Before printing think about environment!15-4-2000
For this month's site, I was guided by by my own forthcoming climbing adventure. On my search for information on the Web, this site was one of the results that came up: It's from a climber who went climbing in the Cordillera Blanca, in Peru, and wanted to share his story and pictures with us.
I must admit I'm a bit sorry for those with a not so fast Internet connection, because this site is not so friendly for downloading time.
Although the introduction mentions the site is about the authors climbing trips (plural), only one trip is actualy found: Peru. Next to this, there's also an unimportant section with links, some of them may turn out interesting, but they don't have anything to do with his trip report. The story itself is divided in three chapters: getting to the Cordillera Blanca, reaching the base camp, and climbing the mountains. It's rather easy reading: not to detailed, but still containing a lot of practical information.
But the main stuff on this website are the photo's. Being a little of an amateur photographer myself, I judge them as extremely good. A big part of this photo quality rarely found on non-professional websites (and even professional website photo's aren't always that professional), is the care that was taken to scan and post-process them. Among his link collection, I found a link to an interesting article about this subject.
Of course these pictures have a drawback too: download time. I have a pretty fast Internet connection at work, but it still took some time to get it all on my screen. Maybe this John O'Marra should divide his pages into smaller pieces and/or use smaller thumnails to present his photo's (and make you click to download them full size)
Apart from this, the layout is simple, but nice, as we seem to get used to in our site of the month.
Sites like this make us climbers dream about far away adventures and explorations, and even those who don't have intentions to become an "andinist", can enjoy it.
Maybe we can expect more trip reports on this site in the future. If they reach the same quality, it may well be worth to keep an eye on it.
You can find Go Uphill !!! at http://home.att.net/~couloirs/
Jo :'-)