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UKClimbing Limited

UKClimbing Limited is the company behind the World's most popular climbing and mountaineering web site UKClimbing.com, and UKHillwalking.com.

Our aim is to bring our readers both the best of hillwalking, climbing and mountaineering from around the World and the best experience that Web technology can provide. We promise that:

  • We will give you the most up-to-date and most comprehensive information and news that we can, about everything to do with hillwalking, climbing and mountaineering from around the World.
  • We will run UKClimbing.com and UKHillwalking.com as separate web sites but enable users to switch between them easily.
  • We will continue to develop the sites using the latest web technology, while maintaining a web site that is compatible with as many computer systems possible, old and new.
  • We will not over-populate the site with advertising.

We'd like to ask one thing from you in return: your participation - give us your opinions; take part in the discussions; submit your articles, photos and news items; use your logbook - because the more you take part, the more valuable this site will be to you and to everyone else. If you want to participate right now, then Contact Us, or go and start looking around.

Business Structure
UKClimbing.com was created in 1995 by Andy Hyslop and Adam Greenwood, and existed as a sub domain of various sites. Alan James combined his Rocktalk forum with the site in 1999 and UKClimbing.com became a fully-fledged limited company in 2001. From 2001 to June 2008 UKClimbing.com Limited had two directors: Alan James and Andy Hyslop. In June 2008 Alan James bought the whole company to become the sole director. In November 2009, UKClimbing.com Limited was bought by Rockfax Limited and both companies were established under a new single company called UKClimbing Limited, again with a single director, Alan James. In February 2011 UKHillwalking.com was launched.

The Team

The current sites are maintained by a number of people:

