Alps
A Single Moment: Alpine Bivouac
This feature was first published in Sidetracked magazine, February 2018. Suddenly I’m not sure I want to go through with this, but there’s no chance to go back now. Not unless I want to descend that ridge in the dark. I’ve climbed to the summit of Stockhorn,
The solastalgia of mountaineering
I’d last been up there ten years before. The landscape looked very different then, the snowfields more extensive, the light a purer white. I returned a decade wiser, weighed down with knowledge of what humanity was doing to these mountains that I loved, and so my sunset from the
Photography on the Trail
You don’t need a ton of gear to create meaningful images on a long-distance trail. Sometimes an agile approach can be best. This feature was first published in On Landscape (Issue 132), February 2017. All images © Alex Roddie. By its very nature, landscape photography requires the photographer to be
Mercantour Traverse gear debrief
Ultralight gear choices in the high Alpine
Trip planning: Mercantour Traverse, July 2018
A long-distance trail in the Maritime Alps I had originally planned to take a year off from European backpacking routes while I focus on other areas of my life, but I find myself unable to resist the lure of big, wild, glaciated mountains. The Mercantour National Park is a corner
Read my feature on Alpine bivouacking in the latest Sidetracked magazine
Sidetracked Volume 11 is shipping now. This is the eighth issue of this magazine I have personally worked on, but the first I have contributed to as a writer and photographer as well as an editor. Key themes in this issue are humanity, authenticity, and expanding our sphere of experience.
Hiking the Tour of Monte Rosa
A 100-mile walk around a huge mountain that straddles the borders of Italy and Switzerland, this Alpine trail deserves to be better known, says Alex Roddie This article was first published in TGO Magazine, July 2016 There’s something beguiling about Monte Rosa. The name sounds graceful, but the mountain
In the Footsteps of Forbes: how the Alps have changed since 1842
Professor James Forbes is probably the most significant mountain explorer you’ve never heard of. In this piece, first published in the summer 2015 edition of Mountain Pro Magazine, I’d like to show how studying his pioneering work led me to appreciate the enormous changes that have taken place
Tour of Monte Rosa day 1
02/09/2015 This is the first in a series of blog posts live from the Tour of Monte Rosa, a 100-mile backpacking route in the Alps. The Tour of Monte Rosa trail blog series Day 1: Zermatt to Täschalp Day 2: Europaweg stage 1 Day 3: Europaweg stage 2
Preparations for the Tour of Monte Rosa
Monte Rosa is one of the biggest and highest mountain massifs in the Western Alps. Incorporating a number of summits all well over 4,000m, it is surrounded by many miles of difficult glaciated terrain to the west, and the biggest cliff in Europe to the east. It’s the