Finding Silence: Reflections on Expedition Climbing

An Introduction

Accounts from five mountaineering expeditions, stories from a season on skis, and field notes from Antarctica. The expeditions took me across the Greater Ranges: the Tian Shan, the Karakoram and the Himalaya, and the Andes of Peru and Bolivia. Small teams, unnamed peaks, and glaciers the maps have left blank. We climbed some and turned back from others. Closer to home, time on skis in the Alps gave me future climbing partners.

Since November 2025, I have been in Antarctica, working as a Field Guide with the British Antarctic Survey. I am here until February 2027 — two summer seasons and the winter between them. We build instrument sites and lay logistics caches. The objective is climate data, not new lines. I will return to expedition climbing in March 2027.

Kyrgyzstan in 2021 is where this all began. Everything since has followed from that first trip into the Kuiluu Valley.

These stories started in journals and notebooks written in wind-battered tents. They were first written for me. Some of them were rewritten years later, a long way from the places they describe. Now they are shared here.

The mountaineering expeditions were supported by the Mount Everest Foundation, the Alpine Club Climbing Fund, the Austrian Alpine Club (UK), the British Mountaineering Council, GRIT&ROCK, and the Jeremy Willson Charitable Trust. I am grateful to all of them.