Our new exciting competition about which solicitor has climbed the highest mountain is hotting up.

After Graeme Aston (Mount Mera, 6,476 metres) outdid Matthew Potter (Mount Kilimanjaro, 5,895 metres), they have been trumped by Robin Marriott of Sutton firm Marriott Davies Yapp and Mark Carr of Guildford's Dawson Mason & Carr, who both summited on Ama Dablam in Nepal, having climbed the technical route up the south-west ridge (pictured here on their way up - and had they fallen at this stage, they would have dropped about a mile before coming to a very squidgy stop).

Mr Carr says: 'Ama Dablam is 6,814 metres and therefore easily beats both Mera (which we climbed in the early 1990s) and Kilimanjaro.' Mr Marriott has also climbed Aconcagua in the Andes together with Richard Middlehurst - a solicitor with Atkins Wilson & Bell in Guildford.

Aconcagua is 400 feet higher than Ama Dablam, but Mr Carr is quick to point out that, like Kilimanjaro, the usual route up it is a walk rather than a 'serious climb'.

In any case, Mr Carr intends to win our competition outright in March, when he joins a team climbing the biggest of them all - Everest (8,850 metres).

His research indicates that no UK lawyer has yet reached the top of Everest.

Meanwhile, Phil Reed, a partner at St Austell firm Graham & Graham, writes to take issue with our statement that there are 17 8,000 metre-plus mountains in the world.

There are, he insists, 14.

'There is only a handful of accomplished mountaineers who have climbed all 14 (and only one British climber), each of whom would be very upset to learn that they had three more to go,' he says.

While a quick Internet search backs Mr Reed, we suggest he takes it up with Whitaker's Almanack, which was our source of information.

[This article refers to images that appear in the printed edition [2003] Gazette, 11 December, 9]