The BBC Archive and exploration

The BBC Archive is a collection of 12 million artefacts including 600,000 hours of television content and 350,000 hours of radio, not to mention thousands of documents and photographs, built up over 80 years of broadcasting. Now, a small part of it has been made available through BBC Archive. Collections, range from a series of programmes about the Berlin Wall, apartheid, to playing Shakespeare's Hamlet.

What about exploration? Well, there is section on the moon landings, but little else - at least for now. However, I did come across a radio feature on Chris Bonington, the mountaineer who is probably best known for leading the British 1975 Everest 'The Hard Way' expedition up the mountain's south-west face. In a programme recorded in 1988, Bonington recalls the significant expeditions and places in his life while climbing on Goat Crag in the English Lake District.

Bonington features a number of times in The Guardian Book of Mountains, including The Social Climber, an in-depth interview with him from March 1973. At the time he was promoting The Next Horizon, the second volume of his autobiography, and was well on his way to becoming a household name. His study is described as being full of all "the latest in audio-visual equipment," an indication that the former tank commander was one of the first, and probably most successful, mountaineers to use writing and lecturing to fund their sport.

What is often forgotten amidst all the tales of mountaineering exploits is that during the mid 1960s, Bonington was an adventure journalist, writing and photographing expeditions such as John Blashford-Snell's attempt to make the first ever descent of the Blue Nile, in 1968. Many of these stories later appeared in the best-selling Quest for Adventure, a very good collection that aimed, as he put it in the introduction, to explore 'The what and the why of adventure', as well as 'the how'.

Lizzie le Blond by way of Biosphere

Geir Jenssen is a musician who, under the name Biosphere, records mainly in Tromso, the northernmost town in mainland Norway. Surrounded by glaciers, mountains, and tundra, the austere 'Arctic' soundscapes he produces are gloomy yet strangely soothing. Sounds of howling wind and running water, combined with his music, evoke empty, snowy wastes.

Although usually filed under ambient, the Norwegian's compositions transcend the generic electronic noodlings of much of the genre. Take a listen to Kobresia, from the classic album Substrata.

With Jenssen's interest in the Arctic circle landscape, it wasn't a total suprise to discover he is also a skier and mountaineer. Many of the mountains he's climbed can be seen on his Northern Playground website, which is partly about the Lyngen peninsula area. Along with a picture of each mountain, and the route taken marked in red, he also lists the first ascensionists plus interesting historical information.

As I mentioned in the Ornulf Opdahl posting a substantial number of the peaks were first climbed by 19th Century British climbers. But it is the name of Elizabeth Main that crops up more than others. Born Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed, following a number of marriages, she was also known as Mrs Fred Burnaby, Mrs E Main, and Mrs Aubrey le Blond - as well as the more the more glamorous sounding Lizzie le Blond. She was one of the pioneering female alpinists and the first president of the Ladies Alpine Club. She wrote a number of books, including Mountaineering in the Land of the Midnight Sun (1908), which is all about the Lyngen area.

There are many tales about her, but a famous one saw her climb the Zinalrothorn (4221m) twice in one day - the second time to retrieve the skirt which propriety demanded she wear over her climbing breeches when off the mountain.

Geir Jenssen has also climbed Cho Oyu in Tibet. And, yes, he's produced music inspired by the expedition.

Alfred Gregory

The death of Alfred Gregory, the mountaineer and photographer who recorded the Everest expedition of 1953, has seen two fine obituaries appear in British newspapers: Jim Perrin's in the Guardian and Stephen Venables's in the Independent. Examples of his work can been here and here, plus there are more pictures and extracts from Alfred Gregory: Photographs from Everest to Africa on Penguin Books Australia's website.

Ripping Yarns.com to close

Ripping Yarns.com, the independent specialist publisher of adventure books, has announced that it's winding up operations. Ian Robertson, its founder, said on UKClimbing:

"In 2003 I started 'Ripping Yarns.com', republishing some classic adventure and mountaineering titles. We also published the much needed guidebook "Walks and Scrambles in Norway". However, it's now time for me to move on. Ripping Yarns.com didn't make any money last year: selling books to climbers in a down-turn ain't easy!"

Rock Climbers in Action in Snowdonia

Rock Climbers in Action in Snowdonia, published in 1966, was "the first really modern book about climbing in Britain." So wrote Steve Dean in a Climbers Club article celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the hugely influential guide. With spectacular pictures by John Cleare, and text provided by Tony Smythe, it went on inspire a new generation of climbers and book publishers.

Now Footless Crow has just reprinted the piece complete with a selection of Cleare's pictures. Part two appears next Friday.

A clue as to why the title made such an impact can be found in a quote by Ken Wilson when he was interviewed about the influences on Hard Rock. Wilson said: 

"What was less of an influence was Rock Climbers in Action is Snowdonia, though I do think that it is a fine book, but it is not my style. It is all about the feeling of climbing and its verve and position and very 'photographic' and the captions are poetic rather than factual. Leo Dickinson, Ray Wood, Bob Keates and John Beatty are photographers that might be said to be part of that school. I favour a more scrupulously factual (some might say boring) approach and I particularly like to see the climber in his architectural setting."

The "verve and position" point seems to complement Dean's description that "something had appeared in print that in words and pictures really managed to convey just how rock climbing felt." 

Apparently Al Alvarez was originally going to write the commentary but in the end was too busy to take on the work. However, Alvarez did write The Edge of the Impossible, a feature about 'hard' climber Peter Crew, and illustrated with Cleare's pictures, that appeared in the Observer magazine on August 22 1965. This, as Jim Perrin was to later put it (The way you climb is the way you are, The Climbing Essays), was a "wonderful and over-the-top essay," that a did good job of turning Crew "into climbing's first pop icon".

As a footnote, the following week saw some heated debate on the letters page as to just how classless climbing really was.

Peter Hodgkiss

The Independent reports the death of "Peter Hodgkiss: Mountaineer and publisher whose Ernest Press extended the scope and ambition of climbing literature." A book with the distinctive Ernest Press screw press logo on the spine was always a guarantee of a unique outdoor literature reading experience. They also produced a good set of UK mountain biking guidebooks.

Shackleton's whisky on (Antarctic) ice: part two

Following the news last November that a rare batch of whisky belonging to polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton had been discovered, this week saw the precious liquid recovered from the ice. Now the burning question is what does the stuff actually taste like? Probably best to turn to Whyte & Mackay's Master Blender, Richard Paterson.