I started outdoor adventures whilst still at school with hillwalks on the rough Pennine moors in any weather and odd school trips away with a keen teacher. After university, I really got into rock climbing and gained lots of experience on Peak District gritstone and limestone as well as going further afield. My Alpine mountaineering also took off and I was ambitious in my objectives, with the quality of the route more important than the tick for the height. I built up to some serious big routes on Alpine rock, with the Badile Cassin route a real highlight as well as many others. Being a keen skier, I got into ski-mountaineering by joining the ESC and soon joined their touring committee. My preference is for lesser-known areas and I have done complete traverses of Switzerland and the Pyrenees over a number of seasons as well as visiting some more unusual regions such as Corsica. I have led school expeditions to India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Morocco, each time summiting a big mountain, sometimes over 6000m and as a senior teacher in a large school with an outdoor activities pedigree, I lead lots of trips regularly, including winter expeditions to Scotland where we have snow-holed in the Cairngorms and trekked over the big mountains of the west coast.