Up and About: The Hard Road to Everest

About Doug Scott

Born in Nottingham in 1941 Doug Scott began climbing in Derbyshire when he was thirteen and without any obvious plan in it was soon discovering the cliffs of Snowdonia Scotland the Alps and the Dolomites. He completed his first Alpine season at the age of eighteen. In 1965 aged twenty-three he went on his first organised expedition to the Tibesti Mountains of Chad. It was to be the first of many trips to the high mountains of the world. On 24 September 1975 he and his climbing partner Dougal Haston became the first Britons to reach the summit of Mount Everest via the formidable South-West Face and they became national heroes. In total Scott made forty-two expeditions to the high mountains of Asia reaching the summits of forty peaks. With the exception of his ascent of Everest he made all his climbs in lightweight or alpine style and without the use of supplementary oxygen. Scott was made a CBE in 1994. He was a president of the Alpine Club and in 1999 he received the Royal Geographical Society Patrons Gold Medal. In 2011 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Piolets dOr during the presentation of which his mountaineering style was described as visionary. In 1995 he founded Community Action Nepal (CAN) a UK-based registered charity whose aim is to help mountaineers to support the mountain people of Nepal. Up until his death in December 2020 Scott continued to climb write and lecture avidly supporting the work of CAN. He is the author of six books including Up and About and The Ogre. Kangchenjunga is his final book.