Who am I???

Born in Yorkshire, England, my interest in the outdoors & 'adventure' came relatively late in life at the age of 22. Before this, I spent a lot of my time riding the Yorkshire Dales on motorbikes; my loathing for the good ol' British weather driving me to join a local caving club, the Yorkshire Subterranean Society, who owned a cottage in Ribblesdale which I could use for the extortionate sum of 75 pence a night!

After a year with these strange types who spent most of their weekends underground, I was persuaded to give it a go and soon my friends all thought I, too, was strange!

For the next 10 months or so, I spent virtually every weekend in the Dales, doing some of the finest caves in Britain - Pen-y-Ghent Pot, Lancaster Hole, Rowten Pot, Flood Entrance (Gaping Gill), Stream Passage Pot (G.G.) and plenty more, besides. This was in training for my first expedition; indeed my first trip abroad - the Gouffre Berger.

The Gouffre Berger (1988), at the time the 7th deepest cave in the world, is situated high in the French Alps near Grenoble. It has a depth of 1000m, with 2 recognised underground camps. Around 50 of us went on this trip, to the cave which later gained notoriety as the final resting place of Alex Pitcher from Derbyshire, who disappeared; not to be found until the following spring.

This wetted my appetite for a number of years in the Dales, Derbyshire, South Wales and Mendip. I joined the Cerberus Speleological Society in Somerset and 'Classic trips' such as Dan-yr-Ogof and Ogof Ffynnon Ddu (Wales) and St Cuthberts Swallet, Longwood Swallet/August Hole & Swildons Hole - including such delights as Blue Pencil Passage and Cowsh' Aven (Mendip) were undertaken, along with a period of digging on Malham Moor, where Kuling Hole was excavated out beyond belief, after several years. The breakthrough was a 7" high slit in the rock.

I was now keen to extend my new found interest and 1989 saw a group of 5 of us heading out to Northern Mallorca, where we explored a number of caves and did the spectacular gorge walk of Torrente de Pareis, descending to the beach at Sa Calobra.

The great thing about the YSS was the amazing variety of members from across the country and occasionally beyond! One local member, Steve Greatorex, had been exploring the pretty much unknown caves of Northern Yugoslavia, the birthplace of the term 'Karst', for about 20 years and this led to 4 of us heading out to Slovenija in August 1990, only a month or two before all hell broke loose in Serbia & Croatia. The caving, people & scenery here were amazing. Enormous river caves opened up underground boat trips to some of the best formations I have come across. The next few years of turmoil effectively closed off Slovenija to outsiders, but we eventually returned in 1993.

Jamaica also reared it's head as an unusual caving venue in 1993, when a small group of us headed out to Montego Bay. The island is one big lump of limestone, riddled with a thousand or so known caves. It turned out to be a bit of a culture shock and, I must admit, more time was spent chilling out on the beach with copious quantities of Red Stripe than was spent underground. This trip was unarguably 'Irie'!

The early '90s saw a movement in my interests towards mountain tops & walking. A place I had always wanted to visit was Iceland . 1992 was the planned year, but a nasty argument between my bike and a taxi left me with a crushed leg and a slightly damaged ego! A couple of years later, however, all was well again and I finally made it to Iceland in 1995, where I spent 3 weeks travelling around the island.

In January 1992 I had been to Verbier in Switzerland on a 10 day skiing holiday, which was fun; in 1997/98 I continued this line with a snowboarding holiday to Mottaret, in Les Trois Vallées, France. However, as much as I enjoyed it, I decided that this wasn't my scene and decided to concentrate on travelling to the more unusual places.

I had now discovered a love & an interest in the arctic/sub arctic and in 1998 I booked onto my first ever organised tour and went on a two week trekking holiday, wild camping in East Greenland with Arctic Experience. This was amazing, and was my first real introduction to glaciers & glacial rivers. This was a good deal colder (and wetter!) than I had anticipated and on my return I decided that, having missed summer altogether, I would go somewhere warm before the year was out. I made a booking later that year with Explore Worldwide and spent two weeks on La Gomera & El Hierro, two of the smaller Canary Islands. After Greenland, the 80-90°C temperatures were a real shock to the system. Again I decided that, although nice, this also wasn't for me.

Back in the UK, I've also spent some time walking the fells of Yorkshire & Cumbria, spending many a happy hour in the environs of Eskdale,

My latest foray to the white stuff has taken me to Spitsbergen, at 80° N, the northernmost inhabited land in the world. Here I spent two weeks, mostly wild camping, in the most dramatic scenery yet. If fantastic scenery was the greatest plus point, then the prospect of meeting Polar Bears was the most worrying! We did actually come across a pair, but they kept to a healthy distance - just close enough to photograph!

This is what this site is about. I don't claim to have done the ultimate. I haven't been to Everest Base Camp, explored the Amazon or been on safaris to darkest Africa. New Zealand has always interested me more than Australia; Japan rather than China, but my real goal is to visit & explore those extremes of the globe north of Scotland.

As to myself, when I have to return to normality, I make my crust working as a Network Integration Engineer for a leading Systems Integrator; it's a far cry from the wilds of Greenland!

Kev Sheard
September, 2000