite recently. In 1967 he and French cinematographer Raoul Coutard released The Rocky Road to Dublin, a portrait of Ireland in the 1960s - a film that caused great uproar in Peter's country of birth. Read more about his life in the Guardian obituary and also New Yorker blogpost.

Peter was a brilliant writer so it was a pleasure to be able to use one of his pieces in the Guardian Book of Mountains. It's about a mountaineering triumph but not quite the usual sort of report as the following from May 1964 shows:

The article appeared in an early edition of the paper on May 4 1964 and was re-printed on May 26. Read more here.

Henry Morton Stanley statue unveiled

2011-03-20T20:31:00.008Z

A statue of Victorian journalist and explorer, Henry Morton Stanley was unveiled in Denbigh, North Wales, on March 17 . The life-size bronze portrays him at the moment he found fellow adventurer Dr David Livingstone - arm outstretched, hat by his side and presumably uttering some memorable words. Residents of the town voted in favour of commemorating its most famous son and £31,000 was raised to pay for sculptor Nick Elphick's statute.
Of course Stanley always claimed to be American but he was actually born John Rowlands and brought up in Denbigh's St Asaph workhouse. He emigrated to the US in 1859.

Not surprisingly, the statue has proved to be controversial. Many in the town are proud of the explorer and feel he's had a bad press, being misrepresented both by the Victorian establishment and latter day historians. However, at the unveiling of the statue, Selwyn Williams, a lecturer at Bangor University, representing opponents of the memorial, told reporters: "Stanley was one of the cruellest Victorian expeditionary surveyors. Needless to say all the statutes of Stanley in Africa have been taken down a long time ago. They (Stanley and King Leopold II of Belgium) turned the Congo into the worst example of colonisation, brutal exploitation, enslavement and genocide in Africa. I'm sure most Welsh people share the view that Stanley's 'exploitation by warfare' in Africa was contemptible."

Tim Jeal, author of Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer unveiled the statue and wrote about the day in the Daily Telegraph. And talking of Stanley statues, it's about a year ago since it was reported that there were moves afoot to restore a memorial to the explorer in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Night of Adventure

2011-03-17T17:49:00.010Z

Around 400 armchair adventurers recently gathered at Leicester Square's Vue cinema to hear a diverse bunch of explorers share tales of their travel epics around the globe. This Night of Adventure included a pensioner who ran around the world, extreme base-jumper, crazy kayaker and an ex-soldier who walked the length of the Amazon.

Rather than being allowed to ramble on about their exploits, each speaker was limited to just 20 slides, each of which scrolled forward automatically every 20 seconds. In most cases this format worked very well with the speakers whetting appetites and leaving the audience wanting to hear more.

The first to take up this presentation challenge was Oli Broom who cycled 25,000 from Lords Cricket ground, London, to Brisbane Cricket ground, Australia to see the ashes. He made it in one piece and went on to watch England win the series. This was followed by Bonita Norris, the youngest British woman to climb Everest and then a succession of speakers ranging from professional explorers to the those who just head off in search of excitement. Highlights included Tristan Gooley, the 'Natural Navigator' and his infectious enthusiasm for travel using only nature's sign posts, and Rosie Swale-Pope who at 57 embarked on a mammoth five year adventure to run around the world. Absolutely unbelievable and she left audience and fellow-explorers alike in awe of her determination.

The final speaker, Ed Stafford, is the first known person to walk the length of the Amazon river. His talk was a little different to the others in that he was totally honest about both physical and mental stresses of travelling alone through inhospitable territory.

The event was organised by Alastair Humphreys in aid of Hope & Homes for Children. Alastair, whose adventures include a four year cycle ride around the world, chose to talk about a recent trip to Iceland where he followed a river from its source to the sea. It was a good illustration of the fact that you don't have to commit to year long feats of endurance to experience adventure.

A list of all the speakers can be seen here.

Art at the rockface

2011-03-03T15:04:00.013Z

A recent trip to Sheffield involved spending a bit of time in the city's Craft and Design Gallery. To be honest, displays of cutlery aren't really my thing although there were some impressive looking coffee pots to be seen. However, while wandering around the small shop I came across Art at the rockface: The fascination of stone, the book to accompany a 2006 exhibition of the same name. The study examines the way a whole range of artists have used stone in their work, whether it's those who sculpt, paint or fashion jewellery. Names include everyone from Magritte (left), Richard Long, William Turner, to ancient rock carvings.

One of my favourite paintings from the book is The Mountains of Thermopylae, 1852, by Edward Lear (below). While best know as the author of nonsense verse and limericks, he was also a talented landscape painter.

At the heavily discounted price of just £1.00, I just had to buy the book. It's selling for £21.25 on Amazon so hurry on down to the gallery while stocks last.

Fine dining on Everest

2011-03-02T17:26:00.007Z

The news that an Everest expedition plans to eat a series of gourmet meals all the way up the mountain was guaranteed to ensure a few headlines. Climbers on the Iceland Everest 2011 will have food prepared by an expedition chef and served on tables with linen, napkins and fine wine. Catalan chicken and boeuf bourguignon are just some of the delights that will replace the usual rehydrated mush. Alan Hinkes, a member of the climbing team, can be heard talking about the expected culinary delights on a recent BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

Of course fine dining on Himalayan mountains is hardly a new phenomenon. The 1924 British expedition's provisions included quail in foie gras, 1915 vintage Montebello champagne and crystallised ginger, all supplied by Fortnum & Mason. Going further back, in 1906 Dr and Mrs Bullock Workman were said to enjoy champagne and 'jugged hare in tins' while climbing in the mountains of Kashmir. Meanwhile, on the 1930 international expedition to Kangchenjungu, Hettie Dyhrenfurth, wife of its leader GO Dyhrenfurth, was responsible for managing provisions and equipment. As the Manchester Guardian reported, supplies included "dainties and essentials ranging from caviare and pate de foie gras...to say nothing of a ton or more of chocolate. For liquid nourishment there are, among other things, 500 bottles of Munich beer, cases of whisky, rum, champagne, brandy and different kinds of liqueurs".

A serious amount of booze was also taken on the 1936 French attempt of Hidden Peak - "unnecessary luxuries" as Frank Smythe put it in a review of Himalayan Assault, the book of the expedition (Observer, September 28, 1938). Beyond this though, the review is an interesting account of the changes taking place in mountaineering during the 1930s.

Gunther Plüschow

2011-02-15T17:54:00.015Z

Gunther Plüschow was the only German PoW to make it home from captivity during either world wars. After escaping a prison camp at Donington Hall, Derbyshire on July 4 1915, he, and fellow inmate Oskar Trefftz, managed to catch a train to London. Newspapers were soon running stories about the men which led to Trefftz's capture.

Plüschow though eventually managed to stow away on a Dutch ship at Tilbury Docks and make it back to Germany. After the war he married and became an aerial explorer. The story of his escapade was published a few years after the war. Manchester Guardian review, June 25 1922:

Plüschow was killed in 1931 in a plane crash while exploring a glacier over southern Chile. His exploits had been largely forgotten until Anton Rippon set about telling his story using documents in German archives. Gunther Plüschow: Airman, Escaper and Explorer has just been published while there's more about him here, here and here.

Adolphus Greely

2011-02-02T11:44:00.011Z

In 1881, Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely led the US Lady Franklin Bay Expedition to northern Ellesmere Island as part of the first International Polar Year (a series of coordinated international expeditions to the polar regions). One of the aims was to create an Arctic base. However, the adventure ended with Greely and six others being rescued in June 1884. Soon after, the expedition received international attention due to evidence of cannibalism.

Michael Robinson writes on Time to Eat the Dogs that "the Greely Expedition was supposed to represent a new kind of Arctic exploration, one focused on international, collaborative science rather than pell mell dashes to the North Pole. In the end, however, the expedition signaled the end of serious collaboration between Arctic explorers and scientists for decades". This is followed by a excerpt about Greely from The Coldest Crucible. Michael was also an advisor and contributed to a recent PBS documentary about the exhibition which can be viewed here.

Incidentally, the post includes page images from the Illustrated London News. Between 1842 and 1971, the paper was one of London's major publishing institutions, pioneering the use of drawings in the service of reportage. At its peak, the ILN had a circulation of about 300,000 and was the publication of choice for the Victorian middle classes, transforming illustrations into a credible, factual, news reporting tool. Previously, illustrations had been used mainly for political caricatures or for sensational events like public hangings. Compared with the dense, text heavy, pages of other papers from the time, the ILN is a joy to view (and the reason why I decided against including Greely content from the Manchester Guardian in the post).

See here for access to the ILN digital archive.

Doom of English forests

2011-02-01T11:59:00.011Z

The announcement that the British Government is planning a £250 million sell-off of England's publicly-owned forests has been met with huge opposition from many sections of society. While not all Forestry Commission land is to be sold off, and it will keep its role overseeing the country's woodlands, there is much uncertainty (to say the least) over guarantees over access for future generations. The fear is that private landlords may restrict walkers and mountain-bikers coming onto their land.

