Tony Howard
have pen, will travel Tony Howard
In 1954, when I was 14, two events started me on my nomadic life of mountain exploration. I went to a talk in our village by Tom Stephenson who had just created the Pennine Way. And whilst scrambling around one of our local Peak District crags I found a guidebook to rock climbing. My father bought me a rope and boots and my destiny was sealed!
The following year a friend and I set off on the Pennine Way which crosses our local moors, though we eventually left it to circumnavigate the Lakes. But it was the climbing guidebook that really grabbed me. Exploring our local cliffs we met others of a like mind, some became lifelong friends. One of the lads, Roy, who was older than me lived in an a converted chicken shack on the moor edge. In later years, Roy used to call in at‘ Troll’, a climbing company of which I became a founding partner, and after enjoying a‘ brew’, he would say,“ I’ ll have to go, I haven’ t had an adventure yet”. Looking back, he reminds me of Millican Dalton, the“ Professor of Adventure” who in a search of warmer rock, discovered and climbed in Tafraoute, now popular for climbing holidays in the sun. As always I recouped some of the costs by writing for outdoor magazines. writings of T E Lawrence until we went there in his footsteps in 1984 after seeing the Lawrence film. After months of letters to the Jordanian Embassy in London and the Tourism Ministry in Amman we finally
Have pen, will travel
Tony Howard
lived for nearly fifty summers in a cave near Castle Crag in Borrowdale.
Unrealised by me at the time, these serendipitous meetings with remarkable men( to quote Gurdjieff), were to lead me to a world of rock and deserts and mountains, particularly“ on ways less trodden”, and as Robert Frost wrote,“ that
has made all the difference”. My motto was always,‘ you never know until you go’. Places like Norway’ s Lofoten Islands where we went when I was 22 in 1962 were well off the beaten track, as was Morocco where we made a winter ascent of North Africa’ s highest mountain, Toubkal then,
And whilst hitching home through Norway in’ 62 we saw( or partly saw- as the clouds were down), Europe’ s tallest, steepest and then unclimbed north face, the Troll Wall. Who could resist that! I climbed it in 1965, as always with friends, making a first ascent simultaneous to a Norwegian team on another new route. The world press said it was a race- it wasn’ t. We each climbed our own new route. They topped out the day before us, but who cares? We certainly didn’ t and Britain’ s top climber, Joe Brown said,“ It must rank as one of the greatest ever achievements by British rock climbers”. Who wouldn’ t be happy with that!
Elsewhere, always on a‘ Quest into the Unknown’, we wandered across North Africa and the Mid East, exploring and making new climbs in the remote Saharan Hoggar Mountains, and even more remote Kassala and Marra mountains of Sudan and the distant, little known, mountains of Iran. Thrown out by the army, we then rediscovered the 1000 metre cliffs of Bisotun first reported by Tilman, where we once again enjoyed making a first ascent, surviving a wild overnight storm, whilst semi-suspended in our‘ Troll’ bivouac tent.
More amazingly, the now world famous mountains of Wadi Rum in Jordan were also unknown back then, other than in the
not only got permission to go, but were sponsored by the Ministry as we offered to write a guidebook. We were warned to beware of the Bedouin- a townsman’ s natural fear of nomads- and were advised to take a recommended middle-man from Aqaba. But we didn’ t. We had by now spent time with other desert nomads, especially in the Saharan countries. Our welcome, even from the poorest, had always been overwhelmingly generous. And so it was in Wadi Rum.
On our arrival we stopped within view of a fort which stood above a few small single storey houses and some traditional‘ bait ash shaar’, the traditional black tents of the semi-nomadic Bedouin, from which smoke drifted lazily. Having put up our tents we intended to walk to the village but were pre-empted when a young man in white robes and with a dagger in his belt came to greet us. His name was Daifallah, and our faith in their highly reputed hospitality was not to be disappointed. Like all Bedouin he spoke adequate English, putting our minimal Arabic to shame. He wondered why we were there and smiled when we said we wanted to see if the mountains were good for climbing.
“ We have climbed everything”, he said,“ whilst hunting ibex”.“ We don’ t need any of that”, he added disparagingly, gesturing
14 OUTDOOR FOCUS Spring 2026