Factor Two

Birth Pains of New Nations - Pete Oxley

The whims and motivations of climbers really are another world to the person in the street. Understanding them is crossing a threshold, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief to start to see the world of risk, adventure, suffering and more in …

Hateja - Louise Thomas and Glenda Huxter

If you had to select your late 90s dream team for a British, all-female Himalayan big wall trip, you couldn’t go far wrong with this one. Glenda Huxter was onsighting E7, Kath Pyke had extensive experience on rock and alpine routes, and Louise...

Finding the Balance - Katherine Schirrmacher

We all get enjoyment from climbing for different reasons. For many of us those reasons change over time, according to our geography, time, money and other pressures in our lives. I’ve read Katherine Schirrmacher’s blog for years, and she’s...

El Capitan - a film by Fred Padula

In the spring of 1968 San Francisco film maker, Fred Padula, drove into the Yosemite Valley and gazed up at El Capitan. He had been approached by one of his film students, Glen Denny, a talented climber and photographer, to advise on making a film...

Hard Grit - Rich Heap, Niall Grimes and Seb Grieve

When it was released in 1998, Hard Grit gave us an insight into something we didn’t often see - the actual ascents of the hardest, most dangerous lines on grit. In an era before everyone had a smartphone, before digital photography was even...

A Play for Voices - Helen Mort and Anna Fleming

When you look at the books on a shelf of mountaineering literature one thing is quickly apparent: the vast majority are written by men. The same is true with the episodes I’ve produced for Factor Two. The simple fact is that there have historically..…

Brave New World - Tom Livingstone and Twid Turner

It’s hard to be truly disconnected these days. Even in the weirdness of isolation over the past few months many of us have been working from home, constantly bothered by the connections around us. Sometimes it’s just a little too much. I’ve...

Deep Play - Neil Gresham and Dr Rebecca Williams

"I climb better when I'm scared." I've heard this quite a few times. I even thought it was true about myself for a while in my earlier climbing career, but it surely can't be true? After speaking with Hazel Findlay about maintaining the bubble of a..…

Walking the Magic Line - Hazel Findlay and Dr Rebecca Williams

Flow is a concept that can divide in climbing. For Dave Thomas it was the joyous experience that removed him from other problems in life. For Mina Leslie-Wujastyk it was a performance tool. Mina told me that a lot of her understanding of flow had com…

The Moment You Doubt - Ben Bransby

Many of the stories in Factor Two feature the same scenario - What next? You always imagine ticking the big goal might be enough, but it rarely is. For Ben Bransby and Jvan Tresch it seemed obvious what was next. Patagonia has long been the most...