However, it is worth remembering that the Forestry Commission was created in 1919, not for public leisure needs, but to provide timber for the nation. The first world war had severely depleted Britain's woodlands and towards the end of the conflict, David Lloyd George, the prime minister, thought that the country was in greater danger of defeat through a shortage of timber than of food. The seriousness of the situation can be seen from this Observer report from April 21 1918 (click image to enlarge):

The Forestry Act of 1919 set up the commission with power but without a tree to its name. By 1939 though, it had planted 600,000 acres of new woods and in 1936 the first 'national forest park' was created in Argyll with others being established in Snowdonia and the Forest of Dean before the second world war.

Supporters of the forestry sale point to the fact that the commission has caused much environmental damage in the past, replacing ancient deciduous woods with commercial confiners, while whole areas have been covered in dark green blankets of forest with no regard for the surrounding area. Ennerdale in the English Lakeland is often cited as one of the worst examples of this and Harry Griffin, one of the Guardian's country diarists, was often critical of the desecration of the valley. However, the commission has changed its policy over the decades, a glimpse of which can be seen in this Griffin piece from July 1 1968:

Takeshiro Matsuura

2011-01-28T17:45:00.004Z

The Daily Yomiuri reports on an exhibition about Takeshiro Matsuura, the Japanese explorer who was the first person to document the inner reaches of what is now known as Hokkaido. He explored the area extensively during the mid 19th century and created a map of the island that included parts which had been ignored by earlier cartographers. He visited Ainu communities and compiled records of the large numbers of the population who had been conscripted for forced labour far from their homes. Matsuura suggested the name Hokkaido for the area.

Artscape Japan has produced an informative article about Matsuura, while The Old Geographer Matsuura Takeshiro, by Frederick Starr can be searched here.

Matthew Flinders and his map of Australia

2011-01-28T16:22:00.016Z

Australians are demanding that Britain hands back a map of the country drawn by explorer Matthew Flinders in 1804. Often referred to as the nation's 'birth certificate' on account of the fact that it's the first map to refer to the land mass as Australia, it is currently currently kept at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) in Taunton, Somerset - but is not on display.

In 1798, Lincolnshire born Lieutenant Matthew Flinders, who had studied navigation and cartography under William Bligh joined Royal Navy surgeon George Bass on a voyage around Van Diemen's Land, charting its coasts and proving that it was separate from the main continent. From 1802 to 1803 he circumnavigated the continent aboard the Investigator, filling in many unknown stretches of coast on the charts. Flinders's map, produced while he was detained by the governor of Mauritius from 1803-10, was the first to call the continent Australia. The name was adopted by the British Admiralty in 1824.Flinders died in 1814.

Australian MP Greg Hunt has written to the Dr Liam Fox, the British Defence Secretary, asking for his assistance and has started a petition calling for the return of the map to Australia. However, the Daily Telegraph reports that UKHO's response to the request was to say: "Matthew Flinders was a Commander in Her Majesty's Royal Navy on board the HMS Investigator and, as such, the UK Government holds it as a public record and [it] is officially part of the UK National Archives."

Matthew Flinders's Voyage to Terra Australis can be read here and for a little more information about him see this Manchester Guardian piece that appeared on July 21 1919:

Aleister Crowley and Gilles de Rais

2011-01-21T12:32:00.017Z

Put Aleister Crowley into an article and you can usually guarantee something of interest. Whether it’s about occultism, the Led Zeppelin connection or his mountaineering exploits, the so called ‘wickedest man in the world’ generates a good tale. Of course many dismiss him as a self-deluded charlatan but there’s no denying, as the latest Footless Crow posting shows, that in his youth Crowley was a bold and talented mountaineer. The blog reprints a Robin Cambell piece that originally appeared in Mountain magazine.

As ever, I was interested to see what contemporaneous news reports had to say about the man. Following the Guardian Book of Mountains thesis that at the beginning of the 20th century the Manchester Guardian was the paper of record for all things climbing, I was expecting at least something on the 1905 Kangchenjunga expedition. Unfortunately there was little apart from a few mentions. There were though some amusing reports of court cases, plus the following story about Crowley being banned from talking about the 15th century poet Gilles de Rais at Oxford University. Perhaps it was a quiet news day but the issue was thought important enough to warrant a leader column in the paper on February 4 1930. (Click images to enlarge)

In search of James Fitzjames

2011-01-19T16:59:00.018Z

While the British can seem obsessed with the exploits of Scott and Shackleton in Antarctica, Canadians are fascinated with the fate of the 1845 Franklin Expedition that set out in search of Northwest Passage, an Arctic waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, plus 129 crew members disappeared and little is known as to what happened - other than there is evidence that some of them survived for a number of years, along with lurid tales of cannibalism and lead poisoning.

A whole publishing industry has grown up around the expedition, while marine archaeologists regularly try and establish what exactly happened to the crew. Much has been written about Sir John Franklin, the leader, but there is scant information about other members of the crew, particularly James Fitzjames, the third in command on the voyage and captain of the Erebus. That was until William Battersby's James Fitzjames: The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition was published last year.

The author recently talked about how he came to write Fitzjames's biography at Kennington's Durning Library, as a guest of the Friends of the library. He explained that as someone working in institutional investment marketing he travelled incessantly, often to San Francisco. On one flight the financier found himself reading Barrow's Boys while travelling above the Arctic, the area where the grisly events contained in the book took place. He became obsessed with the Franklin expedition and after leaving his job during Lehman Brothers bank collapse, decided to pursue this interest, resurrecting his original training as an archaeologist.

Battersby was aware of the many theories about the expedition but found himself irritated by numerous inconsistencies. So he decided to start from scratch and look at the subject afresh. Initial research led him to deciding to concentrate on the life of Fitzjames.

The talk consisted of a romp through the sailor's relatively short life (he was 32 when he joined the expedition). Previous references to the man usually had him down a fast-rising adventurous glamour boy of the British navy. He took part in the first steamer trip down the the Euphrates River and fought China during the first Opium War. Then, at the age of 29, he was promoted from lieutenant to commander. This has usually been attributed to an aristocratic background. However, after trawling through a mountain of archive material, Battersby discovered that Fitzjames was illegitimate and a self-made man, plus many more facts about the man.

This was a fascinating talk that brought Fitzjames and navy life in the 1840s alive. It was illustrated with such newly discovered details as unseen paintings by the sailor and the fact HMS Erebus and HMS Terror can, on close inspection, be seen reflected in the band around his hat (picture above).

There were plenty of questions but, inevitably, the one that generated the most interest was over a slide featuring the skulls, minus jawbones, of some of the Franklin expedition members. There's no getting away from the fact that all talk of this failed voyage from over 160 years ago will always turn to cannibalism.

More on the book can be seen here and here.

Thanks to the Friends of Durning Library for organising such an illuminating evening. Mention must also be made of the fact that they are fighting hard to prevent sections of the service being closed down as part of the current UK spending cuts. The talk was yet another example of the varied services public libraries provide for the community.

On this day - January 17 1912: Scott reaches the south pole

2011-01-17T16:57:00.007Z

The obvious event to mark on January 17 is the arrival of Captain Scott at the South Pole. He may have written in his diary "Great God! This is an awful place," but that hasn't stopped scores of people, particularly over the past few decades, wanting to repeat the famous journey.

However, with next year seeing the 100th anniversary of the race to the pole (Roald Amundsen's Norwegian team got there first on December 14 1911), an unprecedented number of adventurers are heading to Antarctica. According to a report in the New York Times, some people plan to ski the exact routes taken by Scott and Amundsen, while others will travel to the pole by truck. Then there are novices making the trip as well as those making a race of it. Of course you can avoid all the discomfort by being flown there.

I'm undecided as to what to make of this. After all, the number of people actually stepping onto the ice (as opposed to visiting by cruise) is relatively small. A forceful case against all the hullaballoo can be read on Russell Potter's Visions of the North blog in which he states in no uncertain terms that these expeditions "confer only the most artificial sense of achievement".

The abominable snowman

2011-01-16T21:24:00.018Z

Tales of the abominable snowman, a human-like, long-haired creature that lives around the snowline in the high Himalaya have long fired the public imagination. Apparently named by a 19th century British journalist, but of course also known as the yeti, countless individuals have tried to capture it - at least on film.

The yeti industry includes everything from books by the likes of Reinhold Messner, serious studies by cryptozoologists (students of unknown or undiscovered animals) to all manner of appearances in popular culture, including Dr Who.

One of the most recent investigations comes from Mike Allsop, a mountaineer who is hoping to locate and return the supposed hand and skull of a yeti that were stolen from a monastery in the village of Pangboche in 1999. Allsop was so taken with the story that he has worked with a film prop firm to produce replicas and in April he will present them to the monastery. However, he is willing to fly anywhere in the world to collect the originals. Much more information can be found on the returnthehand site.

Perhaps the most famous bit of yeti 'evidence' were the serious of strange footprints photographed by mountaineer Eric Shipton while on the 1951 British Everest reconnaissance expedition. This is how the Manchester Guardian reported on the find on December 5 1951:

Incidentally, the piece appeared in the Miscellany column. Alongside it was the following report about walking backwards...

Brockwell Lido Midwinter swim (again)

2011-01-08T18:22:00.021Z

A final posting about winter swims. Enjoyable as they can be, all that collective jollity, silly hats and standing around in the cold can sometimes be a bit too much to take. As such, I was planning to give this year's Brockwell Lido Midwinter swim a miss.