Alan James at Sella on the Costa Blanca, 3 kbAlan James - Director and Publisher
Alan climbed his first route in June 1971 when just 7 years old. Subsequent trips in the Peak and North Wales with his father through the 1970s planted the seed but it was only in the early 1980s that this grew into a full obsession. Since then he has climbed all over Europe and the UK and even toyed with Alpine climbing in the late 80s. An impressive debut solo of the Frendo Spur proved to be a false dawn and in 1989 he hung up his crampons after a perilous ascent of the NNE Spur of the Cortes. He then concentrated on high standard trad and sport climbing. A handful of un-noteworthy new routes on Peak Limestone followed before he turned his hand to producing cartoons for OTE. This led him to a meeting with Mick Ryan and his first venture into guidebook work by authoring the Peak Limestone Rockfax of 1992. After Mick Ryan's departure to the States in 1994 Alan took over the fledgling Rockfax company and turned it into the most innovative guidebook company in the UK. The Rockfax web site was set up in 1998 which included a small discussion forum called Rocktalk. Combining this forum with Andy's Hyslop's UKClimbing site led to the UKClimbing.com as it is today. In June 2008, Alan became the sole owner of UKClimbing.com.
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Mick Ryan climbing on the Peñon de Ifach on the Costa Blanca, 4 kbMick Ryan - Senior Editor
Mick started climbing in 1978 when in sixth form at St. Mary's College Blackburn (Lancashire, England). He enjoys all types of climbing and climbers and has climbed all over the UK, Europe and the USA. Highlights include doing the Old Man of Hoy and Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Mick was a co-founder of Rockfax guidebooks in the early 1990s before moving to Bishop, California enjoying the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and the boulders in the Owens Valley. After 12 years in the States he moved back to the UK in 2006 to become the full-time editor at UKClimbing.com. Mick's role grew over the next year and in 2008 Mick combined his role as Senior Editor with becoming the Advertising Manager at UKC.
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Jack Geldard on the first ascent of Rocky E8 6c, 4 kbJack Geldard - UKC Chief Editor (News and Features)
Jack started climbing in Yorkshire at the age of 12 - using a Whillans harness and a stolen washing line. As luck would have it, the science teacher at his school was a well known climber (Mick Ryan) and a source of inspiration (exasperation?!) that firmly planted the climbing bug. Since then it has been a whirlwind of mountain-based adventures all over the globe, including first ascents on several of the World's larger rock walls and a few of Wales' smaller outcrops. His real passion is trad climbing, but he has also been known to clip the odd bolt and fall off a few boulder problems. He is a qualified Mountaineering Instructor and resides near Llanberis, North Wales. He joined UKClimbing.com in 2007 as Assistant Editor and graduated to Chief Editor in 2008.
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Björn Pohl Bouldering, 4 kbBjörn Pohl - UKC International News Editor
Björn is the Editor of TheLowDown on UKClimbing which started out as an independent blog in November 2008, and is became part of UKClimbing in June 2010. Björn writes about the hardest ascents of routes and boulder problems all over the world, and the people who make it happen.
Having discovered climbing through skiing in around 1990, Björn has found himself focusing on increasingly smaller objects. The mountains turned into sport crags, which turned into boulders. If this continues, twenty years from now he'll be into gravel!
So far, his favourite area is Chironico in Ticino, where the boulders are steep and the climbing powerful - he claims his poor technique may have something to do with it. Chironico is also where he did his first (and last?) 8A, back in 2005 - so not quite over the hill quite yet ...
Björn began his "career" as a climbing journalist back in 1998 and has kept writing news and the odd article ever since. He says, "there must be something wrong with me, but so far, no one has been able to find out just what."
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Sarah Stirling, 4 kb Sarah Stirling - UKC/UKH Editor (Features and Gear)
At 16, after work experience with an outdoor magazine company, Sarah Stirling decided on her career path. She was going to travel around doing fun stuff outdoors, write about it and get paid! Her first book (local history) was published by Francis Frith/WHSmith while she was at uni studying English. Graduating with a First is one of her proudest achievements. While starting out as a freelance outdoors writer, she taught at skiing and climbing centres. She has contributed to all the usual outdoor titles: OE, TRAIL, TGO, Climb, Running Fitness, BBC Countryfile, Fall-line Skiing ... and edited sections of Adventure Travel magazine (Short Breaks) and the Outdoor Adventure Guide (Gear Editor). Sarah came on board at UKC as Assistant Gear Editor back in January 2010, and took on the responsibility of being the part time Gear Editor a couple of months later. She is now an Editor across both UKC and UKH, responsible for the Gear pages and the Articles page of UKH.
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Dan Bailey, 3 kb Dan Bailey - UKH Editor (News)
Dan Bailey discovered a love for the hills on family holidays to North Wales, allegedly making it up Cadair Idris at three-and-a-bit (he has to take his parents' word for that), and never really looking back. Day walks expanded into backpacking trips, and a gradual progress through the classic scrambles led inevitably to climbing, for which he has endless enthusiasm but practically no talent. His passion for all things mountainous has led him from the Andes to Africa, the Pyrenees to the North Pennines; a cynic might point out that although he took nothing but photographs, he's sure as hell left a big carbon footprint. But Dan is usually to be found at home in Scotland, enjoying the world class mountains and seascapes on his doorstep. In lieu of a real job Dan produces words and pictures on the great outdoors, particularly hillwalking, scrambling and grand old traditional climbs. He is a regular contributor to print and online media, and the author of several guidebooks including Scotland's Mountain Ridges, The Ridges of England, Wales and Ireland and West Highland Way.
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Nick Smith - UKC, 4 kbNick Smith - Technical Developer, UKC and UKH
Originally from Cambridge, Nick moved up to Sheffield in 1999 to pursue his climbing ambitions. When not running the web-design company, Climbers.net, he can be found trail running in the Peak, or photographing some gritstone action (if the weather is nice!). Nick looks after the technical side of the site, writing the PHP scripts that interface to our MySQL database engine.
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Stephen Horne climbing at The Castle, Pembroke, 4 kbStephen Horne - Editor, UKC and Rockfax
Stephen started climbing about ten years ago. Originally he stuck to bouldering because he "enjoyed the technical nature of it”. He thought this sounded better than saying he was terrified of falling off. He was later bullied and cajoled into tying-on and climbing routes, and eventually got over his fear of heights and has now climbed extensively around the world. He enjoys all aspects of the sport, although his heart lies with trad climbing. He spent ten years working in the climbing wall sector, first off manufacturing and installing climbing walls, then designing walls and the structures holding them up. He has just returned to Britain to live in the Peak District after spending two years in Grenoble working for Entre-Prises Climbing Walls, and joined the Rockfax team as an Assistant Editor in February 2010.
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Mark Glaister climbing Acid Discharge Party Hat (E1) on the Culm Coast., 3 kbMark Glaister - Destinations Editor, UKC and Rockfax
Mark is a climbing writer and photographer who has traveled to crags near and far for 35+ years. Mark started out climbing at school with friends on the sea cliffs and inland crags of Devon. At 18 he packed up his flares and Whillans harness, tide back his long black hair (where did it go!) and headed for the North living between the Peak and Dales before moving on to the Lakes for work where he was based for around 20 years. During the 90's, Mark with his then partner Emma traveled extensively spending 1995 to 2000 in a van in the States, Canada, Europe, OZ and New Zealand. The last decade has been a transient one hopping between the Lakes, North Wales, Devon and Lancs, with trips away mainly on guidebook (Rockfax) work or for articles to places such as Sardinia, Finale, Ceuse, El Chorro, Lofoten, Mallorca and Turkey. In February 2010 he joined UKClimbing.com as Assistant Editor in charge of Destination Articles and he is also chief Photo Editor.
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Chris Craggs, 4 kb Chris Craggs - Rockfax
Chris first started writing guidebooks in the 1980s and his first book - Rock Climbs in the Costa Blanca (1989) - was a major contributing factor to the popularity of that area as a climbing destination. Further books written for Cicerone have helped publicise many other areas in Spain and Belgium.
In 2001 Chris joined ROCKFAX as the co-author of the revolutionary guidebook Peak Gritstone East (now updated to Eastern Grit). Following on from this Chris has gone on to author and co-author many more books across England, Spain and France. In addition Chris takes an active role in the publication of all Rockfax publications.
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How small?! Adrian going for another tiny hold on Spartan Wall (F8b+), Kalymnos, 3 kb Adrian Berry - Rockfax
Adrian was the main author of the first Rockfax performance coaching book Sport CLIMBING + published in 2006. He has gone on to co-author Trad CLIMBING + with John Arran, and Winter CLIMBING + with Ian Parnell and Neil Gresham. Since this series has now focussed his attention on writing guidebooks to the sport climbing in the South of France.


Tom Briggs ? and Jonathan Lagoe ? both help with the UKC forum moderation. In addition there are others who moderate the photos database and who write articles. We are always keen for new input so please Contact Us if you wish to get involved.

We also work with a number of other authors for Rockfax Guidebooks - see the full list here.