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Sinking like a Stone
Come gather 'round peopleWherever you roamAnd admit that the watersAround you have grownAnd accept it that soonYou'll be drenched to the boneIf your time to youIs worth savin'Then you better start...
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The Rock
The most impressive early companion of my childhood was a dark cliff, or what looked like a dark cliff, to the south; a wall of rock and steep woods half-way up the sky, just cleared by the winter sun....
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John Muir- The Wildest, Highest Places
When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southernWisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel...
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Mountain Characters: Spirits in the Sky
John Porter and Alex MacIntyre in Peru: Photo John Porter‘Your young men shall see visions’ The BibleRecently I read an article by Nick Bullock bemoaning the fact that the present day climbing...
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Lone Star..... 'Trespassing Across America'.....review
I first came across Ken Ilgunas when I received a review copy of his debut work ‘Walden on Wheels’ . What I first thought would be yet another road trip travelogue turned out to be a smart polemical...
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Two Short Summers: A profile of Brian Kellett.
On the 11th September, 1944, a search for two missing mountaineers was launched on Ben Nevis. The climbers in question were Brian Kellett, a cragsman of the highest calibre, and a woman climber of vast...
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Terra Pericilosa: Speak, why are you here?
Derek Hersey:Photo Gary Thornhill Intimacy with the planet keeps us wild, undomesticated, unwilling to submit to social conditioning. Lash.As a self-professed outsider in the outside arena it may...
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Hay Dream Believer: Under the Tump....Review
Oliver Balch’s ‘Under the Tump’- the tump in question being the mound in Hay on Wye, upon which sits a fortification-is a lyrical tour of that quiet land twixt England and Wales...The Marches. A...
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Three men in a boat
There’s nothing quite like being on the sea at night in a wee boat,” said Graham. “Nothing lies ahead of us now except the Outer Hebrides. We should be there in another five hours.”The trim little...
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The Fear Barrier
I first perceived the fear barrier on my first VS climb — the Barbican on the Castle Rock of Triermain.Four of us,on separate ropes,went for it on a damp March day in 1975. Big black boots; a stiffish...
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The Old Men of Hoy
L to R; Paul Trower.Al Alvarez and Mo Anthoine: Photo G BandMost of us city dwelling climbers lead split lives; five days a week in the office or factory, occasional weekends and holidays in the hills....
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Snapshot
It is all too easy in these days of Crags, Hard Rock, Mountain and Climbing to assume that the state of mountaineering photography has never been better. The recent entries of still photos for the...
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Wizz
Ken Wilson: Photo John Cleare-Mountain Picture Library ‘It’s an old Ken Wilson maxim, a picture is worth a thousand words, so snap away, snap away, snap away!’(From a song by the author)Not many sports...
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The Ballad of Idwal Slabs
Idwal Slabs: Artist Aled Prichard Jones Editor's Introduction *: The climbing world of thirty years ago seems a very innocent place viewed in retrospect. The days of Wall End Barn or Scotty Dwyer's...
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Climbing Days....Reviewed
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Slippery Jim
Joe Brown: Painting by Keith Bowen:Image KB I prefer to look forward and not back, but occasionally it is good to sit and remember. I do hope however, that climbing never becomes anything more than a...
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Ashes
Ashes. Now there are only ashes. Scattered on the wind. Falling far and free.Who was he? When I first met him, he was struggling to stand in a sling on the bolt of Darius. He’d never made an aid move...
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Classic Rock: A fanfare for the common man
The following article announced the imminent arrival of a book which has become an iconic coffee table climbing tome...Ken Wilson's Classic Rock. A sequel to the equally lauded Hard Rock.The concept...
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Simon McCartney's 'The Bond'...reviewed
Climbing now seems to be at a crossroads, will it continue to be a free- wheeling activity, attracting adventurous souls, with a canvas much wider than organised sports or will it succumb to being a...
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The Gully....Part One
“And now that I have climbed and won this height, I must tread downward through the sloping shade, And travel the bewildered tracks till night; Yet for this...
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