However, a combination of the air temperature rising to balmy 10C and curious to see what the repainted pool looked like, saw me once again poolside, waiting to take the winter plunge with fellow South Londoners. And it was great. I really enjoyed the swim (rather than it being an ordeal and excuse for a drink) plus, unlike last year, the atmosphere was very relaxed.

The pool looked fantastic too. The new Mediterranean blue colour made the water look inviting even on a cloudy day. As an aside, I really think the owners of the Lido are missing a trick by not opening up the pool during the winter to members of its gym. The combination of modern gym, outdoor swim and then heated spa pool would have me signing up.

Thanks to athlonejonnie for the picture.

Climbing Everest: Noble adventure or Selfish Pursuit?

2011-01-06T18:39:00.006Z

Climbers who make the pilgrimage to Everest may claim that they're transcending the stresses of daily life in the city, but life at the mountain's Base Camp is as bitchy and competitive as any office across the globe. So say Gülnur Tumbat and Russell W. Belk in Marketplace Tensions in Extraordinary Experiences, to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

With many climbers paying as much as £40,000 for the pleasure of trying to get up the mountain, the authors conclude: “Our study finds that extraordinary experiences, when bought in the marketplace, can be destructive of feelings of camaraderie and reinforce an individualistic and competitive ethos that I, the climber, am the only one who matters”.

Plenty of books (see Michael Kodas's High Crimes, for example) and articles have been written about the often tense atmosphere around Base Camp, but this probably the first in-depth sociological study into the people who feel the urge to go there.

The 'discovery' of Machu Picchu

2011-01-06T17:45:00.007Z

2011 sees the centenary of the 'discovery' of Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham. Even though it wasn't actually brought to the attention of the wider world until much later in 1911, the anniversary is enough of a peg for travel articles about the ancient Incan ruins to start appearing. The following piece appeared in the Observer on December 31 1911.

On this day - January 5 1922: Ernest Shackleton died

2011-01-05T21:09:00.010Z

On January 5 1922, Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic explorer and legendary survivor, died on the island of South Georgia. He was leading the Shackleton-Rowett expedition, his fourth, which aimed to circumnavigate the Antarctic continent. Setting sail from London in Quest on September 21 1921, the ship arrived in South Georgia on January 4 1922. However, Shackleton suffered a heart attack, possibly due to the immense physical strain of previous expeditions and the stress of raising finance for them. He died the next day at Grytviken, where he was eventually buried in the whalers' graveyard overlooking the bay.

George Marston, the official artist on Shackleton's Nimrod and Endurance expeditions, wrote the following piece for the Manchester Guardian.

(click to enlarge)

More expedition pictures can be seen here. Thanks to DeadExplorers.

George Everest and the Manor Hotel

2010-12-25T12:20:00.019Z

Christmas travel plans included staying at the Manor Hotel, Crickhowell in south Wales. Plenty of character in a fantastic location, it's also supposed to be the birthplace of George Everest in 1790 - although the building was then known as the Manor of Gwernvale.

While the world's highest mountain was named after Everest in 1856, the military engineer and geodesist was always rather embarrassed by the honour. The story goes that in 1852, Radhanath Sikhdar who worked for the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India, discovered what he thought was the highest peak in the world. Several years later this was confirmed and despite it already being called Chomolungma by the Tibetans and Sagarmatha by the Nepalese (words not deemed "intelligible to civilised man"), the British decided to name it after Colonel George Everest, head of the survey.

News of the great discovery eventually reached the British papers - the following Manchester Guardian article appearing on October 7 1856 (lifted from the Times, as was the custom in those days).

Wim Hof: The Iceman

2010-12-21T17:05:00.010Z

It's that time of year again when stories appear about people stripping off and jumping into freezing water. Almost every paper has to have at least one picture of a lido or grim looking beach, complete with swimmers wearing silly Santa hats and skin the colour of beetroot. OK, I've done a few these festive dips in my time (and written about them). I was intrigued though by a story in the South China Morning Post (£) about Wim Hof who's going for an icy dip in Hong Kong of all places. The 51-year-old Dutch adventurer is hoping to break his own world record of immersing himself under ice for one hour and 44 minutes.

This is but the latest of Hof's extreme adventures. He has climbed to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in under two days wearing shorts, and run a full marathon within the Arctic Circle in Finland in temperatures close to minus 20 degrees Celsius - as well as an underwater ice swim. A man of extremes, he's also planning to run 50 kilometres in a desert without drinking water.

Silken flag at the South Pole

2010-12-16T17:38:00.009Z

So it's 99 years this week since man finally made it to the South Pole. At 3pm on December 14 1911, Roald Amundsen and his team deduced that they had reached their destination and, as the Norwegian explorer later wrote, "gathered round the colours, a beautiful silken flag. All hands took hold of it, and, planting it on the spot, gave the vast plateau on which the Pole is situated the name of the King Haakon VII Plateau."

Of course news of the success didn't emerge until the beginning of March the following year. Countless articles and books have been written about the journey but I rather like Amudsen's initial matter of fact account. The following piece appeared in the Observer on March 10 1912.

Leningradskaya Station

2010-12-02T17:20:00.010Z

The excellent UrbanGhosts site features Leningradskaya Station, a disused Soviet research facility in the Antarctic. Opened in 1971 and closed 20 years, the ramshackle collection of rusting buildings might lack the charm of the Edwardian huts of the Scott era, but they still have a certain presence.

Intrigued by pictures the outpost, I had a quick look in the archive and came up with the following piece from January 28 1989. There is talk that the station could be reopened but if it is someone will have to work out how to get rid of it's waste. It is fair to say that the visitors from Greenpeace were not too happy with the rubbish-dumping practices of the Russians.

As can be seen from these pictures, the station is perched atop a great looking cliff.

(click to enlarge)

Celebrity timepieces

2010-11-23T17:09:00.013Z

Luxury watch brands spend millions getting celebrities and sporting heroes to wear their products so they no doubt get excited when the timepieces make it into the general news. Last week saw plenty of coverage of the proposed sale of Sir Edmund Hillary's Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch. This was presented to the mountaineer after he scaled Everest in 1953 but is now stoking a bitter feud between his children and second wife, June. She wants to sell the watch, along with other items, but Hillary's two children claim it belongs to them. The explorer, who subsequently became the advertising face of Rolex, wore the watch during a 1957 expedition where he led a tractor team across Antarctica to the South Pole.

Another famous timepiece to come on the market is Lieutenant Don Walsh's specially-made Rolex that went with him all the way to the deepest part of the world's oceans in January 1960. Along with Jacques Piccard, Walsh descended seven miles to Mariana Trench in the Pacific in the Trieste, a specially built bathyscaphe. The explorer, 79, is auctioning the watch and it could fetch as much as £20,000 in New York.

To return to watch manufacturers sponsoring celebrities, Rolex all but invented the concept in 1927 when they persuaded a young woman called Mercedes Gleitze to wear one of their watches during one of her attempts to become the first woman to swim the English Channel. British Pathe footage of Gleitze can be seen here.

There, plenty more coverage for Rolex (and no, I'm not sponsored by them). Stories about all the above can be found in Those Who Dared.

Albert Smith and the Ascent of Mont Blanc

2010-11-17T17:11:00.013Z

The December issue of Climb features an interview with Sir Chris Boninington. There are a number of good questions to which Britain's most successful mountaineer provides, as always, some honest answers. In response to the inevitable observation that he was the first ever professional climber, Bonington replies:

"No, not all. Not many people will remember John Smith, who in the 1860s hired a theartre in London and put on a show about climbing Mont Blanc that ran for a whole month. Queen Victoria even came!"

I'm sure he means Albert Smith who in the autumn of 1851 made a guided ascent of Mont Blanc. On March 15 1852 at the Egyptian Hall, in London's Piccadilly, the former doctor produced 'The Ascent of Mont Blanc', a magic lantern show delivered in front of painted mountain scenes. Smith recounted the climb, interspersing it with humorous sketches of his fellow-travellers and topical songs. He even had St Bernard dogs carrying chocolate to the audience and employed showgirls dressed as Alpine handmaidens. Naturally the enthralled punters could purchase merchandise such as books, sheets of illustrations and even mountain-themed fans. The show was incredibly successful and was to run for a number of years. It also made Smith very wealthy. As the Manchester Guardian pointed out (below) Smith was making £6,000 a year, roughly quarter of million pounds in today's money.

Despite the razzmatazz, the Mont Blanc show gave impetus to the growing interest in mountain travel and exploration, that was to develop into the so-called Golden Age of Alpine climbing.

(Manchester Guardian, November 26 1856. Click to enlarge)

A couple of thoughts on Jim Perrin's West

2010-11-16T16:20:00.025Z

Jim Perrin's West: A Journey Through The Landscapes of Loss is part memoir and part travelogue as the climbing and landscape writer charts a journey of love and loss in the face of the deaths of his partner and son. Described as a psycho-geographical travel book on the nature of grief, Perrin explores everything from remote coastlines, forests, to the wild spaces of his beloved Wales as he attempts to understand the suicide of son, Will, and death of Jacquetta to cancer a few months later.

