Friday, 23 October 2026
International edition · English
From the Himalayas to the Pyrenees: the history and geography of great peaks, the effects of altitude, safety and everything worth knowing before you climb.
38 articles · RSS
In May 2025 a huge flow of ice, rock and mud almost completely destroyed the village of Blatten, in the Lötschental. A preventive evacuation avoided a far greater tragedy. We look at what happened and why it is a warning for the whole of the Alps.
The permit for the south side rose from 11,000 to 15,000 dollars, climbers must carry down their own waste and experience requirements are being discussed. We review the measures trying to bring order to the world's most famous mountain.
Not all dangerous mountains are dangerous for the same reason. Some kill with avalanches, others with altitude, unpredictable weather or because they look easier than they are. Fifteen summits and their reasons.
The Sierra Nevada de Mérida once had at least six glaciers. By 2024 the last one —Humboldt— had shrunk into a small ice field. Venezuela thus became the first country in modern times to lose all its glaciers.
When a border follows the watershed across a glacier, melting can move it. That is what has happened around the Matterhorn, where Switzerland and Italy have had to adjust their shared boundary.
You do not need to be a mountaineer to walk beside glaciers, peer into a fjord or circle the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. Ten routes any hiker with reasonable fitness and common sense can do.
Where a human struggles to breathe, some animals live, hunt and breed. A mouse on the summit of an Andean volcano, a spider above 6,000 metres and a goose that can fly over the Himalaya.
At 3,000 metres every breath carries around 30% less oxygen than at sea level. Your body reacts within minutes, adapts within days… and sometimes fails. This is what happens and what to do.
Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but if you measure from the centre of the Earth, an Ecuadorian volcano wins. The reason: our planet is not a perfect sphere.
Running on trails is not road running with a different view: technique, pace and training all change. This is how to get into trail running without getting injured and enjoy it from day one.
A glacier is a balance between the snow it gains and the ice it loses. When the books come out in the red year after year, it retreats. We explain why this is happening almost everywhere and what it means for us.
Some of nature's shows look like special effects, but they really happen and you can see them without scientific equipment. Ten phenomena, explained, with the best times and places to watch them.
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