UKC

Win a copy of "Regions of the Heart"

OK, clearly everyone is too used to those quizzes where all they want is lots of people entering without using their brain. You know, the ones with questions like "MINDLESS washing powder is brilliant. Now enter the quiz: What is the name of the washing powder just mentioned? Simply fill in your name, address, bank account details & inside leg measurement on this form and ring our premium-rate number for 20 minutes and you may win a reproduction biscuit tin!!"

Things are rather different here at UKC. We expect you to be made of sterner, or at least cleverer stuff. (Or just to use a search engine! You're on the Net, for God's sake!)

So who was the first British woman to climb K2? Not Alison Hargreaves, although many people kneejerked their way to that reply, because the prize was a copy of the paperback of 'Regions of the Heart' by Ed Douglas and David Rose, their fascinating biography of the woman who was one of Britain's premier mountaineers until her death descending from K2's summit in August 1995.

But the first British woman to summit K2 was in fact Julie Tullis, who reached the top on 4 August 1986 (only the third woman to do so, just a month after Wanda Rutkiewicz of Poland made the first female ascent). She died three days later on the descent after having survived a 1,000-ft slide and a forced bivouac at 27,000ft.

Happily we had five correct entries, from Mike Cheetham, Ray Hunt, Jon Pearson, Toby Archer and Peter Atkinson. Well done all. We received entries from the competition's first day through to the last, with an average of more than one entry each day. We like that. We'll try to encourage more for the next competition, which starts soon and will give you a chance to win a copy of David Simmonite's amazing photo collection "Rock Climbing in England and Wales".

And so to the tiebreak element of the competition, which decided who would win. The task: suggest an improvement for UKClimbing. The criterion: that it should be something which we at UKClimbing could actually implement for maximum effectiveness and at a reasonable cost.

The suggestions (and our comments) were:

  • Quiz questions that are so blatantly obvious that even brain deads like myself can get them right first attempt!

  • Hmm, that might increase the number of entries, but is that really a worthwhile enhancement?

  • Fewer pages to go through before messages.

  • Well, yes, but your browser does have a thing called "bookmarks" or "favorites" - you can go straight to the ROCKTALK or other forums using them. Not a bad idea, though.

  • Put the climbing news on the front page. Currently it takes two clicks to reach this page, which is the main reason for people returning to the site every day. Likewise make it easier to get to the message boards, and merge them all - reading lots of different boards is a bit unnecessary when they're all about climbing anyway.

  • This point is very like the previous one - not a bad idea. But the news is not the only thing about this site. What about the Rangefinder, the Forecaster, and all the great listings?

  • The politeness and genuine camarderie of British climbers to continue to echo around the silently misted commbes, corries and mountain tops of this wonderful isle.

  • We're not quite sure how we, sitting (or standing) at our computers are going to manage to do this. A worthy cause, nonetheless...

  • More good intelligent and reflective writers... Obviously getting good writers is the crux of the problem and there needs to be some way to attract them. Some of us out there who think we might be able to at least try and produce something need to get motivated to get off our arse and actually put the effort into producing something. I would suggest bribery in the form of competition prizes is likely to be the only way of doing this, unless you know people have potential and can approach them directly. Not many people knew of Jamie Fisher outside of the Scottish Winter scene, but the article he wrote in OTE about surviving a storm high on Mt. Blanc made me cry with its humanity. His loss is all the more as this potential will never be realised.
    Secondly, develop a network of informants to keep your news bang up to date - the net can do this much better than a monthly mag can.
    So there you go, optimise the advantage of speed then internet provides, but provide quality writing that sets UK Climbing apart from the general stuff that floats around on the net.

  • We found this a bit hard to disagree with. And so....

Toby Archer, who wrote that last comment, is our winner! We'll send him the book as soon as we find out his real address. And of course we look forward to him writing us oodles of features and sending hot news tips on a regular basis... :-)



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