mountains
Historical climbing re-enactment on Countryfile
Image from the BBC: http://goo.gl/SfQPe BBC1’s Countryfile is a programme that often covers topics related to mountaineering and the outdoors, but last night’s episode was particularly good and featured many locations and themes relevant to my novels. The episode focused on the Lochaber region of
In our September…
Gearr Aonach and Aonach Dubh, with a corner of Stob Coire nan Lochan’s cliffs visible. 11th of September 2009. EVEN the mountains can look dull. When we remember their haze of August heat, the glaring rays that beat on flattened colour, unrelieving line, our clouded hours of life seem
Review: Echoes: One Climber’s Hard Road to Freedom
Echoes: One Climber’s Hard Road to Freedom, by Nick Bullock This book has just been released in the UK. My rating: 4 of 5 stars Echoes is a striking book with an evocative cover photo featuring Nick surmounting a cornice–or so we assume. On reading the photo description
The quest for the sublime in the Alps
In this blog post I’d like to talk a bit about how I’m trying to connect the late 18th / early 19th century concept of the ‘sublime’ (and by extension, Romanticism) with my work. First, some definitions. According to Wikipedia, “the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis) is the quality
A writer’s holiday in Snowdonia
Tryfan: the nursery-ground for generations of British mountaineers A week ago, I jumped on a train and headed west, with a simple intention: to spend a few days in the Ogwen Valley of Snowdonia, to spend my nights under canvas, and to recharge my batteries by revisiting some of my
Review: FIVA: An Adventure That Went Wrong
FIVA: An Adventure That Went Wrong, by Gordon Stainforth My rating: 5 of 5 stars Warning: spoilers! When Gordon Stainforth asked me to read and review his new book, I jumped at the opportunity. His true story of an adventure going sour, and in the mountains of Norway no less,
Switzerland (oh to be there in the summer!)
In the steamy, stuffy Midlands, ‘neath an English summer sky, When the holidays are nearing with the closing of July,And experienced Alpine stagers and impetuous recruitsAre renewing with the season their continual disputes–Those inveterate disputesOn the newest Alpine routes–And inspecting the condition of their mountaineering boots:You
Five years since work began on OGJ
These notebooks, in which I wrote down everything I saw during my two visits to Zermatt in 2007 and 2008, proved vital to my future work In July 2007, my brother and I went to the Alps for the first time. We weren’t very experienced mountaineers at that point.
Something a little different
Over the years, I have found that my appreciation for mountains is best expressed in three different ways: literature, music, and art. Literature is obvious enough (it’s the reason this blog exists, after all); for music, I find references in dozens of classical symphonies to the wonders of nature,
Terra Incognita
Part of my research for 1848 has involved a study of the cartography and glaciology of that decade. The Alps were only partially explored, despite Chamouni (modern-day Chamonix) being almost permanently overrun by tourists from every corner of Europe. Mont Blanc had been climbed dozens of times, but most other