Mark Horrell's Blog, page 24

Cycling the North Coast 500: a teaser from my next book

It’s been three months since I last spoke about my next book Chimborazo. It’s time I updated you and gave you another short teaser from the book the whet your appetite.

When I last spoke about it back in June, I had just completed the first draft, weighing in at a hefty 140,000 words. This compares favourably with Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest, whose first draft came to an enormous 180,000 word, but I’ve learned to waffle less since then.

I took nearly a year off work to write the first...

The great Nepal helicopter rescue fraud: an introduction

Last week Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that a group of insurance companies from Britain, Australia and New Zealand has given the Nepal government a deadline of this Saturday (1 September) to take concrete steps to prevent helicopter rescue fraud, or it will stop providing cover to tourists travelling to Nepal.

If it goes ahead, this would be an unprecedented move that could effectively make Nepal a no-go destination for tourists from those three countries. But how has it come to this,...

5 stepping stones on the path to high altitude

Are you keen to branch out and develop the skills to climb higher peaks? Here are five objectives that should be on your to-do list.

It took me ten years to progress from being a regular UK hill walker to being a competent mountaineer with the skills and experience needed to reach the summit of Everest, a journey I documented in my book Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest.

Here is a series of mountains further afield that more experienced hikers should visit if you are interested in reaching...

Cadair Idris by the Minffordd Path

Rising a short distance south of the town of Barmouth and the Mawddach estuary – the place where the great Himalayan explorer Bill Tilman lived for the latter part of his life and embarked on many of his voyages – is Cadair Idris, the last peak in Snowdonia before the high mountains give way to the soft rolling landscape of mid-Wales.

The name Cadair Idris translates as Idris’s Chair because of the mountain’s saddle shape. Quite who Idris was, has been lost in the mists of time. Some say he w...

Introduction to the Apennines – Part 3: Abruzzo National Park

I was lucky to live and work for a year in Rome, where the highest peaks of the Apennines were accessible within a couple of hours. It was a hill walker’s paradise, with a feast of mountains of great variety, and reliable weather.

Had they been that close to London, those peaks would be crawling with walkers, but this 1,200km chain of mountains that forms the spine of Italy is undiscovered, despite being criss-crossed with hiking trails.

There isn’t much information available in English. We s...

Revised digital edition of Islands of the Snow is now available

Time goes by, and gradually I’m working through the books in my Footsteps in the Mountain Travel Diaries series, revising and expanding the text and getting them professionally edited.

The latest book to undergo this treatment is Islands in the Snow, the story of my trek around the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal in 2009. I completed this trek with my erstwhile climbing partner Mark Dickson (now, sadly, retired from mountaineering) as a warm-up for our 8,000m-peak expedition to the Gasherbrums in...

Flashing on Everest: is it worth the money?

This is a follow up to last month’s post, Flashing on Everest: is it safe or sensible? In that post, I examined whether flashing on Everest is an effective means of climbing the world’s highest mountain, and promised to examine the costs in a later post.

But first, what is flashing on Everest? It’s not what you think it is. It’s got nothing to do with flopping out your John Thomas at 8,000m. It’s the practice of climbing Everest in a shorter period of time by acclimatising at home (using alti...

Scafell Pike, the highest peak in England, from Wasdale

Until last month I had only climbed England’s highest mountain once, and I can date it precisely. It was 22 years ago, on 8 June 1996. On the rocky summit of Scafell Pike we learned that Alan Shearer had put England 1-0 against Switzerland in Euro ‘96. But we had a wild camp beside Styhead Tarn that night, and didn’t find out till the following day that it finished 1-1. I didn’t really give a toss – we’d had a great walk, and that mattered more.

This time the World Cup was on, France and Arge...

Where are the humorous mountaineering books?

This headline is not a rhetorical question; nor is it a variant of Betteridge’s Law, where you’re supposed to infer the opposite. I know there must be humorous mountaineering books out there, and I want to know where they are because I’d like to read them.

I was prompted to ask this question when Vertebrate Publishing started a poll on Twitter to compile a list of the 100 most recommended mountaineering books.

Love them or loathe them, we’re compiling a list of the hundred most recommended m...

The Manaslu Adventure is now available as a paperback

Another quick book update.

I’ve mentioned previously that I’m in the process of having selected titles from my Footsteps on the Mountain Travel Diaries re-edited and published as revised editions. These revised editions are the first time ever that the diaries have been published as paperbacks.

The paperback of The Manaslu Adventure is available now

The latest diary to go through this process is The Manaslu Adventure, about my expedition to Manaslu in Nepal in 2011. The book is a peek inside...