Lesson one: Pack light unless you want to hump the eight around the mountains all day and night.By the time we reached Snowdonia National Park on Friday night it was dark, and with one young teacher a...
Just under the South Summit I could make out the shape where Rob Hall lay. He had died up here some twenty-four months earlier.His body, half covered in drift-snow, remained unchanged. Frozen in time....
In the end I concluded, nothing ventured, nothing gained. (A vital ethos to follow if life is to have flavor, I have since learned.) I knew I should at least attempt Selection.If I failed, well at lea...
I was so proud to have been made a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy in 2005 (Dad would have approved!), and through the expeditions that I have led in Antarctica, the Himalayas, and the Arctic,...
I remember, for example, the time at prep school when I was chosen for the under nines’ rugby team. Well, to be more accurate, I was chosen to be linesman, as I wasn’t good enough for the actual team....
I have always loved the quote from John F. Kennedy: When written in Chinese, the word is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.Looking back on my life...
Fears and worries - about things that are long passed, or that may never materialize in our future - all weigh us down and slow us up.So where you can, drop the worries.Jesus talked a lot about this,...
During the year before Shara and I got married, I managed to persuade the owners of a small island, situated in Poole Harbor, to let me winter house-sit the place in return for free lodging.It was a b...
Among these have been an unhealthy number of near-death moments, many of which I look back on now and wince. But I guess our training in life never really ends--and experience is always the best tutor...
Almost a hundred years earlier, to the day, Samuel Smiles had written the final pages of his book It included this moving tale of heroism as an example for the Victorian Englishman to follow. For the...
…just keep going. JKG.Winston Churchill said it in one of the darkest moments of World War Two, when the outlook was as bleak as it had ever been. On 10 May 1940, the British looked to be finished. Th...
Without doubt, we all get handed ‘lemons’ sometimes in life. No one is immune from this. Maybe it’s an incurable illness, or a soldier caught in a roadside bomb; maybe it’s a duff education, a dysfunc...
I mean, what does it say about someone if you describe them as a ‘trying’ person? It means they try our patience to the limit!)Somewhere in our brains the word ‘try’ gets associated with phrases like...
I exercise about 40 minutes a day, and I'll run one day and do circuit training the next day. I live in an area where there are brilliant hills and mountains, so I get a good hill run with my dog. At...
When I'm filming, survival requires movement. You need your energy, and you've got to eat the bad stuff, and survival food is rarely pretty, but you kind of do it. I get in that zone, and I eat the na...
Empty vessels make the most noise. It is true. The best adventurers and climbers, and the most successful people I know in life, are all great listeners, and they don’t talk too much.
Write this on your bathroom mirror:
When my parents were away, I would often be sent to spend the night in the house of an older lady who I didn’t know, and who didn’t seem to know me, either. (I assume it was a friendly neighbor or acq...
Wealthy people so often find that the summit of their mountains - the success that they sought - isn’t enough. And they are right. It isn’t enough to satisfy our deep hunger for meaning and purpose. (...
We were now receiving daily very accurate weather reports from the Bracknell Weather Centre in the UK. These gave us the most advanced precision forecast available anywhere in the world. The meteorolo...