Dan Richards
Dorothy Pilley (1894–1986) was a trailblazing writer and mountaineer who led the way for women’s climbing and co-founded the Pinnacle Club for women in 1921. She climbed ridges and sheer faces around the world, creating a legacy that is admired to this day. In 1928, together with her husband I.A. Richards and Swiss Guides Joseph and Antoine Georges, she pioneered a route up the north- north-west ridge of the Dent Blanche in Switzerland. Climbing Days, a celebrated memoir of her early life and climbs, was published in 1935.
Dan Richards discusses preparing for unexpected meetings with bears in this audio extract from Outpost.
“It all had an irksome feeling of déjà vu. This had happened to me in a fashion before - but at least this time I had a working phone and we were below the snow-line.”
“These isolated, precarious refuges, at once exposed and welcoming, allow Richards to interrogate ideas of home and escape, of safety and adventure, all in a narrative whose principal pleasure is the time the reader gets to spend in the author’s amiable, erudite, Tiggerish company … Richards is often compared to his friend Rober Macfarlane, but his voice is much closer to that of Geoff Dyer: vivid, self-deprecating, literary and very, very funny.”
Alex Preston
Observer
