Probably having a cup of tea somewhere cold or unexplored… and trying to get better at writing it all down.

As a student, I was learning to climb on Lakeland rock. Shepherd’s Crag in Borrowdale, Gimmer Crag in Langdale. Nearly twenty years on, I have been caching science cargo on the Antarctic ice sheet. The years in between were an apprenticeship. Halcyon days in the Alps, expeditions to the Greater Ranges. Each trip asking for a little more than the last. Here, everything the apprenticeship taught me supports the science.

There have been winters on skis for nearly as long. It was one season in the Alps, between expeditions - mountain huts, bootpack trails, power days, snowstorms, and days of rain - that taught me objectives must shift with the conditions.

The big expeditions started in 2021. Looking across the East Bordlu Glacier from our advanced base camp, I felt at home in the solitude. Unnamed peaks caught the last of the sun as the cold settled around us. Finding an unclimbed line, building a climbing team, working out how to access glaciers nobody had been to. This was everything I wanted. Some of the climbing partnerships behind these stories started there. I had found something in the Kuiluu that would keep bringing me back to the Greater Ranges.

I started writing about these trips in India in 2023. Thomas and I were hunkered down in a cramped bivouac tent, where we had been stormbound for nearly two days. Between broken sleep, clearing snow off the tent, and brewing up, I scribbled the first notes for the piece about our time in Sikkim in a crumpled notebook. I was trying to work out what I was doing there.

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.