Throughout the book Perrin's language is rich, elegant and, as Robert Macfarlane put it, "lyrical in the proper sense of that word". West has been widely reviewed see here, here and here for a good selection.

A couple of thoughts. Despite the intense and often intimate language that thrills and challenges on almost every page it was a straightforward line that made me sit up. After exploring the coast north of Berwick-upon-Tweed, he comments "Climbers, I've long maintained, are of all groups of people among the least aware of their surroundings". It wasn't quite a Damascene moment but it did made me realise that in the urge to race up a mountain or get to the crag, I've sometimes been oblivious to the subtleties of the landscape.

Secondly, there is something incredibly satisfying about Perrin's endnotes. Whether it is a literary reference, information on a particular pub or recounting disarming a knife-wielding drunk on a train, they add another layer to the reading experience. Similarly, The Villain, his biography of Don Whillans, had copious notes which I enjoyed almost as much as the main narrative - although not all reviewers seemed to agree.

To the Himalayas on £250

2010-11-12T16:51:00.030Z

With so many media outfits binning their libraries, it's always heartening to come across a company that still sees the value of holding onto their archives, and, most importantly, knowledgeable people who know their way around them.

I recently visited one such collection, the Daily Mail's picture archive which is a treasure trove of prints and negatives from roughly 1907 up until 1997. Housed in a basement near London Bridge, it may be several miles away from the main office but staff can find pictures, scan, and send them back to the picture desk within minutes. Alan Pinnock, the librarian who has worked there since the late 1960s, asked if there was anything interested in. Off the top of my head I, er, suggested mountaineering and so he pulled out a few files from the 1924 and 1933 expeditions to Everest. The latter included some fascinating aerial shots of the mountain.

Quite by chance though, Alan was updating a file on Eileen Healey, a British mountaineer who recently died, aged 89. Healey was part of the 1959 all-female expedition to Cho Oyu, the world's sixth highest peak. This was organised by French climber, Claude Kogan, and a team that included members of the British Ladies Alpine Club, the Pinnacle Club, and three Nepali women. Unfortunately the expedition ended in tragedy with the loss of four climbers, including Kogan – probably due to storm and avalanche at or above Camp 4. Another British climber Countess (Dorothea) Gravina then took over as leader.

Although only an amateur photographer Healey had been invited to use her family cine-camera to record the expedition. After the tragedy the resulting film lay in an attic until, three years ago, it was put into digital format and shown at the 2009 Kendal Mountain Film Festival.

Three years later and Gravina led another all-female expedition, this time to the Jagdula region of Western Nepal. A Daily Mail photographer accompanied them and it was perhaps inevitable that the following shot of cosmetics and a handbag amidst all the climbing paraphanalia would be taken. Judging by its battered state, the print had been used several times.

(Copyright: Daily Mail)

Back in the office a quick search about the expedition brought up an interesting piece about Jo Scarr and Barbara Sparke, two climbers from the team, which goes against the accepted wisdom that low-budget Himalayan expeditions only really started in the mid-1970s.

(Observer, March 18 1962 - Click to enlarge)

Many thanks to the Daily Mail picture library.

On this day: A Century of Mountaineering, November 3 1957

2010-11-03T11:05:00.010Z

Perhaps it was just a slow news day or maybe the news editor really did think that the publication of Century of Mountaineering was just what Observer readers wanted to read about on the front page of their paper. Whatever the reason, Arnold Lunn's book provided an excuse to print the above picture on November 3 1957. Usually regarded as the father of modern British skiing, Lunn was also an accomplished mountaineer and the book is a very enjoyable read. A sample of his Oxford Mountaineering Essays can be viewed here.

Sir Francis Chichester

2010-11-02T11:08:00.010Z

The Sunday Times reports* that two of its readers have saved Sir Francis Chichester's Gipsy Moth IV with a donation of £250,000. Chichester set the record for the fastest single-handed circumnavigation of the globe in 1967 but the current owners of the boat were ready to sell it overseas. The article states that the Sunday Times sponsored the record-breaking voyage and secured an aerial front-page picture of Gipsy Moth rounding Cape Horn. This is partly true but in fact the Guardian signed a contract jointly with the Sunday Times to take Chichester's copy by radio-telephone.

This method had been extremely successful in 1962 when Chichester had done a deal with the Guardian to relay daily accounts of life on his boat (Gipsy Moth III) while trying to beat his own time for single-handedly crossing the Atlantic.

JRL Anderson, who amongst many jobs was the paper's yachting editor, worked with the Marconi company to develop an experimental ship-to-shore radio system. Chichester's daily commentary - best described as an early form of blogging - covered the smallest details including the progress of a wounded pigeon that took refuge on the boat. Anderson later wrote:

Five years later and the collaboration was revived with the Guardian printing long reports of Chichester's voyage to Sydney. However, the contract only covered the outward journey and due to a financial crisis at the paper, there wasn't enough money to pay for the return leg. With its deeper pockets the Sunday Times was able to buy up exclusive rights to the voyage - a fortuitous move as this leg proved to be a lot more exciting than the outward one.

The Gipsy Moth IV buyers, who are keen sailors and live in East Anglia, were moved to step in after reading in The Sunday Times that the yacht was likely to go to an overseas buyer after being put up for sale because of crippling maintenance costs. They have negotiated a package that allows the yacht to stay with the United Kingdom Sailing Academy (UKSA), the charity that trains children and disabled people to sail. There is a pledge to cover the maintenance costs for at least five years and will also ensure that the yacht is put on public display several times a year.

*Article locked behind paywall. Access details here

Faking it

2010-10-26T14:06:00.010+01:00

Fakes and cheats, a recent posting on Mikael Strandberg's blog looks at why some explorers and mountaineers feel the pressure to lie about their exploits. As he points out, there is nothing new about this and inevitably the name of Frederick Cook crops up. In the early 20th century Cook claimed to have been the first to the North Pole and the first to climb on Mount Mckinley (Denali) although it is generally accepted that he didn't succeed at either. As an aside, Strandberg offers a link to someone who suggests that in fact the American might just have been the first up McKinley.

Some of the most famous cases of cheating can be found in Great Exploration Hoaxes by David Roberts. However, while reading the blog I was reminded of Like Water and Like Wind, another piece of work by Roberts. This is a novella about a climber who, after watching his partner fall to his death while descending a mountain face, returns to civilisation and tells the world they were the first up a spectacularly hard route. No one knows that they didn't actually make it to the top and the climber is hailed as a hero in the mountaineering community. Wealth and fame follow. Living a lie though has a corrosive effect on the protagonist and when some begin to question his claims he turns to drink and withdraws from climbing. There's much, much more to this fascinating tale as Roberts explores what motivates an individual to deceive both colleagues and themselves.

A copy of the story can be found in the excellent One Step in the Clouds, an anthology of mountaineering novels and short stories.

Putting online communities on the map

2010-10-20T15:00:00.011+01:00

Maps are in the news. The publication of Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey has generated coverage for a subject that rarely gets a look-in on the pages of the print and online media. The book is the first popular history of the Ordnance Survey (OS) map, from its inception in 1791 to the first series of the one-inch map of Great Britain, eight decades later. I've just picked up a copy and hope to write about it at a later date.

If the OS map was the first complete and accurate map of Great Britain, Munroe's Map of Online Communities could well be the first to show the levels of internet social activity around the world. Randall Munroe has created an imagined world in which the land mass of each mythical country named after a website equates to the popularity of that site, showing effectively how social activity is spread throughout the internet.

The map is based on statistical information such as website hits and the number of members each community had during the Summer or 2010. Facebook and Twitter dominate but so does QQ, a Chinese instant messaging service which has more than 100 million users but is almost unheard of in the west. Meanwhile, the once popular MySpace is barely visible. Compare this with the 2007 version when the social networking site occupied a huge chunk of Munroe's map.

I like the way the Twitter landmass includes the impressive looking bit.ly mountain range. There are a number of gags contained - see this larger map.

Survival stories

2010-10-18T11:17:00.011+01:00

Last week's rescue of 'los 33' after being trapped in a Chilean mine for over two months provides an excuse for papers to review previous stories of survival. In the Observer, Ed Douglas selects The 10 best Mountain Survival stories. It's a good mix of the well known, such as Touching the Void, Into Thin Air etc, plus a few lesser known tales such as British climber Tony Streather's 1957 expedition to Haramosh.

Not all of the books listed are classics and of course everyone has their own favourites - just take a look at the comments. I might have included Ernest Shackleton's climb over the mountains of South Georgia (as told in Alfred Lansing's Endurance). There was also Doug Scott's epic crawl down the Ogre in 1977 after breaking both legs, and Stephen Venables's high altitude rescue from Panch Chuli V in the Himalaya which he wrote about in A Slender Thread. Making lists, it's an endless task...

Franklin fictions review

2010-10-15T17:40:00.003+01:00

The disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 man crew somewhere off the eastern coast of Canada in 1845 has spawned at least 24 novels, not to mention poetry, films and drama. Russell Potter, on his Visions of the North blog, reviews some of the literature as well as asking what it is about Franklin that appeals to such a wide array of authors.

