Mark Horrell's Blog, page 26

Drohmo Ri, the world’s easiest 6,000m peak? Not quite

While in the planning stage of our Kangchenjunga trek earlier this year I consulted Nepal trekking and climbing guru Jamie McGuinness of Project Himalaya about a suitable trekking peak to climb in the area.

I knew that the only officially designated trekking peak in the Kangchenjunga region, Bokta (6,143m), hardly ever gets climbed because of a high rockfall risk. In true Nepalese tradition, nobody working in an official capacity in Nepal’s tourism industry cares about this. The list of 33 of...

Introduction to the Apennines – Part 2: Maiella

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...

Archive footage of the 1955 first ascent of Kangchenjunga

It’s not often I’ve sat through a whole silent movie that doesn’t feature slapstick comedy and a honky-tonk piano playing in the background, but in this case I made an exception.

The British Film Institute (BFI) has recently digitised a whole load of grainy 16mm film footage from the Royal Geographical Society’s historical archives and put it on their website to watch for free.

Among this treasure is some amateur footage of the 1955 British expedition to Kangchenjunga. The expedition was led...

My first visit to Kangchenjunga

By the time you read this Edita and I will be somewhere in the Kangchenjunga region of Nepal, in the far east of the country near its eastern border with India. It’s a region dominated by one huge mountain, 8,586m Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world.

Strangely, given the number of times I’ve travelled to the Himalayas, I have never seen this mountain at close quarters. Although I’ve been high enough to catch distant glimpses from the summits of Mera Peak and Everest, I have...

Why I’m supporting the BMC’s Mend Our Mountains appeal

In 2016 the British Mountaineering Council (BMC) successfully raised £100,000 in a crowdfunded appeal to repair footpaths in several popular UK mountain areas. The campaign was called Mend Our Mountains, and the BMC has just launched its sequel Mend Our Mountains II: Make One Million with the ambitious target of raising, yes, £1 million to repair even more.

A million pounds might seem a lot of money for a cause that isn’t going to stop anyone dying. But I believe it’s money well spent and I’m...

A peek inside the Himalayan Database, the archives of Elizabeth Hawley

A couple of weekends ago, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: install the Himalayan Database on my computer and play around with it.

The Himalayan Database is a comprehensive record of all expeditions to peaks in Nepal over 7,000m since 1905. It is based on the archive of the American journalist Elizabeth Hawley, who died in January at the age of 94.

Miss Hawley moved to Kathmandu in 1959 as a reporter for Reuters and remained there for the rest of her life (I wouldn’t normal...

High Atlas 4,000ers: the videos

Some more dodgy videos – but not in that sense.

I found a new method of making these which involved chucking all the video footage into a food mixer, whizzing it around for a minute or so, and seeing what popped out. I added a few bits of parsley for decoration.

I’m quite pleased with the results. I hope you like them too. These short videos cover our week in Morocco at the end of December, bagging a few 4,000m peaks in the High Atlas.

If you want to watch them all in sequence, there is a You...

Introduction to the Apennines – Part 1: Gran Sasso

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...

Everesting on Everest: how mountaineers differ from endurance cyclists

Everesting: Noun. An endurance challenge performed on a bicycle, where a cyclist repeatedly climbs a single hill until the combined elevation gain reaches 8,848m, the height of Mount Everest.

I first learned about Everesting last August, when I visited my brother in northern Scotland after completing our North Coast 500 cycle ride. He’s a keen cyclist, who often completes multi-day cycling trips across Europe. He’s quite competitive and his status updates sometimes contain stats.

‘Total ascen...

The Brecon Beacons: our Welsh Apennines

It’s now been four months since we moved back to London, and in all that time we’d not been out into the UK hills. If we’d still been in Rome, then we would have been out to the Apennines many times in that period.

Edita was missing those Roman hills. This yearning was heightened acutely a couple of weeks ago when we nipped over to Rome for the Six Nations rugby international. On the morning of the match we walked up the Gianicolo, a hill rising above the Tiber, from where we could see a pano...