Mick has balanced holding a full-time job with being a family man and a leading figure in the climbing world for over 45 years. He continues to climb despite a cancer problem which resulted in removal of his anus and rectum in 2018.
In the UK he is renowned as a leading adventure climber with numerous ground-breaking first ascents on chalk, shale, London drainpipes and other cliffs not previously viewed as suitable for climbing. Throughout the 1980s and 90s he was a leading pioneer of Scottish winter climbing, his record being 11 consecutive weekends travelling up from London. He was the first ascentionist of the first Scottish winter climb to be graded VI and some of the first rock climbs in the UK to be graded E6.
In mountaineering terms he has been a regular expedition climber since 1982, specialising in technically challenging, eye-catching lines on peaks between 6,000m and 7,000m. His first ascents now include celebrated lines in Peru, India, Yukon, Tibet, Xinjiang, Sichuan, Nepal, Russia and Pakistan.
He was voted the Mountaineers’ Mountaineer in The Observer newspaper, has won three Piolet d’Or awards (the Oscars of the mountaineering world, judged each year by an expert panel of leading mountaineers) and was awarded the King Albert Medal for mountain achievement in 2012. He has written three books about his climbs Vertical Pleasure (1995), On Thin Ice (2005) and No Easy Way (2018) and has won several literary awards including the John Whyte Award at the Banff Mountain Festival in Canada, the Best Book prize at the Bormio Mountain Festival in Italy, the Grand Prix at the Passy Book Festival in France and Best Outdoor Book at the Golden Rhino Awards in China.
Until retiring in January 2017 all his climbing was done in his holidays from his job in the UK tax office where he held the position of Assistant Director of Shares and Assets Valuation.
He has served as President of the Alpine Club and is a Patron of the British Mountaineering Council and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cumbia and he recently became an Honorary Doctor of the University (HonDUniv) at the University of Derby. He lives in Derbyshire, England with his wife Nicki. They have two grown up children.
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