Life is all about decisions. Some of them are easy, some less so. This year involved some of the trickiest variety I’ve encountered in some while. I started out 2011 with the intention of taking on a major challenge on the icecaps, the places where I ply my trade. Rather, the place where I’d ply my trade week after week if funding and commitments in the ‘real world’ allowed. Having reunited with a great team mate from years past, Andrew Wilkinson, known as Wilki, we set out a plan to challeng

Moat Have you ever heard of Moat? I imagine not – only the people that live and work here really know anything about it. Yet it’s right here, a radar station at the End of the World. The southernmost point in the Americas which can be reached by car. Further south than Ushuaia, the archetypal pan-South American expedition destination; further south than Puerto Williams; and about 10 miles north of Puerto Toro, the southernmost settlement of the world, outside of the Antarctic, which lies on t

Through the mist and light snow fall I could just make out Norm and Kris waving a final goodbye as their 4 x 4 bumped away over the corrugated dirt road and back towards home.  Back to a dry, warm house, back to a soft comfortable bed.  Back to my tent, back to my therm-a-rest I would go. The car disappeared over a final rise and with beanie pulled low over my ears, hands shoved deep in my down jacket pockets I did an about face to survey my surroundings.  My friends had graciously driven

When Shackleton received word that war clouds had darkened over Europe in July 1914, he immediately dispatched a telegram to the Admiralty offering the services of his expedition crew and vessels. “There were enough trained and experienced men among us to man a destroyer,” he wrote in South, the story of his ill-fated 1914-1917 expedition across Antarctica. “Within an hour,” he continued, “I received a laconic wire from the Admiralty saying “Proceed.” Within two hours a longer wire came from

Cape York Peninsula, Australia. May 13, 2005. 5:17 pm Rounding the southern edge of Lookout Point, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, like when you know you’re being watched. I glanced behind. Two lidless eyes and a snub nose, gliding behind my kayak. Fear gripped me instantly. Not the jittery type like when you come across a large spider in the bath. But the primal, fundamentally hard-wired horror of being hunted and considered prey. And the last fifty yards to shore, which s

I began to stir, wriggling my toes, stretching my neck and taking a deep intake of air. My senses began to awaken. I could feel the warm breeze on my exposed face, my hair dancing around. I could hear the crinkling of our Tyvek groundsheet as intermittent gusts of wind gently pummelled us, as if trying to rouse us and tell us it was time to move on. With each gust came a sprinkling of sand on my skin and the pitter patter as it landed all around us. Slowly I opened my eyes expecting to see th

“It’s coming down to a matter of seconds” are not the words I was expecting to hear at the finish line of a 1,000 mile sled dog race, and yet that’s what was blared over the speakers as we watched two headlamps bob up and down and grow closer. Nearly two weeks earlier I had stepped off the plane and experienced my first glimpse of the incredible beauty of the north.  I was in Alaska, in the dead of winter.  Each breath left a tiny layer of frost on my eyelashes, and I could feel the inside o

Ascension Island is an oceanic relic of volcanic activity; a lone island almost mid-way between South America and Africa and only a few degrees south of the equator.  With no permanent or indigenous population, it is a communications relay base and staging post for flights to the South Atlantic.  Its harsh lava flow and cinder cone landscape is dotted with green foliage and the surrounding waters are warm and clear.  But the coast can be buffeted by strong winds and powerful surges, which ma

Towering above the high alpine villages of Switzerland, Italy and France, the lofty peaks of the Matterhorn and surrounding mountains have long been a Mecca for mountaineers and explorers alike. But, whilst cable cars and a mountain-railway usher hordes of eager-minded tourists to the region’s more accessible heights, pioneering exploration is still continuing, just not quite where one expects. Far out of sight, down in the eerie blue darkness of Western Europe’s second largest glacier syste

As I stood alone beyond the last bus stop in Europe, with more than a year of travel ahead of me, I could think of nothing but returning to this exact spot at journey’s end. Success on my trip would mean returning to where I had started, 394 days older, having travelled west from Tangier for more than 24,000 miles. The distance was equivalent to circling the globe at the equator. I reached Europa Point, Gibraltar’s southernmost, through streets closer to British history than roads back home.

