Articles and Hints & Tips

Read our review of the excellent two new instructional guides by Pete Hill.

Read our review of Dan Evan's guides to scrambling in the Lake District, published by Cicerone Press.

Read our review of forthcoming DVD release of Mountain with Griff Rhys Jones.

Read our review of Ronald Turnball's guides to the top 100 walks in the Lochaber area, published by Cicerone Press.

Read our review of Dan Bailey's brilliant guide to Scotland's finest ridge routes, published by Cicerone Press.

Read our review of the excellent new winter climbing guide for the English Lake District, written by Brian Davidson and published by Fell and Rock Climb Club (FRCC) and Cicerone Press.

Once you're tried winter climbing in the UK, you'll know that predicting the conditions and which routes are in good "nick" is a big part of the battle. There's a mixture of science, local knowledge and intuition involved but fortunately there are plenty of good resources available on the internet to help you with this.

In this article we'll point you to all the best resources on the web for weather forecasts, snow & ice conditions and route reports. We'll also outline how to get the most out of these.

For those that are new to the sport of climbing, the grading system can be confusing. As you travel abroad or branch out into other variations of the sport, the different grading systems used just add to the confusion.

In this article we try to shed some light on the different systems used around the world, across the three main of the variations of the sport: rock climbing, bouldering and snow & ice climbing. For each system we'll give brief overview on how it works and where possible compare the different grades across the systems.

Climbing is confusing enough without having to learn a whole new language. Hopefully this dictionary will prove useful in translating some of the words and terms that you will hear or read.

When you go to the crag you'll hear a variety of phrases being shouted between partners. While some of them might be mild chit chat or abuse, others are actually used to let the partner know what the other has done or is about to do. These are climbing calls and are an important method of communication.

Welcome to the MountainDays.net Library. In this article we've provided details of some of our favourite mountaineering books. We have split them into two groups, the first contains instruction books and the second covers mountain literature.

Where possible we've also included a link to where you can buy these books.

Web cameras have come a long way since a group of students at Cambridge University thought it would be a great idea to publish a picture of their coffee pot on the Internet. There are now tens of thousands of web cameras across the globe providing shots of people, places and landscapes every hour of the day.

From a mountaineering perspective, the useful ones are those that are showing the current conditions in mountain areas, of which there are numerous in the UK.

An article written by Mick Upton in which he recounts an eventful ascent of Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis in May 2004.