Wilf Bishop was anguished by the death of his wife of six decades. He could no longer ski, but knew he wanted to return to the mountaineering they both loved. Then a friend gave him an idea …
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.”
