In reply to Mick Ryan and others: Thank you for the encouraging and constructive comments.
In answer to various posts:
Why am I am doing this?
-Firstly after climbing in the USA and Alps in recent summers I really want to climb some of the best trad routes at home this year and Hard Rock is still the best tick list British routes!
-Secondly, it has never been tried before, I've been considering it for several years and it will be a once in a lifetime challenge.
-Thirdly, if I am going to put 5 weeks of my life into this project then it would be great to support a very worthy and appropriate cause.
-Fourthly it would be great to promote how good British trad mountian routes actualy are.
In reply to Paz asking us if we are taking bets. We are hoping to allow anyone who donates to MR to enter a competition to guess how many routes we will climb between 13th July and 18th August and exactly how long it will take us. Obviously we need to source some prizes for the competition to make it worthwhile but I'm working on that.
Environmental impact and carbon neutrality. A very interesting topic - I would encourage everyone to read the editorial about mountaineering and environment impact in the current issue of Summit.
As someone who is now very much against things like '3 Peaks charity events' I have thought about this a lot. Last month I did some basic calculations for my own interest to quantify the enironmental impact.
- The three of us spending 5 weeks traveling 3000 miles around the UK will produce less CO2 than 3 short-haul return flights within Europe.
- For each climbing day, the trip will produce less than 60% of the CO2 of a weekend trip to the Peak from London by car and less the 40% of the CO2 of a weekend trip to North Wales.
- Also, spending 5 weeks camping and living out of a motorhome we will use only and fraction of the water, electricty and gas that we wood if we stayed at home.
That is not a justifcation, but it does put it into perspective. I am personally comforatable with the fact that it is no more environmentally damaging than me taking a short haul foreign holiday this summer.
People are quite welcome to take issue with this view, but I don't think we really want to be in the situation where every climber has to justify his CO2 output.
Finally, I'm not completely convinced about the whole cardon neutrality thing of buying 'offsets'. I am being pro-active myself and I'm currently doing things like replacing my central heating system with one that will be compatible with both solar heating and the wood burning stove I'll be fitting.
If you have any more comments, please let me know.