No Easy Way

Mick Fowler was introduced to climbing in the French and Swiss Alps when he was thirteen by his father and soon developed an unstoppable enthusiasm for the sport. Every weekend through the winter climbing season he would make the long drive from London to tackle new winter routes in the Scottish Highlands, always managing to be back behind his desk in the tax office on Monday morning. His dedication paid off. Fowler became one the UK’s foremost mountaineers, putting up new routes in most fields of climbing, with first ascents of gritstone E5s, remote sea stacks and the frozen drainpipes of London St Pancras to his name. Along the way, he helped to develop a whole new style of climbing on the chalk cliffs of Dover. But it is for mountaineering that Fowler is best known. A former president of the Alpine Club, he has made challenging climbs across the globe, earning him three prestigious Piolets d’Or – the Oscars of the mountaineering world – and the title of ‘Mountaineer’s Mountaineer’ in a poll in The Observer. Remarkably, his climbing has taken place alongside a full-time job at the tax office, squeezing major mountaineering objectives into his holidays and earning him another title – ‘Britain’s hardest-climbing tax collector’. He retired from life as a taxman in 2017 but his enthusiasm for exploratory climbing remains undimmed.