Mark Horrell's Blog, page 11

10 high-altitude mountaineering lookalikes

I know some people found my previous post a bit heavy. And if you’ve been following events on K2 this winter, you will know that since I posted it, things have got heavier still with a certain K2 inevitability. So to cheer everyone up at the end of a dark season in difficult times, and to prove that this isn’t just another serious climbing blog (hell, it isn’t even a climbing blog), I’ve decided to post something a little more light-hearted.

A few people have commented on the resemblance of Ming...

Is the first winter ascent of K2 a turning point for Sherpa mountaineers?

It’s not very often that the ascent of an 8,000m peak makes international news headlines, but earlier this month something rather special happened.

At 5pm Pakistan time on 16 January 2021, a team of 10 climbers stood on the summit of K2 (8,611m), the world’s second highest mountain, believed by many to be the hardest of the world’s fourteen 8,000m peaks.

There were a number of reasons this climb was special (notwithstanding the fact that it had been accomplished amidst a global pandemic).

Nims P...

How I evolved as a writer by writing one blog post every week for 10 years

If you did a double take when you read this headline then that’s OK: so did I. I can’t quite believe it, but today I’ve reached an important milestone.

When I started this blog in August 2010, it was a bit of a leap in the dark. I had no idea where it would go.

Back then, my website was a place to publish photographs and diaries from my travels. I wanted to write more, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write. And I was publishing into a void: apart from kind-hearted friends and family, I didn’t...

The Ghosts Above – 36 minutes of Everest porn, free on YouTube

In 2019, the mountaineering film maker Renan Ozturk and climbing writer Mark Synnott led an expedition to the north side of Everest, sponsored by National Geographic. Their aim was to find the body of Sandy Irvine, who went missing on the North-East Ridge in 1924. They hoped to retrieve his camera and solve the 96-year mystery of whether Irvine and George Mallory were the first to reach the summit.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say as far as this aim was concerned, the expedition was something o...

Doug Scott’s expedition to the Tibesti Mountains in Chad

In 2016 when I was working in Rome, Edita was posted to Chad in central Africa by the UN World Food Programme, to run a project distributing mosquito nets the length and breadth of the country.

She worked on a similar project in Zambia in 2014. When the project ended, I flew out to join her, and we did a short trip to identify then climb the highest mountain in Zambia, Mafinga Central (2,339m). It was an easy walk up, but we had fun finding it, and while we were out there we decided to climb Mul...

How not to do the Cuillin Ridge, by cyclist Danny MacAskill

I hope youre sitting comfortably, because in todays post Im going to show you the most terrifying thing you have ever seen (at least on this blog) more frightening than a Reinhold Messner Barbie doll, or Bill Bailey dancing in a sequinned leotard. Youre about to see something more dangerous than a Van Morrison-Eric Clapton protest concert or a supreme court nomination ceremony in the White House garden.

When I first visited the Isle of Skye in 2005, my hiking companion Tony was intrigued to...

What was Jan Morris’s secret code to say that Everest had been climbed?

Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement

All well!Jan Morris, Coronation Everest

There have been many tributes to the journalist and travel writer Jan Morris, who died last month at the age of 94. She is famous for writing Pax Britannica, a trilogy about the British Empire, and for the travel books Venice and Trieste. She is perhaps most famous for being transsexual back in the days when it really wasn’t very common, an experience she wrote about in he...

Sgurr nan Gillean and Am Basteir: the Black Cuillin’s hair-raising finale

This is part 4 of a quartet of posts describing a scrambling adventure in the Cuillin Hills on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. After an eventful build up, a bittersweet first day and a scary second one, this post provides the final sphincter-clenching instalment.

‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ Edita said as we sat in the hotel restaurant later that evening.

No, she wasn’t tucking into a plate of prize-winning haggis (although that might have elicited the same response). She was looking at the Met Office mounta...

The best place on the internet to buy new paperback books

If, like me, you’re trying to wean yourself off Amazon, then in this week’s post I’d like to tell you about a brand new website that many people (including me) are hoping will be a game-changer.

Bookshop.org, a socially conscious alternative to Amazon, launched in the US earlier this year, with the aim of supporting local independent booksellers. It provides customers with the ability to search for a book online and choose a local bookstore to benefit from the sale. Bookshop.org handles the fulf...

Sgurr na Banachdich to Sgurr a Ghreadaidh: touching cloth in the Black Cuillin

This is part 3 of a quartet of posts describing a scrambling adventure in the Cuillin Hills on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. After an eventful build up and a bittersweet first day, this post continues with the next hair-raising instalment.

At the end of my last post, I mentioned how an enjoyable day of scrambling on the southern peaks of the Cuillin ridge was marred when I buggered my leg for a second time returning along the easy section to the car park at Glen Brittle. It was an injury that needed ...