Tag: Mountaineering
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Crossing the Kolyma Mountain Range in the Russian Arctic
I tend to call the winning ideas from my grant “adventures” rather than “expeditions” because I don’t like to throw around the term “expedition” lightly. Like the word “epic”, I think it gets over used and there is a risk of diluting its meaning. Grant winners Wyatt Stevens and Tully Henke recently completed an epic…
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EasyJet Expedition #2: Moroccan Mountains
Three years ago, Laura and I walked across Ibiza and called it an “EasyJet expedition”. The idea was to do a trip somewhere you wouldn’t normally associate with adventure (Ibiza = clubbing, right?) and somewhere that you could get to easily and cheaply by budget airline. It was a great trip. I loved the illicit…
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From City to Summit – Walking from Boston to Mount Washington
My least favourite part of running my own expedition grant is having to turn people down. Which is why I love it so much when someone who doesn’t win a grant still completes their expedition. Here’s one such story from Tom Hennell, who recently walked from Boston city centre to the summit of Mount Washington.…
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Three Teenagers Tackle the Tour du Mont Blanc
I always enjoy reading applications for my grant but but I particularly enjoy applications from young people. The application I received from teenagers Joe, William and Ollie to walk the Tour du Mont Blanc was excellent. I was really impressed with how meticulously they had planned their trip (we’re talking daily itinerary and budget to…
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Rock Climbing the UK’s 82 Classic Routes (and cycling between them)
I usually say that The Next Challenge Grant is for small adventures but every year there are exceptions. Last year, Lisa and Libby ran up every 3,000ft mountain in Scotland and, in 2015, Elise ran five thousand miles around the coast of Great Britain, to name just two such exceptions. This year, Oli Warlow took…
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Running Up Every ‘Munro’ Mountain in Scotland
At the end of last year, two women achieved a remarkable feat: they ran up 282 mountains, back-to-back over 77 days, running more than 1,000 miles on the way. Libby and Lisa were the biggest winners in last year’s Next Challenge Grant, getting an award of £600. Their challenge was to climb all of the…
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Off to Morocco
Laura and I are off to Morocco. It is another of our ‘EasyJet¹ expeditions’: short adventures that fit around annual leave, in places you can get to with a cheap flight. ¹(Other budget airlines are available). Last year, we walked across Ibiza: flying with hand luggage only and walking home from the airport afterwards. Wonderfully…
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What Happened When We Went Walking In Iceland…
Last summer, Laura and I followed a series of long distance trails in Iceland. Here’s my account… [divide] The bus pulled away leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere. Concerned passages stared at us from the windows, exchanging looks of bewilderment. ‘Here?’, I’d asked the driver. ‘Yes…’ he’d replied uncertainly, ‘we think’. And that…
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I Walked from Exmoor to Patagonia
I walked out of my front door for the first time, age 14, with 75-litres’ worth of kit on my back and made a bee line for Exmoor carrying a change of jeans, a clutch of Pot Noodle and four spare litres of water (“just in case”). Our mileage as a group was low but…
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The First Man to Row the Atlantic, Climb Everest and Cycle the World
Today, a guest blog from James Ketchell AKA Captain Ketch, the man who has rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, summited Mount Everest and cycle around the world. James recently joined the database of Long Distance Cycle Journeys (LDCJ) and kindly offered to write a piece for The Next Challenge. Over to the Captain… Over to…
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Expedition Travel Insurance
Complete listings of all the best travel insurance companies for expeditions and adventure. Including: cycle touring, mountaineering, climbing, Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland icecap. Updated February 2020 Expedition travel insurance is a topic about which I have received a lot of emails. People struggling to get cover for trips of a long duration, particularly cycling tours,…
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10 Tips for Trekking the Inca Trail
A guest post with advice for walking the Inca Trail courtesy of Helene from Dragoman. [divide] Ten tips for trekking the Inca Trail The Inca Trail is one of the world’s most amazing treks, taking you across the unspoilt Peruvian Andes, through some of the globe’s most beautiful mountainous terrain, stopping on the way to…