On this day: Douglas Mawson dies, October 14 1958

2010-10-14T17:42:00.011+01:00

Douglas Mawson, the Antarctic explorer died 52 years ago at age of 76 in Adelaide. Although born in Yorkshire, he grew up in Sydney. In 1907, the Australian joined Ernest Shackleton's 'Farthest South' Nimrod expedition as a scientist and was part of the team that climbed Mount Erebus as well as reaching the Magnetic South Pole.

It was an expedition that set out in November 1912 to map part of the Antarctic coastline though, for which Mawson will probably be best remembered. After Lieutenant Ninnis, one of the three-man team, disappeared into a massive crevasse, along with six dogs and most of the supplies, the remaining two turned back. All they had to eat was stewed sledge dog but Dr Xavier Mertz then fell ill and died, probably due to poisonous levels of vitamin A from consuming dog liver. Mawson, while also in a dreadful state, eventually managed to make it back to base - only to see the ship that should have carried him to safety already out to sea. He finally managed to leave Antarctica and Those Who Dared includes an interview with the explorer when he visited London in May 1914.

In 1911-14 and 1929-31 Mawson led explorations which enabled Australia to claim much of the continent, something discussed in the following Manchester Guardian leading article from October 15 1958.

James Caird

2010-10-10T21:13:00.015+01:00

For the past couple of years my early Sunday morning ritual has been something like this: wake up, drag daughters off to swimming lessons and then grab 30 minutes or so in the gym while they're perfecting their strokes. The swimming pool is part of Dulwich College, south London, so there is one final part of the ritual - a glance at James Caird, one of the three lifeboats from the Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship.

Yes, the final berth for the boat that Shackleton and five companions sailed 800 nautical miles across the South Atlantic to seek rescue for his ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-16, is small gallery in a boys school. Dulwich College is the explorer's alma mater and after Norwegian whalers had rescued the boat from South Georgia, it made it back to Britain in 1919, was displayed for a while before being delivered to the college in 1922. It was moved during the middle part of the 20th Century but was finally returned to Dulwich in 1986. This led to the formation of the James Caird Society.

The display, consisting of the boat, plus a couple of sledges, a stuffed Emperor penquin and an old sail is well worth a visit, if only to marvel at how this tiny vessel survived such an audacious voyage.

Tryggve Gran interview with Roland Huntford

2010-10-08T15:01:00.016+01:00

When Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen was first published in 1979, it caused an uproar. For 50 years after his death, Captain Scott's reputation had been that of a great British explorer who died a heroic death in his tent. The book challenged this view, accusing Scott of being, amongst other things, "recklessly incompetent." Huntford though has always maintained that his aim was to rehabilitate Roald Amundsen's reputation, rather than simply attack the Briton.

What led Huntford to write the book in the first place was an interview he did with Tryggve Gran (above), the only Norwegian on Scott's team, for the Observer Colour Magazine in 1974. Huntford was the paper's Scandinavian correspondent, as well as writing about winter sports, for around 15 years. After filing the original piece "the editor phoned me to say he thought there was probably a book in it. I agreed with him and was astonished to find that when the piece was published he had added a footnote saying I was working on a new biography of Scott and Amundsen. So that sort of settled things." (Guardian, December 2008)

The Man Who Remembers Scott's Last Journey is a fascinating read. Gran explains how it was a recommendation from Fridjtof Nansen, the great polar explorer, that led him to being part of a British expedition. In 1910 Scott went to Norway to consult Nansen and while visiting a ski and sled factory, the champion skier remarked "But remember, Scott, it's no use having skis unless you know how to use them properly. You ought to take a Norwegian to show you." Gran also offers some interesting views on the differing personalities of the two protagonists.

As the Observer Colour Magazine has not been digitised, colour versions can only be viewed if you're fortunate to come across a bound volume. See below for the copy that appeared on March 31 1974. Click to enlarge.

Race for the South Pole

2010-10-06T18:23:00.018+01:00

This year marks the centenary of the beginning of the race for the South Pole. On June 1 1910, the Terra Nova, Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ship, sailed out of Cardiff for the Antarctic, while a few weeks later Roald Amundsen's team left the Norwegian port of Flekkero aboard the Fram, also bound for the south.

The British expedition was supposed to be a scientific mission with getting to the pole as just one of its objectives. Things changed though when, on arriving in Melbourne on October 12, Scott received a curt telegram stating: "Beg to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic – Amundsen." The ensuing polar marathon has been written about many times and expect yet more books to appear over the following months.

The latest to join groaning Antarctic Exploration bookshelves is Roland Huntford's The Race for the South Pole which tells the story through the expedition diaries of Scott and Amundsen. The entries are laid out so that the two men “finally confront each other across the printed page.” This is a first as the Norwegian's diaries have never appeared in English before (translated by Huntford), while all the cuts made by Scott's family and literary executors to Scott's published words have been restored. Also appearing for the first time is the diary of Olav Bjaaland, the cross-country champion who played a significant part in Amundsen's successful team.

As a polar historian and ski-expert, Huntford adds valuable commentary to the entries. The introduction sets out clearly the build up to the race, comparing the preparation that each team made during the winter months before setting out for the pole. There may be a little too much detail for some but reading about cooking stoves, skis, or the peculiarities of fur in a polar environment, brings the story alive.

The Race to the Pole is very much a companion volume to Huntford's 1979 book, Scott and Amundsen, an account which still divides polar historians. Was Scott, compared to Amundsen's ultra professional skiing team, an unprepared amateur whose achievement was to “perpetuate the romantic myth of the explorer as martyr" Or was Huntford's revisionist history just a prejudiced rant against a great, and brave, British explorer who simply got unlucky with the weather? This is discussed, along with the the rehabilitation of Scott's reputation by way of books such as Ranulph Fiennes's Captain Scott, in a recent Guardian article.

And so the story continues. The latest news is that descendants of Scott are planning to embark on a journey of commemoration and are offering the chance for one lucky person to go along with them. See here for details (but don't bother applying if you're over 30).

Gordon Bennett

2010-09-30T11:51:00.010+01:00

Balloonists in the the Gordon Bennett cup, the world's oldest, simplest and slowest air race, launched from near Bristol, late on Saturday night. Started in 1906, the rules are simple: take off from a fixed point and fly as far as you can on one fill of hydrogen - the winner being the balloon that travels the furthest.

This year, the winners, a Swiss team - SWI2 - made up of Kurt Frieden and Pascal Witpraechtiger, landed near Constanta, Romania, having travelled 1,513 miles (2,435km). However, a balloon piloted by Americans Richard Abruzzo and Carol Rymer Davis, went missing in thunderstorms over the Adriatic. The search continues.
Twenty teams, from 11 countries, competed this year, the first time that the Coupe Aeronautique Gordon Bennett has taken off from the UK. Where they eventually landed can be seen here. Described by the organisers as "the oldest and most prestigious aeronautical race in the world", it has always generated interesting news stories, such as the following report from the Observer, October 18 1908.
As to who was the original Gordon Bennett, see here and here.

Conquistadors of the Useless

2010-09-25T23:15:00.011+01:00

While rummaging around in the Guardian/Observer digital archive the other day, I came across an obituary for the French mountaineer and guide, Lionel Terray. It's 45 years this week since he died while climbing in the Dauphine Alps. Terray made the second ascent of the Eiger north wall in 1947 with Louis Lachenal, and then returned to take part in a dramatic rescue on the same mountain in 1957. As well as being part of the 1950 French Himalayan expedition to Annapurna, he climbed Makalu, Nilgiri and many other summits.

The alpinist, regarded as one of the finest climbers of his time, also wrote Conquistadors of the Useless, his much acclaimed autobiography in 1963. Here he defined his love of mountains as "This mass of grandeur and mystery...this world of ice and rock where there is nothing to be plucked but weariness and danger."

In a review of the book for the Guardian, Patrick Monkhouse (a climber, and a writer/editor on the paper for some 30 years who features in the Guardian Book of Mountains), while praising the content, thought the title "irony overstrained". Perhaps, but four decades on the and the phrase regularly crops up in mountainering essays and articles. In fact, I'd say that it's up there as one of the greatest titles for climbing/adventure books.

On the Proper Use of Stars

2010-09-20T10:37:00.011+01:00

Another day, another Franklin story. The latest news is that TV adventurer Bear Grylls claims to have found human bones, the remnants of huge fires built from ship timber, and tools carved from whale bone, which may help to explain the fate Sir John Franlin, his 129 men and their two ships. Grylls and his crew made the discovery while on a mission to enter the record books as the first team to navigate the treacherous Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean in inflatable boats. More details here.

Meanwhile, On the Proper Use of Stars, a novel about Franklin's doomed expedition has just been published. An English translation of Quebec writer Dominique Fortier's Du bon usage des etoiles (2008), it focuses on Francis Crozier, Franklin's second-in-command who turns a sceptic eye on the ambitions of his leader.

Life moves on and Grylls has just tweeted "off to start filming new Degree deodorant commercials today".

127 Hours

2010-09-17T10:24:00.016+01:00

127 Hours, a new film about Aron Ralston, the young adventurer who had to amputate his arm with a multi-tool, has been garnering positive reviews. Some of the scenes are said to be so realistic and explicit that three filmgoers fainted when it was it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival (although of course this could well have been a publicity stunt.)

