Mark Horrell's Blog, page 22

Salt before breakfast: an ascent of Ojos del Salado

Christmas and New Year for me usually means some new ascents in a mountainous region of Africa or Latin America. When I received an email from Jagged Globe sometime last year announcing a new trip to Ojos del Salado in Chile’s Puna de Atacama region, I didn’t have any doubts that was the peak I wanted to climb.

At 6,893m, Ojos del Salado is the highest mountain in Chile, the second -highest mountain in South America, and the highest volcano in the world. Like its more famous Argentine counter...

Cerro Vicuñas, the world’s easiest 6,000m peak? Quite possibly

Last year I returned from Nepal and reported that I may have ‘discovered’ the easiest 6,000m peak in the world to climb (in much the same way Columbus discovered America, in that it wasn’t lost and somebody had been there before me).

In terms of ease, the peak in question – Drohmo Ri – rises 800m above Pangpema, the last teahouse on the Kangchenjunga base camp trail. There was so little snow that we hiked up in approach shoes, and had need for neither crampons nor an ice axe. It wasn’t even p...

Ojos del Salado – the photos (and a quick message about cheating)

It’s a much-delayed, slightly rapid half-post this week. This is because I’ve been climbing the world’s highest volcano and away from all contact with the outside world.

Ojos del Salado, seen across Laguna Verde

It’s great being incommunicado for a few weeks, especially when the national news is universally stupid. When I got back to civilisation I discovered that a great controversy had taken place while I was away, and it had been splashed all across the news.

Had a wall been built around t...

Happy 50th birthday to Cicerone guidebooks

One of the things about writing an outdoor blog is that people sometimes contact me asking if they can send me free stuff. Some people would call this a perk, but I don’t see it that way.

Free stuff usually comes with an obligation. First it was brands and retailers offering to send me clothes and gear to review. But I’m not really interested in writing a few hundred words of text about a fleece or a pair of gloves. There are a limited number of jokes you can make and most of them have been m...

What’s the highest mountain in the solar system?

While I’m in Chile climbing the mountain with the most superlatives in the world, I thought it might be interesting to consider just how superlative a mountain can get.

Most of us have climbed mountains where we’ve not been able to see the summit until we’re standing on it. A few of us have also climbed mountains where the slope has been so gentle that the horizon has remained just a few metres in front of us for much of the ascent (for me, Muztag Ata springs to mind).

But imagine climbing a...

Ojos del Salado at last: climbing the world’s highest volcano

This weekend I’ll be departing for my annual New Year mountaineering trip, and this time I think it’s going to be a bit special. Edita and I will be attempting Ojos del Salado, a peak I’ve been wanting to climb for a few years now.

In the far north of Chile is a high, arid plateau known as the Puna de Atacama. For a distance of over 300km the land rises to an astonishing 4,000m in its lowest parts. There are some 40 peaks over 6,000m and the highest, Ojos del Salado reaches 6,893m. Despite th...

A short scramble up Rumiñahui, the stone-faced Inca warrior

I made my first close acquaintance with Cotopaxi, Ecuador’s highest active volcano, when we climbed Rumiñahui, an attractive peak of three rocky summits a stone’s throw to the north-west.

There is a clear avenue of volcanoes as you drive south from Quito. Pichincha, Atacatzo, Corazón and the Ilinizas rise in a line to the right of the Pan-American Highway, while Sincholagua, Pasochoa and Rumiñahui form a protective shield to the left. Behind these mountains the high grasslands of Antisana and...

Beautiful places are more crowded, but the world is getting better, not worse

The media does not tell us how the world is changing, it tells us what in the world goes wrong.
Max Roser, Our World in Data

Last week an article in the Guardian about the rapid increase in popularity of US national parks was widely shared on social media.

The article described how the launch of Instagram in 2010 had caused visitor numbers to a popular viewpoint above the Grand Canyon called Horseshoe Bend to grow from a few thousand a year to 100,000 in 2010, to a predicted two million this...

The cause of Himalayan forest fires

Forest fires have been in the news recently. Some are inevitable and a necessary event in the life of an ecosystem – part of the natural cycle of death and regeneration. But many people now believe that climate change is causing them to occur more frequently and with more devastating consequences.

I’ve recently been editing the video footage from my trip to the Kangchenjunga region of Nepal earlier this year, where we witnessed a Himalayan forest fire that we believe was entirely man-made.

W...

A doctor’s advice on surviving the death zone

When I was staying at the Summit Hotel in Patan in 2007, en route to Tibet and the north side of Everest, I was woken early one morning by the sound of people exercising in the yard outside my room.

‘Up, down, up, down,’ an instructor was shouting like a sergeant-major overseeing a military drill.

I knew already that these people were trekkers on their way to Everest Base Camp as part of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest expedition. I had sat next to two of them on the flight out to Kathmandu from...