Mark Horrell's Blog, page 26

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...

Chimborazo’s role in proving Newton’s theory of gravity

Climbers can fall off mountains for a variety of reasons. Clumsiness, incompetence, bad luck, shoddy equipment, natural causes or – if you’re Joe Simpson – because somebody above you has cut the rope. But there’s one common cause in every plummet: the law of gravity, discovered in the 1660s (as legend has it) by the British scientist Sir Isaac Newton, after being struck on the head by an apple.

I expect you know this already, but Newton’s law states that bodies attract in proportion to their...

Tomek Mackiewicz and Nanga Parbat: a Shakespearean mountaineering tragedy

Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat (8,125m), the world’s ninth-highest mountain, has had its share of strange tragedies. It was the first 8,000m peak to take a climber’s life in 1895, when Albert Mummery and two Gurkha officers, Ragobir Thapa and Goman Singh, set off to cross the Diamir Gap and were never seen again.

In 1934, nine members of a German expedition, including six Darjeeling Sherpas, died in a harrowing eight-day storm as they retreated down the mountain. In 1937, sixteen members of another...

Chimborazo Sea to Summit Challenge: the videos

Another one for those of you who prefer to watch telly than read books.

It’s that time again, when I show off the latest batch of classy videos that I’ve cobbled together in the garden shed with a pair of scissors, a roll of sellotape, and some sticky-back plastic. These ones cover our Chimborazo Sea to Summit Challenge last autumn, when we climbed 6,310m Chimborazo in Ecuador, starting from sea level on push bikes. Fans of my videos (have another drink, all of you) will be pleased to know th...

Mountain, The Movie: pornography for outdoor folk

You may not know it, but on 11 December every year, the United Nations celebrates International Mountain Day to highlight how climate change, hunger and migration is affecting mountain communities. What the event actually involves, I’m not going to go into here, but you can hop on over to the official website if you want to learn more. What I will say is that, as far as obscure international days go, it beats such eccentric celebrations as Ed Balls Day, Global Wind Day and International Dog B...

Bagging 4,000m peaks in Morocco

It was arranged at very short notice, but our brief visit to the High Atlas over Christmas and New Year, was as enjoyable as any week’s holiday I’ve ever had.

I found a local trekking agent Pathfinders Treks on TripAdvisor, and was impressed by their owner Rachid’s almost instant response to my enquiry, offering a fair price for precisely the services we needed – a guide, cook, mule, food, transport to Imlil, and accommodation at both Imlil and Toubkal. There proved to be no catch. Apart from...

It’s the Everest silly announcement season again

It was a slow news week over the Christmas period, and this is perhaps why the mainstream media fell for the Everest silly announcement hoax for the umpteenth time.

This particular stunt happens roughly once a year, and the sequence of events is as follows:

The Government of Nepal appoints a new Minister for Tourism. The Minister decides to stamp his mark by making a silly announcement about Everest, with no intention of following through with it. Often it’s the same announcement that was ma...