Directed by Danny Boyle, the film, based on Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place, tells the story of how a fallen boulder crashes on his arm and traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah. Over the next five days he comes to the conclusion that the only way to escape is break the bone and cut through the tendons of his right arm. There's a short trailer here but also take a look at this film of Ralston describing the amputation.

Obviously the build-up to the severing of the arm forms the central part the book but Ralston has a few other tales to tell. For example, early on in his outdoor career a solo climbing trip to the Grand Teton National Park turned into a nightmare cat and mouse game with a hungry bear. Soon after establishing camp he realised that a young bear had been following him so, being an experienced backwoodsman, he strapped his food bag high up in a tree. The bear though just ripped it down. Ralston realised that he if he didn't get the supplies back he could well run into trouble thus he went looking for the thief, found it, and while waving a large stick, shouted "give me my food back, bear". Surprisingly, it dropped the bag. However, the animal later got its revenge by trashing the camp while Ralston was off climbing. It then followed him for 24 hours - Ralston would throw stones at the bear, it would go away, and then re-appear. He finally reached the safety the safety of his car,

I'd completely forgotten this story until a friend reminded me - whilst trying to scare a bear (left) away from our camp at Porcupine Flat, near Tuolumne Meadows. Panic reigned in the campsite for an hour or so, especially after the animal went up to someone's table and began to eat everything in sight. It gave just a small insight into the fear Ralston must have felt whilst coping with the bear on his own.

Georgy Brusilov

2010-09-16T12:12:00.007+01:00

The fate of Russian adventurer Georgy Brusilov, whose legendary Arctic expedition vanished in 1912, has been revealed. Explorers discovered his camp complete with skeletons and the perfectly-preserved pages of the sailor's log on Franz Josef Land, Europe's northernmost land mass, in July. Brusilov was trying to forge a route through the ice-choked North-east passage, the elusive Arctic trade route from Asia to the West. Midway into the journey along the Siberian coast, Svyataya Anna, the expedition ship, ran aground on thick ice floes.

The 24-member crew clung to the doomed ship for two winters as it floated ever closer to the North Pole. In the Spring of 1914 a 14 man team left to sledge south to Franz Josef Land. Of those who left the ship, only two survived, one of whom was the navigator Valerian Albanov, who later described the ordeal in The Land of White Death. These formed the basis for Soviet author Veniamin Kaverin's novel Two Captains. More detail about the 2010 can be found here.

Millican Dalton

2010-09-10T17:53:00.041+01:00

Harry Griffin, the journalist and climber who died in 2004 is usually remembered for his Lakeland Country Diary columns that appeared in the Guardian for over fifty years. However, he was also part of a small band of 1930s rock-climbers who helped revive the sport after the First World War. This week's Footless Crow republishes a 1975 piece by the man himself in which he recalls half a century of climbing in the English Lake District.

It's a fascinating read but what caught my eye was a sentence about Millican Dalton, the self-styled Professor of Adventure. Griffin writes: "There were no professional guides in the Lake District 50 years ago, apart from kindly old Millican Dalton, the Borrowdale hermit, who would take you up the Needle, make you a tent or rucksack, or cook you a meal in his cave." The man also featured in a Country Diary from September 14 1984:

Another description of the famous cave dweller can be found in the 1992 obituary of climber Paul Orkney-Work, in which he is quoted as saying, "(Dalton) made his own clothes and equipment and never washed. My mother broke off the engagement eventually. She said that he had a rather strong goaty aroma. But he took no offence and when she married my father he made them a tent for their honeymoon, in the gipsy style, with hoops rather than poles"

Read more about this amazing character in Millican Dalton: A search for Romance & Freedom.

There are a number of Griffin articles in the Guardian Book of Mountains, but his work also appears inDouble Measures. Here he writes about Lanty Slee, a notorius bootlegger and yet another cave dweller. Hidden underground in a quarry area near the Langdale valley the sometime farmer produced illicit whisky that was said to be the best for miles around.

Sir John Franklin

2010-09-09T15:10:00.009+01:00

It was reported in July that a ship lost while searching for missing explorer Sir John Franklin in the Arctic over 150 years ago had been found by Canadian archaeologists. The HMS Investigator, sent by London in 1850 to try to locate Franklin and his crew, was located in 11 metres of water at Banks Island, in the west of the Arctic archipelago.

Franklin and his entire crew were lost after setting sail for Northern Canada in 1845 during a fruitless attempt to find the Northwest Passage, a trade route between the Atlantic and Pacific through the Arctic Ocean. As an aside, a series of eight sketches of the voyage of HMS Investigator, reviewed in The Observer, appeared in 1854.

(Observer, August 13 1854)

The most recent news about Franklin is that a box containing documents linked to his doomed expedition has just been dug up in Gjoa Haven in the Canadian Northwest Territories. The exact contents of the unopened, sand-filled container will not be known for about three weeks. However, the view from Russell Potter's informative and reliable Visions of the North blog is that it will most likely contain records of Roald Amundsen, who was known to have left several caches in the area.

John Muir: Stone Sermons

2010-09-02T17:15:00.042+01:00

Travel writer Jan Morris once observed that "there can be few places of comparable grandeur so ghastly to visit as the Yosemite Valley on a holiday." She (then James) was writing in 1956 but on a recent visit to the Valley I did begin to wonder what I was doing there. There were queues for everything - from finding a parking space, getting a pizza, viewing waterfalls, showers, to the pleasure of renting a dusty patch of ground to put up my tent.

Of course nothing detracts from the supreme beauty of the place and once established in your campsite/lodge/hotel you can begin to relax and really appreciate the place. In fact, as I soon discovered, step off the main roads and it surprising how relaxed things begin to feel, while break away from the established trails and you'll soon be on your own. And then of course there is always the option heading up one of the the rock faces. Gain a bit of height, then look out over the tall, ancient trees, framed by the vast granite walls, and you can imagine what it was like when people first started exploring this wilderness in the 19th century (obviously Native Americans had been living in Yosemite for centuries.)

The most famous of these new visitors was John Muir, who, as every self-respecting environmentalist knows, was the Scottish-born American naturalist who was largely responsible for the establishment of Yosemite as a National Park as well the preservation of other wilderness ares. He has an almost god-like status in the park with his picture everywhere. In fact the great bearded one spent a relatively small amount of time in the park, mainly between the years 1868 and 1874. During this period he signed up as a shepherd to take a flock of 2,000 sheep to Tuolumne Meadows in the High Sierra, an adventure he recounted in one of his most exciting books, My First Summer in the Sierra, (published much later on in his life.)

Muir may have been looking after sheep but he explored as much of the landscape as possible. His diary shows that he was obsessed with Cathedral Peak, a spectacular 10,911-foot weathered granite horn above Tuolumne Meadows. The following entry appeared on August 9 1869:

"From every point of view it shows marked individuality. It is a majestic temple of one stone, hewn from the living rock, and adorned with spires and pinnacles in regular cathedral style ...(he hoped to climb to it) to say my prayers and hear the stone sermons."

Later that year he finally made an unroped ascent of the peak armed with nothing but a notebook tied to his belt and a few lumps of hard break in his coat pockets. One has to marvel at Muir's daring and adventurous spirit and some say this excursion kicked off Yosemite's climbing era. Equipped with rather more gear, a friend and I did a route on the mountain, last month. We had the rock to ourselves (bar a bare-chested hotshot who soloed past muttering something about English beer) and if I didn't quite hear Muir's 'stone sermons' amidst the spires, the view from the top of the final pinnacle is stupendous enough to bring out feelings about a higher being in even the most hardened atheist.

Or, as Peter Croft, author of The Good, The Great and The Awesome, puts it:

"The view from the top is pretty as punch and less than two hours away is the Meadows Store. Soon you'll be accosting strangers in the parking lot. "Excuse me, sir", you'll say, popsickle in one hand as you jerk the thumb of the other hand over your shoulder , "in case you're interested, I just climbed that MOUNTAIN!"

To take the ecclesiastical theme one step further, Climbing Great Buildings, a new BBC series, includes climbs up great structures such as World Heritage site, Durham Cathedral.

(Cathedral Peak pictures: Tim Wilkinson)

Digitised history

2010-07-21T13:36:00.008+01:00

British Library Newspapers Online allows researchers to explore over three million pages of 18th and 19th century newspapers online. It's a brilliant resource that has changed the whole nature of historical investigation. It has also presented challenges, some of which were debated at Digitised History, a conference held at the BL on Tuesday.

I plan to write about the day on vexed issue. However, one point that intrigued me was a remark made by Jim Draper, Vice President and Publisher at Gale, when he mentioned that the Victorians were obsessed with the phrase 'eaten by' - as in humans being eaten by wild animals or cannibals.

This chimed with some of the background research I did for Those Who Dared. Starting with the obsession with sailors from Sir John Franklin's failed attempt to find the North West Passage resorting to eating their dead colleagues, to wild tales of cannibalism from around the world, the papers were indeed obsessed with the phrase. A quick search brought up numerous examples. I've chosen this Manchester Guardian story from January 14 1890, if only for the extra details about 'roasting' and 'besmeared with blood'.

