What makes you a good candidate for climbing Everest and taking on a challenge which will require spending time in the ‘Death Zone’, the top reaches of the world’s highest mountain? We’ve been thinking more about this since seeing for a second time ‘The Wildest Dream’, the film of Mallory’s and Irving’s fateful attempt on the Everest summit in 1924.
We’ve met people from Europe and the US, who’ve wondered if there is anywhere in the UK, where the altitude and mountains can really prepare you for the conditions you’re likely to meet in the Himalayas.
If you have experience of winter walking or climbing in Scotland or the Lakes, you will of course know the answer. Last year we met Jon Bennett, one of the Helvellyn climbers who daily report in the winter on conditions at the top. He described taking five hours summiting from Thirlmere through snow drifts up to five feet deep. That’s tough!
And back in the 80s we remember a fierce August night beside wild Loch Avon below Cairngorm, when we just managed to hold up our tent with our two young children beside us in the tail end of a violent Hurricane Harry. We survived, but sadly we learnt on our return that a German father had that same night lost one of his two young children through hypothermia when trying to cross the plateau from Braemar to Aviemore. He had been used to the Alps and wasn’t ready for the Scottish weather.
Yes, the conditions on our high fells, though under 1000m, can still be arctic even in summer and can prepare you for the worst. We were reminded of this when reading Graham Ratcliffe’s, ‘A day to die for’, an account of the Everest climb back in 1996, when eight people tragically lost their lives.
Ratcliffe points out there that the photographer Bentley Beetham – whose impressive photos of the 1924 expedition and of the tent, where Mallory and Irving spent their last night alive, have helped to maintain interest in the expedition – learnt his mountain skills as a young teenager in the Lake District. Not for nothing do they call Keswick the climbing and outdoor capital of England!
There is a great website of the whole of Beetham’s oeuvre in the Himalayas, which has recently been created by a new Trust in association with the University of Durham.
We’ve been fans of Keswick’s Saturday market for years, so it was natural that we would want to take a look this month at the 
Only a mile from Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers, the Lincoln Park market stalls are full of a wide range of produce and provide a marvellous contrast of colours.
But this is not big business like the average 450 acre farms in the prairies of Illinois and Iowa, where millions of tons of field corn (or maize) are grown every year for home beef production, for the rapidly expanding Chinese market and for ethanol production.
The same however does not apply to the farmers’ markets in rural areas where jobs are limited and wages low and unemployment, well over the national rate of 9%, is hitting communities hard.
It’s just over two years since I started our 
All these buildings are set in magnificent landscapes. The highest at 4400m is a Civil War 
To expand on our pictures, we have included some photos which show the people living there and hint at their life stories. Most recently we have added photos taken on the 
The gallery has been a great cooperative venture and we hope that in reading this you will want to send us other pictures for inclusion. We now have 57 photos, of which half have been supplied by other people. We would like to express our thanks to Barney Harford, Chloe Harford, David Harrison, John Loudon, Liz Moore, Jim Richardson and lastly Mog Empson for his 
Yes, you’ll have guessed that we are talking about the ospreys, who returned this year to the Derwent Valley in April. Since we built the Belvedere three years ago with its wide range view across the marshes, we’ve been keeping an eye out for the ospreys. In 2008 they moved, conveniently for us, to a site in Dodd Wood which was visible from the Belvedere, though hard to see in any detail as over 1.5 miles distant.
We received news however last week from Lee Gretton who was staying at The Larches in August. He confirmed what we thought: “The osprey’s nest is easy to view from the Belvedere. I spent quite a lot of time with the binoculars watching them flying across the marshes”. The photo at the top shows the view through the binoculars of the bare tree with the nest. The site is indicated with a grey magnifying glass at bottom left of the photo.
In the US this month visiting family, we’re spending time in multi ethnic Chicago getting to know more of its history, character and traditions.
