In March 2023, 82-year-old Wilf Bishop found himself almost a thousand metres above sea level, snowshoeing across a mountainside in Austria. “I’m not a spiritual person, but it felt so peaceful being up there, even though it was arduous,” he says. “Mountains address something in us. It’s addictive.”
It was a brave moment of exploration that followed the hardest period of Bishop’s life. Three years earlier, his wife, Janet, had died of ovarian cancer. The pair met in 1959, at a mountaineering club in Hull, when he was just 17. “I saw this beautiful girl and had no idea how to talk to her, but I eventually gathered the courage,” he says. “She was the first girl I’d ever kissed and we fell in love. A few years later, we were married.”