The Longest Winter

2010-07-16T17:24:00.019+01:00

The events surrounding the 1910-12 expeditions to the South Pole have been written about so many times that it is hard to believe that there is anything new to say about the travails of Scott and Amundsen. It was a surprise then to come across The Longest Winter: Scott's other Heroes by Meredith Hooper, a a tale that has never been fully told.

While most of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 59-strong team was dedicated to getting their leader and four others to the Pole, six members set out in February 1911 on a separate expedition several hundred miles north of the main Ross Island base camp. Under the leadership of Lieutenant Victor Campbell, the purpose was zoological and magnetic research. The Longest Winter tells the tale of how this Eastern, or Northern Party as it became known, after a partially successful year at Cape Adare, was picked up by Terra Nova, the expedition ship, and deposited further down the coast for further exploration. However, five weeks later, severe ice conditions meant that the ship couldn't collect them and so they were forced to spend the winter in an ice cave measuring 9ft by 12ft. Rations were low and seal and penguin became the main source of food. Come the Spring, and with no sign of a rescue party, the team then had to make a 230-mile walk back to the main base.

The first section of the book covers the team's year in a prefabricated hut. It's interesting to hear about life, (and often boredom), in a remote research outpost but the story really comes to life with the telling of the men's unexpected stay in the ice cave. Drawing on the diaries of the team - three officers and three 'men' - some still smelling of the seal blubber fires on which they depended for survival, Hooper reveals the daily grind and feeling of desperation they felt in what was dubbed Inexpressible Island (above).

Life revolved around trying to have enough to eat. The seal was served in the form of a 'hoosh', a stew which they found tastier when stirred in the blood-soaked ice. This was cooked over fires of burning seal blubber, which also served as fuel for improvised lamps made out of Oxo tins. The walls of the cave were soon blackened by the smoke and the acrid fumes choked the men. 'That igloo with its black and blubber beastliness' was how Apsley Cherry-Garrard later described it, after hearing accounts of the place.

While the diet of mainly seal and penguin kept the mean alive, the salt-water ice, combined with a lack of carbohydrate led to all of the team suffering from chronic diahorrea (often after long periods of constipation.) The radical change in their appearance can be seen in these photographs. In the first, taken at the Cape Adare hut, the men look like they're posing for a Boden winter catalogue.

A year later, and making the most of a lull in the wind to get out of the cave, the team, in their blubber soiled clothes resemble a particularly disgruntled Scandinavian heavy metal band.

Why this group of six very hungry men cooped up in a tiny ice cave for six months didn't end up fighting each other can be explained in part by the fact that Campbell maintained the strict naval discipline that had carried them through their year in the hut. All abided (if sometimes reluctantly) to this. That said, living in such close proximity to each other did lead to some of the strict class and social barriers breaking down. Certain matters though remained sacrosanct. It would take an expert in Edwardian etiquette to explain why exactly, even during a period when all the team were suffering extreme stomach problems, they needed one latrine for officers and one for the men - each side by side. At times the account feels almost Monty Pythonesque.

However, The Longest Winter recounts a story that should certainly be up there in the pantheon of tales of endurance. A good piece about the expedition appeared in the New York Times on February 15 1913 (a version of which was reproduced in the Manchester Guardian on the same day).

Ian Fairweather

2010-07-09T16:33:00.007+01:00

The Australian artist, Ian Fairweather, who died in 1974, is usually described as difficult, reclusive and a genius. The British-born son of a distinguished surgeon-general,who grew up on Jersey in a large house with a butler, rejected his privileged background and ended up living as a hermit on Bribie Island, Queensland.

Fairweather is usually viewed as an an artist of exceptional talent who produced paintings that merged everything from cubism, aboriginal art and Chinese calligraphy. Art critic, Robert Hughes, believed that "the emotional range and sheer breathtaking beauty" of Fairweather's finest pieces, such as Epiphany (below) surpassed all other Australian paintings.

However, as this recent article from the Australian explains, Fairweather is also remembered for a crazy ocean adventure when in April 1952 he set out alone from Darwin for Timor on a flimsy raft. This was made from materials he scavenged from the detritus of post-war Darwin such as torpedo shaped aluminium aircraft fuel tanks, driftwood and square sails made from parachute silk. He landed 16 days later on the Indonesian island of Roti, from where he was shipped back to Britain. He barely survived the voyage but in a later interview he explained "I wanted to get to Portuguese Timor, as the next best thing to Bali where I had done the best painting of my life after coming out of China 20 years or so before."

The artist Michael Stevenson recreated the raft in 2004:

David Livingstone's last letters

2010-07-06T18:08:00.013+01:00

The contents of a letter written by David Livingstone in which he condemns slavery and talks about his loneliness and ill-health have been revealed for the first time. The Letter from Bambarre addressed to friend and future biographer Horace Waller was written six years into the explorer's final, ill-fated mission to discover the source of the Nile and shortly before his famous encounter with Henry Morton Stanley.

Livingstone had run out of paper and ink, so he improvised by writing on torn-up pages of an old newspaper, using 'ink' squeezed from berries. Over the decades his handwriting had all but faded but researchers using spectral imaging, a technique that involves illuminating an object with successive wavelengths of light, were able to separate the explorer's handwriting from the newspaper type, thus revealing the contents of the document.

The publication of the letter by the Livingstone Online project is the prelude to a much larger project over the next 18 months, that will utilise spectral imaging to recover the diaries and remaining letters written by Livingstone 1870-71. Works by him can be found on the Missionary Etexts archive.

There was plenty of Livingstone coverage in the Guardian and Observer, but the following letter from the Guardian, September 24 1872, provides a revealing snapshot of the Scottish explorer's "useless tramp" around the Lake Tanganyika region of Africa.

Walter Bonatti

2010-06-30T18:22:00.011+01:00

The Mountains of My Life by Walter Bonatti regularly makes it on to top-ten lists of mountaineering books. A collection of the Italian climber's classic writings on everything from his epic 1955 solo route on the Petit Dru in the French Alps to controversy on the slopes of K2, the year before. Penguin have just republished a translation of the book and the sprightly 80-year-old recently spoke to the Guardian about his life.

Bonatti is one of the 20th century's greatest alpinists so, as I've been asked on a number of occasions, why he didn't make it into the Guardian Book of Mountains? The simple answer is that his exploits just weren't reported in the paper. The vagaries of the newspaper business can mean that sometimes mountain triumphs end up being relegated to little more than a small paragraph.

However, with the Guardian piece reminding me of Bonatti's many triumphs, I double-checked the Guardian's archive to see if I'd missed something. When I compiled the book, the paper hadn't been digitised so the only way to search was by way of the old card index and then trying to find the piece on microfilm. This method certainly threw up some interesting material but inevitably a number events just didn't get noted.

After scouring the digital archive, apart from a few news in briefs, I still didn't come up with much. The following item though, which did make it to the front page on August 30 1961, does capture the essence of the man:

Ludwig Leichhardt

2010-06-29T13:04:00.012+01:00

The Northern Territory News reports that a 'boffin' is to travel through the the north west deserts of Australia in a bid to find the final resting place of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared around 165 years ago. Central to the search for evidence is the fact that Leichhardt was know to carve the letter L into trees to mark his campsites. Dr Darrell Lewis, a National Museum of Australia research fellow, said "All the explorers marked trees everywhere ... It was really to help future people to relate to the maps." An illustration of this historical graffiti can be seen in an 1858 Sydney Morning Herald article.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt, who was German, began geological investigations in Australia in 1841. In 1848 he set out with the object of crossing the continent from east to west, but the last heard of him was from McPherson's Station, on the Cogoon River, Darling Downs, on April 3 1848. Five relief expeditions were sent out between 1851 and 1865, but no trace of the expedition was ever found. Various theories have been put forward about the disappearance including that the group was massacred by Aborigines, washed away in a flooded creek or perished of thirst and starvation in the desert. The following report about one of search parties appeared in the Manchester Guardian on January 14 1862:

Read Leichhardt's Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, here.

The Itineraries of William Wey: the first Rough Guide for pilgrims

2010-06-22T18:00:00.016+01:00

The Itineraries of William Wey is a 15th century pilgrimage account to the Holy Land that offers insights into travel, religious faith and the topography of Medieval Europe. Wey, a Devon priest was granted special dispensation by Henry VI to go on length pilgrimages. Perhaps the first known travel guide, his book has been described as the original ‘Rough Guide for Pilgrims’.

Bodleian Library Publishing has just produced the first modern translation of Wey's travels and more details can be found here. The route he took can be seen on the Walking Pilgrim site.

Aleister Crowley

2010-06-22T11:59:00.015+01:00

Aleister Crowley: A Passion for Evil is a new play by John Burns about the infamous occultist, poet, chess grand master, and rather good mountaineer. It can be seen at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival from August 6-28. Hear Burns read from Crowley's Confessions, including a section on how he became a climber here. The site also features a trailer for the play, an excerpt, and a podcast on how it came to be written.

Perhaps not surprisingly, no mention of the fact that Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page used to own Boleskine House, Crowley's place on the south east shore of Loch Ness. There are all kinds of stories about what 'the wickedest man in the world', and indeed Page, allegedly got up to in the house. Perhaps it did hold some dark secrets, but part of the attraction must have simply been that it's a handsome looking residence set in stunning surroundings - not to mention the mountain of Meall Fuarvounie just across the water.

