Mark Horrell's Blog, page 13

How does climbing Everest compare with winning a Nobel prize?

Apart from the occasional pub quiz, I’ve not won many things in my life. I did once win a tent in an outdoor website’s prize draw, which was a nice surprise. And in my twenties, I won a bottle of wine at a comedy club in London for making up a joke in the interval which everybody liked.

But when it comes to winning a prize for being good at something, that’s always been another matter. I don’t write the sort of books that will ever be considered for an award. I was pretty average at sport, and n...

Ascent Into Hell by Fergus White: An authentic account of climbing Everest

Way back when I published my journal The Chomolungma Diaries in 2012, there were very few books (if any) about climbing Everest that had been written from the perspective of a commercial client.

Yes, there was Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about the disastrous Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness expeditions of 1996, probably the best-selling mountaineering book ever written. But those weren’t really the words of a commercial client. Krakauer was a commercial client in the literal sense, b...

Beyond the Nevis watershed, part 2: the Grey Corries

This is part 2 of a brace of posts describing a wild camp and hill walking east of Glen Nevis in the Scottish Highlands. The first post described an ascent of the Mamores on the south side of the valley. This post describes an ascent of the Grey Corries on the north side.

The second day started with the excitement of fording the river. Both the maps.me app and a couple of guidebooks indicated a crossing point at Luibeilt, but it wasn’t obvious. It was easy to get halfway across by means of a lar...

Beyond the Nevis watershed, part 1: the eastern Mamores

With an unfamiliar virus floating across the world and random quarantine rules introduced at a moment’s notice, the only sensible option for a holiday this year was to remain in the UK. Fortunately, there is always Scotland, a place sufficiently large to provide a feast of new mountains to last a lifetime.

When Edita and I stood on the summit of An Gearanach while completing the Ring of Steall last year, a plan formulated in my mind. To the east was an emerald valley – the top end of Glen Nevis ...

The world’s most stupid navigational error

After a promising start to the day, the clouds moved in and the rain started pounding against them as they ascended the south ridge of Stob Choire Claurigh, the highest point in the Grey Corries, a ridge of quartz-laden peaks due east of Ben Nevis. Four of the peaks are Munros, a defined list of Scottish mountains over 3,000ft in height.

‘That was a beast of a mountain,’ the idiot said to Edita as they crested the final rise and spied the pile of rubble that marked the summit.

They were standing...

5 surprising, educational facts about Everest, all for a good cause

This week’s post follows on neatly from last week’s, on what the data reveals about Everest summit success.

While I was busy posting that one, physicist Dr Melanie Windridge, who climbed Everest in 2018 was busy posting the following short educational video that describes five surprising facts about Everest in a way that manages to be fun, educational and accessible all in one.

I say ‘surprising’, but this depends on who you are. Some of the things revealed in the video (like the fact that it ca...

10 facts about Everest success and death rates, based on scientific data

Today’s post is all about an exciting new scientific research paper. No, no no… don’t click the back button just yet – I promise you this one’s really interesting.

Once a year (except this year, obviously), there is an Everest feeding frenzy as traditional and social media sink their teeth into the latest Everest season, producing an avalanche of opinion about how overcrowded and easy Everest is to climb these days.

Every year, photos of queues and soundbites from climbers, both on the mountain ...

When Joe Brown went hunting for Inca treasure in Ecuador’s Llanganates Mountains

Much has been written about Joe Brown, the great alpinist and rock climber who died earlier this year. In some ways his life was a conventional rags-to-riches story: a working-class lad from Manchester who by means of his exceptional talent went on to own a chain of successful climbing shops and become one of the most celebrated mountaineers in the world.

In today’s post, I’m going to talk about an episode where he tried distinctly unconventional means to achieve his fortune – when he followed a...

If you climb a peak that collapses in an earthquake, did you still climb it?

In today’s big philosophical question, we feature a video with the most entertaining commentary since these three Geordie lads went hiking on a winter’s day in the Cheviots.

At 8pm on 7 August this year, a 4.2-magnitude earthquake struck the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, a sub-range of the Rocky Mountains. It caused a famous rock feature known as Baron Spire, affectionately known as Old Smoothie, to collapse. The subsequent rockslide was captured on video by a group of climbers camping on the opp...

His father, Frank Smythe – biography of a Himalayan legend

It’s been a while since I wrote at length about Frank Smythe, the legendary British mountain explorer who was something of a celebrity in the 1930s when he became one of the first people to make a career of climbing, writing and photography.

He first appeared in this blog in 2011 in the course of a frivolous post about yetis (a chapter of his book The Valley of Flowers describes his discovery of a set of yeti footprints). The following year his thoughts on maintaining a steady pace at high altit...