It was another one of those ‘How the hell did I get here?’ moments but it’s not like I haven’t had plenty of those during my time in Russia. Over the last four years I’d got  up close and personal with bears in Kamchatka; dangled upside down over gorges in the Caucasus; and navigated some of the largest and deepest coalmines in the world in Kemerovo, to name but a few.  But when your job is to make films about some of the most weird and wonderful places and people in the world’s biggest count

For many years we have enjoyed exploring remote regions of the world, mainly by bike. After several adventures exploring high altitude regions, we became interested in a winter bike trip. We quickly fell upon the heart of Siberia: Lake Baikal. It is well-known for outstanding natural beauty and for its surrounding high mountain ranges. Consequently, the region offering amazing scenery. The lake completely freezes over in winter and the locals use its surface as a winter road. This seemed idea

The idea came from my friend José Manuel Naranjo: a Baltic Sea ski crossing, from Oulu (Finland) to Pitea (Sweden) completely unsupported – meaning without re-supplies en route or any external assistance. No fellow Spaniard had ever considered such a challenge before, and no one we knew had done it, so we started the planning stage with a huge amount of questions. Most of them would remain unanswered by the time we actually set foot on the ice. The Harbour Master’s Offices in Sweden and Finl

North America’s continental or Great Divide has an almost magical significance. Invisible and unmarked, it meanders at altitude for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Fall to one side of it and, if you are a raindrop, your journey will end in the Atlantic Ocean. Fall even fractionally on the other and the Pacific will be where you merge back into the ever-shifting seas. If you are a cyclist on a road-bike in the Rocky Mountains, the great divide switches between a place that gifts nigh on unbeli

Sometimes you have to begin at the end. In this case: at the summit of Pointe de Cray, above Château-d’Œx, surrounded by countless peaks, bathing in the last beams of sun on a warm September day. ‘I used to climb these mountains,’ the old man at the Alpine hut had said on our way up. He had built the cabin with his own hands, and the big terrace still serves him a view of the summits that he no longer climbs. From his wooden bench, he was able to name all the mountains around him. And now, t

Chasing silence has become an obsession, a therapy, an essential part of my personality, a necessity for good mental health – and a powerful tool for conservation. I’d been seeking these rare moments of silent communion with wild creatures ever since a close encounter with a female tiger shark off Cocos Island, which Jacques Cousteau called the most beautiful island on the planet, but from the isolated steppes of Kazakhstan to the Annapurna mountains nothing seemed to totally fulfil my spiri

The short and dark days of winter are now but a memory, and spring, as I write this, is upon us. The wildflowers have begun slowly unfurling, reaching towards the light of longer days. Skylarks are singing high over their prospective territories and the heather stems rustle around me. You’ll find me on the Isle of Islay, Queen of the Hebrides. I am the warden of the Oa reserve, a 2,100-hectare nature reserve and working farm owned by the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). In

Motes of ochre and gold cover our shoes. Grains of sand, millennia old and shaped by wind and water, feel as insubstantial as flour or dust, yet all around us we see towers and walls, hundreds of feet tall, sculpted into wondrous forms from these same grains. 1,000km to the north, the Pyrenees are locked deep into winter mode, ski tourers and mountaineers playing on frozen faces and in deep powder, while here, in Andalusia, we’re bathed in bright light, desert heat, and cricket chirps. By mi

My heartbeat is pounding through my head like a drum, and although I’m at altitude, I realise I’m pushing a little too hard. Picking up a skin track that meanders through the fresh snow in the glaciated valleys above Chamonix, I’m letting the excitement of this big adventure get the better of me. If I’m to ski the Haute Route in a single push, I need to settle my nerves and temper my speed. After all, I’m no superhuman skimo racer, but a 90+kg Brit who learnt to ski pretty late in life, att

I scream as I see something, someone, fall from the Abruzzi Spur in front of my eyes. They do somersaults, roll fast, too fast, from the infinite vertical wall. Their head goes up and down, up and down. They land 40m from me at Advanced Base Camp. Shock. My heart is racing. Breath broken, mind clouded. I’m not lucid. I think of everything in those few steps as I approach the body. Who is it? Will they be alive? In what condition will I find them? The End is my Beginning The journey to get h