For a detailed description of Boleskine read Mick Wall's So Mote it be from When Giants Walked the Earth or listen to this BBC radio documentary.

In 1902 Crowley and Oscar Eckenstein made the first attempt on K2. Eckenstein and Crowley are sitting in the middle.

Thanks to UKClimbing for pointing me in the direction of the Crowley play.

John Menlove Edwards

2010-06-18T18:42:00.005+01:00

It was a hundred years ago today (June 18) that the writer, poet, and leading British rock climber in the inter-war period, John Menlove Edwards was born. A psychiatrist by profession, he is remembered for his great climbing routes in the Llanberis Pass, Wales, as well as his guide books and literature.

Mention must also be made of his depression, mental illness and his suicide in 1958. A homosexual at a time when homosexuality was a criminal act in Britain, Menlove Edwards was also a conscientious objector during WWII. Whatever one thinks about COs, this must have been an extremely brave act for individuals when names and addresses were published in the daily papers. This is how the Manchester Guardian reported the refusal of his application on May 14 1941:

Short biographies can be read here and here, but Jim Perrin's Menlove is the definitive account.

Because It's There

2010-06-17T17:59:00.030+01:00

Because It's There was a one-evening exploration of what mountains represent to humanity, held at the Royal Geographical Society. A tall order, but over three hours various speakers touched on everything from why people climb, fear, women and mountaineering, the commercialisation of Everest expeditions to is true adventure still possible?

The first part of the programme consisted of four short talks. Journalist Ed Douglas began by looking at the relationship between the media and mountaineers. This has changed since the days of Arthur Hinks, then secretary of the Mount Everest Committee, who attempted to stifle all publicity relating to the Everest attempts of the 1920s, and who found that ‘All these questions of dealing with the newspapers are personally very distasteful to me'. On the 1953 British Everest expedition, Jan Morris (then James) used a pre-arranged code to ensure the Times got their Hillary/Tenzing exclusive.

Now climbers are blogging and writing on the mountain, often in real-time. One consequence of this is that media hails those that can write as the best climbers, while the true stars and innovators often go unnoticed.

Louise Turner talked about her long mountaineering career and how the real adventure often begins when the unexpected happens. However, she was very clear that she enjoyed living, not dying, and thus didn't take unnecessary risks.

Peter Baily then presented a meditation on what you can learn about yourself when you're in the mountains - the relationship between the the body, mind and emotions. He's as interested in the spiritual benefits of interacting with the landscape, as the physical exertion of getting to the summit. He illustrated this with a line from Walter Bonatti's The Mountains of My Life where the Italian climber states "it was solo climbing, above all, that let me enter into the spirit of the mountains and so come to recognize my own true nature". Finally, photographer Alexandre Buisse explained how the best photographs often come about in situations when you don't really want to be hanging around adjusting camera equipment.

The author and mountaineer Stephen Venables made the keynote speech. This was an inspiring romp through many of his expeditions, but he concluded that adventure doesn't always have to take place in the most inaccessible places.

The second part of the evening was the debate, Has Everest killed the true spirit of adventure? With a strong panel, it looked like being an exciting session. All agreed that climbing on the mountain had opened up new vistas, both in their climbing and non climbing lives. Kenton Cool, who has been to the Everest summit eight times, warned that you should never take it for granted. Meanwhile, Doug Scott talked about the importance of his 'apprenticeship' on the mountains of Scotland the Alps, before venturing into the higher reaches of the Himalaya. He also pointed out that there were more unclimbed than climbed mountains in Nepal - adventure for anyone who seeks it.

All of the panellists, with their anecdotes, tales and great experiences, made for exciting listening. However, the debate only occasionally came close to answering the main question. In many ways a well moderated online discussion might have revealed more. Nevertheless, it was a stimulating evening and pictures of the event can be seen here.

Finally, mention must be made of the complimentary King's Ginger that was available during the break. The drink of 'sporting gentlemen and high-spirited ladies', no doubt it was also taken on expeditions. Despite being often thought of as a winter drink, I've noticed that people have started sipping it in the warmer months (at least in South London they have). No mention in Double Measures, but this piece from the Observer's celebrated wine writer (December 17 1967) explains all:

1921 British Reconnaissance Expedition to Everest

2010-06-11T12:22:00.006+01:00

The latest issue of Footless Crow features a first hand account by George Mallory of the 1921 British Reconnaissance Expedition to Everest. Despite various problems members of the team got up to 23,000 feet and saw the way up to the final ridge quite clearly.

Once back in the UK, Mallory was part of lecture series about the assault on the mountain - and the forthcoming 1922 expedition. The following review appeared in the Manchester Guardian on January 11 1922. Interestingly, though, three days later the paper also covered the lecture given at Manchester Free Trade Hall where it was noted that the speaker was "sparing in his use of maps". A later piece also revealed that Mallory stated what a pleasure it was to read the Guardian Weekly on Everest.

(click to enlarge)

Jacques Cousteau

2010-06-10T16:58:00.012+01:00

Today sees the centenary of the birth of marine explorer Jacques Cousteau. The former French naval officer is famous for being an explorer, author, inventor of the aqualung, but is probably best remembered for the long-running television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which started in 1966.

This series was broadcast from the Calypso, a former British minesweeper. It was badly damaged in 1996, when a barge accidentally rammed into it in the port of Singapore. Now, his wife wants the French government to mark the anniversary of his birth by restoring the vessel to its former glory. "The Calypso is, in its way, the Eiffel Tower of the oceans," Francine Cousteau recently said, "I feel a duty to restore its soul... so it can be an ambassador of the environment in the years to come."

Cousteau died in 1997 and his reputation took a bit of a knock a couple of years later. Those Who Dared features an article about his 1953 book, The Silent World, and the following review of the film of the same name appeared in the Observer on December 1 1956.

Bouldering in St. Ives

2010-06-09T12:37:00.019+01:00

It was bright blue skies and big surf in St. Ives, last week, so most of my time was spent in and around the sea. However, inspired by Bouldering in St. Ives, I did manage to drag myself away from the beach and onto some rock. This excellent guide is an introduction to the boulders that are within a few minutes walk of the town.

OK, so many are just a few metres high and it may seem a bit of a waste of time climbing on these when the majestic cliffs of Gurnard's Head, Bosigran and Sennen Cove lie just a few miles along the coast. But, apart from being great fun, I was intrigued by the history of bouldering in the area.

Victorian Alpinist Sir Leslie Stephen was climbing in West Cornwall during the 1850s, but much of the action centred around the house of Eagle's Nest at Zennor, a few miles from St Ives. In 1873 this was bought by Professor John Westlake, and, as Barnaby Carver explains in the guide's introduction:

"His nephew, Arthur Westlake Andrews is regarded by many as ‘the father of Cornish climbing’. A. W. Andrews and his sister Marion Elizabeth (‘Elsie’) Andrews, scrambled on the granite boulders surrounding the house during childhood holidays. These rocks would later provide test-pieces for visiting climbers...By 1922 Andrews was living at Tregerthen, neighbouring Eagle’s Nest which was by then owned by painter, politician and writer Will Arnold-Forster. Andrews still presided over the house and garden parties for visiting climbers. Sir Leslie Stephen’s daughter, the author Virginia Woolf, describes Cornwall’s early ‘bouldering scene’ in her diary entry of 30th March 1921: ‘Visited Arnold-Forster’s at Eagle’s Nest... Endless varieties of nice elderly men to be seen there, come for the climbing...'"

One of the most famous climbs in the area is the Commando Ridge at Bosigran, a 700ft ridge of granite, that was used in the second world war for training commandos in cliff assault. In fact it was first climbed in 1902 by AW Andrews, and was then known as Bosigran Ridge Climb.

Everest season

2010-05-25T18:06:00.015+01:00

This year's Everest season is producing yet more mountaineering firsts. Jordan Romero, at the age of 13, has become the youngest person to scale the summit, while last week Bonita Norris claimed the title of youngest British woman to get there. However, lest anyone think climbing Everest it is a pushover, the Observer printed an account of just how dangerous the mountain can be.

Another climber going for a record is Duncan Chessell who is aiming to become the first Australian to climb Everest three times. On the descent he plans to look for the body of Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine, which, if found, will prove an Englishman got to the summit 30 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Irvine and George Mallory were last seen on the ascent, a few hundred metres from top, in June 1924. Mallory's body was found in 1999 but certain pieces of equipment, including cameras, and personal effects were not located. The body of Irvine has never been found.

Reading about this reminded me Mother Goddess of the World, a 1980s account of young Americans looking for Mallory and Irvine. Don't worry if you haven't heard of this infamous expedition as it's one of four stories that make up Kim Stanley Robinson's Escape from Kathmandu. This Nepal-based fiction revolves around the misadventures of George and Freds, part of the US expatriate mountaineer/traveller community.

Mother Goddess sees George unwillingly roped into climbing Everest with Freds and an oft-reincarnated Tibetan Guru, while on a mission to hide the bodies of the 1920s climbers from an expedition - not unlike Chessell's. Other characters include some naive English climbers and a documentary filmmaker who specialises in voyeurism. It's a hilarious tale that should be read alongside all the po-faced news reports about Mallory's tweed jacket, lost film etc, etc.