Its been a month today since Ueli Steck passed away. I said my goodbyes as a handful of us huddled together on a ridge by Tengboche Monastery in the wind and watched his spirit be let loose in the Khumbu, as the funeral pyre set his body free. I’ve been thankful for all the messages that people have said and written, he was a man who touched a lot of people’s lives. I’ve also had time to reflect on his story and what the last few years of his life were like and what it should teach us. I’ve thought a lot about how the witch hunt, spearheaded in part by a certain prominent French climber, led ..read more

I’ve lost count of the amount of emails I’ve received asking for camera gear advice and what I use; it’s a minefield after all with so many brands, sensor sizes, and lens choices. Throw in the fact that in our sport we tend to favour the small and light things in life, it means that we’re constantly looking to squeeze every ounce of performance out of our kit. My set up is actually pretty simple and it doesn’t tend to change all that much - keep it simple and you’ll use it lots, make it complicated and you’ll never get your camera out. So to that end I’ve laid out below what I use on both pr ..read more

About the only thing that’s guaranteed for me in Himalayan climbing is that at the end of it all I get to press my face up against a cold aircraft window, like a kid on their first flight, as we fly right over the Mont Blanc massif into Geneva airport. It’s a special moment for me, and I always have a huge grin on my face as I take it all in. On the left side of the plane you see the main core of the Mont Blanc massif, and on the right you fly directly over the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses and Aiguille Verte. Either way you win. I can even see my apartment from up there, a physical rem ..read more

When I was 20 I stepped down from the yellow La Poste bus on to a completely dark and deserted street in Grindelwald. I’d arrived at the famous home of the Eiger. I tried to scan the featureless sky above and ahead of me to try and make out even the faintest outlines of the mythical mountain but thoughts quickly turned to finding somewhere to bivy for the night. I spent a lot of time staring up at that wall from our camping spot tracing out all the stories I’d read over and over again in The White Spider. I watched storms roll in from nowhere and broil up in its huge concave face, I went for ..read more

Shooting Link Sar over the years has given me an incredible amount of footage from beautiful sunsets to Himalayan storms and everything in-between. Part of the focus of climbing Link Sar, for me, was to make a really beautiful film out of it as there really are very few ‘professional’ grade films that cover technical ascents of unclimbed mountains in the Himalayas- for obvious reasons. The full feature film will come out in Autumn 2016 but for now here is our 4 mins trailer- it’s definitely worth your time. Hit HD and full screen for the full experience ..read more