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    On Thin Ice: Alpine Climbs in the Americas, Asia and the Himalaya
    Unavailable
    On Thin Ice: Alpine Climbs in the Americas, Asia and the Himalaya
    Unavailable
    On Thin Ice: Alpine Climbs in the Americas, Asia and the Himalaya
    Ebook370 pages6 hours

    On Thin Ice: Alpine Climbs in the Americas, Asia and the Himalaya

    By Mick Fowler

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    On Thin Ice is Mick Fowler's second set of climbing memoirs, following Vertical Pleasure. Here, the celebrated mountaineer records his expeditions since 1990. Despite work and family commitments, he has maintained a regular series of 'big trips' to challenging objectives around the world with a sequence of major successes: Taweche (1995, with Pat Littlejohn), Changabang (1997, with Steve Sustad, Andy Cave and Brendan Murphy), Arwa Tower (1999, with Sustad), Mount Kennedy (2000, with Cave), Siguniang (2002, with Paul Ramsden). Siguniang's hard ice climbing on a fabulous face in deepest China was so admired by the international climbing community that it won the US 'Golden Piton' and the French 'Piolet d'Or', both awards given for the finest alpine achievements in the world during that year. The author describes his travels in the great traditions, with engaging modesty and wit, but the climbs themselves are frequently so dramatic that the anxiety and tension forces its way to the surface to be matched by a corresponding relief and triumph when success and safe descent is achieved. Mick Fowler has thus become Britain's most successful exponent of high-standard lightweight mountaineering in the greater ranges. At 48 he is already something of an elder statesman of a cadre of international activists. They are steadily ticking off the most challenging lines in the world - a 'golden age' of super-alpinism that is now in full swing. How this influences activities on the 8000m peaks where the dangers (rarefied air, weather severity and sheer scale) are greater is an open question. History suggests that as major challenges on the lower peaks are steadily mastered the focus will return to technical challenges offered at the higher altitudes. Whether the results will exceed achievements such as the Kurtyka/Schauer (Gasherbrum 4) and the Bohigas/Lucas (Annapurna 1) remains to be seen. The combination of exotic travel with major climbs provides the ultimate adrenalin-soaked holiday experience that Mick Fowler has mastered to the full. We are transported from the cliffs of Jordan, to remote peaks in deepest Asia, via Taweche and Changabang in the Himalaya, with jaunts to the Andes and Alaska thrown in for good measure. That Fowler has organised this routine for years, while holding down a conventional nine-to-five job with the Inland Revenue, has constantly amazed his peers. In this, his second book, he has also mastered the skills of amusing travel-writing to entertain us as a preliminary to the finale of a titanic struggle on each of his fiendishly demanding climbs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVertebrate Digital
    Release dateMay 30, 2013
    ISBN9781906148713
    Unavailable
    On Thin Ice: Alpine Climbs in the Americas, Asia and the Himalaya
    Author

    Mick Fowler

    Mick Fowler was introduced to climbing in the French and Swiss Alps when he was thirteen by his father and soon developed an unstoppable enthusiasm for the sport. Every weekend through the winter climbing season he would make the long drive from London to tackle new winter routes in the Scottish Highlands, always managing to be back behind his desk in the tax office on Monday morning. His dedication paid off. Fowler became one the UK’s foremost mountaineers, putting up new routes in most fields of climbing, with first ascents of gritstone E5s, remote sea stacks and the frozen drainpipes of London St Pancras to his name. Along the way, he helped to develop a whole new style of climbing on the chalk cliffs of Dover. But it is for mountaineering that Fowler is best known. A former president of the Alpine Club, he has made challenging climbs across the globe, earning him three prestigious Piolets d’Or – the Oscars of the mountaineering world – and the title of ‘Mountaineer’s Mountaineer’ in a poll in The Observer. Remarkably, his climbing has taken place alongside a full-time job at the tax office, squeezing major mountaineering objectives into his holidays and earning him another title – ‘Britain’s hardest-climbing tax collector’. He retired from life as a taxman in 2017 but his enthusiasm for exploratory climbing remains undimmed.

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