Mark Horrell's Blog, page 2

What will drone transport on Everest mean for Sherpa mountaineers?

Much of the media coverage around Everest this year has focused on a brace of unusual speed ascents that have been framed as a game changer for aspiring Everest climbers. But there was another technological advance that is likely to change the job description for Sherpas much more significantly.

The two speed ascents were unusual in their choice of starting point. These speedsters weren’t trying to leg it to the summit from base camp in the quickest possible time, but to reach the summit in a mi...

A night on top of the world: the legend of Babu Chiri Sherpa

In an interview for the mountaineering gear blog OutInUnder, tent designer Martin Zemitis described the moment he first met Babu Chiri Sherpa.

Down came this rather short gentleman about 5 feet in diameter. I think he was nothing but a big lung and a muscle, with legs like tree trunks.

Standing just 1.65m tall and weighing 82kg (or 5’5” high and 13 stones for those of you who prefer good old-fashioned measurements), nobody would ever have suspected Babu Chiri of being an athlete if he walked i...

12 inspiring stories about the lives of Sherpa mountaineers

A review of Sherpa by Pradeep Bashyal and Ankit Babu Adhikari

There have been many books about Sherpa mountaineers over the years. I wrote about some of my favourites in this post from a few years ago. Few have been written from the perspective of Sherpas themselves. Of the three in that post, one was famously ghosted by an American, one was co-written by an Australian, and the other was written by a Sherpa who has lived much of his life in America. Perhaps more significantly, they were by three...

Pen y Fan via Fan Frynych: two contrasting peaks in Bannau Brycheiniog

It’s been a very dry April. For three weeks it barely rained and there are still parts of our garden that I haven’t needed to mow. When the Easter holiday weekend came, however, it was set to tank down. In what seems like an increasingly lawless world, it was comforting to see that British weather still obeys Sod’s Law.

Luckily, there was forecast to be one day of glorious weather on the Sunday, so I nabbed it to take a day trip to the Brecon Beacons, a range of hills in South Wales a couple of ...

Corsica’s GR20 North, the videos – a demonstration of decrepitude

There is a moment in your life when you start reminding yourself of your dad. For me that happened earlier this month while I was editing Edita’s videos of myself trekking the GR20 across Corsica. It wasn’t a agreeable realisation.

I should point out that I don’t have anything against my father. He’s an entertaining, amiable chap. He just happens to be 83 years old. I hadn’t previously been aware of looking like a wizened old man as I walk, and nor has Edita ever pointed it out to me.

I had anot...

A traverse of Hergest Ridge: Mike Oldfield’s favourite hill walk

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about climbing tiny Little Solsbury Hill above the city of Bath, the setting for Peter Gabriel’s 70s progressive rock classic, that’s right… Solsbury Hill. Two years on, here I am writing a blog post about another small English hill that was once the subject of a classic 70s prog rock album. So I suppose you could say this is the second in my series of blog posts about mountain-themed prog rock. I can’t promise that it will be a very long series.

Herges...

Corsica’s GR20 South, the videos – trekking ‘Europe’s toughest trail’

It’s that special time of year when you get to see more of my amazing videos. A full eighteen months ago, Edita and I had the great pleasure of trekking the GR20, the infamous long-distance trail along the spine of the mountainous island of Corsica.

I say infamous because it’s known to be one of the toughest, hairiest long-distance trails in Europe. There is no better person to confirm this than Paddy Dillon, the man who wrote the Cicerone guidebook Trekking the GR20 Corsica, who describes it as...

My latest audiobook: listen to the sounds of a man spending two months in a tent on a glacier

Over the last few years, I’ve been gradually recording my remaining diaries and releasing them as audiobooks. I’m delighted to say that my latest effort, Thieves, Liars and Mountaineers, will soon be available as an audiobook via all the main channels, including Amazon, Audible, iTunes and Spotify. This is the fifth audiobook that I’ve narrated and produced myself and I’m happy to say that the quality is improving every time.

It’s hard to imagine spending two months in a tent on a glacier, but 1...

The Doctor and the Apprentice: the Jeeves and Wooster of mountaineering literature

A few years ago on this blog, I posed the question Where are the humorous mountaineering books? The general thrust of the post was that while there is no shortage of humour in mountaineering literature, it’s often of the alpha-male kind. This contrasts starkly with the travel genre in general and other niches of sports writing, such as cycling, where gentle, self-deprecatory humour abounds.

Towards the end of last year, I discovered a hidden gem of mountaineering literature quite by chance: a co...

Why xenon and the noble gases have a noble mountaineering pedigree

There has been a lot of controversy in mountaineering circles recently about the noble gas xenon. As reported in the Financial Times, the Austrian mountaineering company Furtenbach Adventures announced that they will be providing their Everest clients with xenon in the belief that it will help them to climb the mountain safely without having to go through the usual acclimatisation process.

Is it going to work or are Furtenbach Adventures taking a huge risk? Has the announcement given xenon (or E...