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Did Edward Whymper make the first ascent of Carihuairazo?
From the south side, it’s not easy to see which summit of Carihuairazo is the highest. Once an active volcano, there must have been a time in the distant past when this mountain was huge. It has long...
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Nirmal Purja’s ascent of all fourteen 8,000m peaks: why is it controversial?
Every so often a story emerges in the world of mountaineering that is so big that it makes it into the popular press alongside stories about Brexit, Brexit and even Brexit. Last week was one of those...
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Review: Touching the Void, on stage in London’s West End
‘What next? A bloody musical?’ Joe Simpson When a writer makes a comment like this about a stage-play version of his book, then it’s probably going to be a weird play. I have to confess, I raised my...
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If you climb a peak that collapses in an earthquake, did you still climb it?
In today’s big philosophical question, we feature a video with the most entertaining commentary since these three Geordie lads went hiking on a winter’s day in the Cheviots. At 8pm on 7 August this...
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What was Jan Morris’s secret code to say that Everest had been climbed?
Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement All well!Jan Morris, Coronation Everest There have been many tributes to the journalist and travel writer Jan...
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Is the first winter ascent of K2 a turning point for Sherpa mountaineers?
It’s not very often that the ascent of an 8,000m peak makes international news headlines, but earlier this month something rather special happened. At 5pm Pakistan time on 16 January 2021, a team of 10...
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If Reinhold Messner wasn’t the first person to climb all the 8,000m peaks,...
There have been rumours in the mountaineering world for a couple of years now that all the records about ascents of the world’s fourteen 8,000m peaks might need to be rewritten. The rumours were...
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Did George Mallory climb Everest in 1924? I asked ChatGPT for an answer
Some of you may have heard about ChatGPT, the Elon Musk-funded chatbot that was launched to the public last month to much fanfare (although he has since left the project to concentrate on winding down...
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Bookman Plaster Award announces new rules for mountaineering books following...
The trustees of the world’s most prestigious mountain book award have announced updated rules for entries following new research alleging that hundreds of historical mountaineering books have been...
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The most shocking first page in mountaineering literature
One of the things that sometimes annoys me about quite a lot of mountaineering writing is machismo: the equating of various attributes such as physical strength and endurance, single-mindedness and...
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