Mark Horrell's Blog, page 35

Comparing Hillary’s and Tichy’s ascents of Cho Oyu

Ever since I first started taking note of what happened on the 8000m peaks, Cho Oyu (8201m), the sixth highest mountain in the world, has stood out as the one that is most achievable for amateur and guided mountaineers to climb. Despite this, even the best mountaineers have had difficulties climbing it, and two of the early expeditions there experienced contrasting fortunes.

Arguably it was the first 8000er to be climbed by a fully commercial expedition team. The amusingly-named Austrian Marc...

Monti Ernici: a taste of the Scottish Highlands a short drive from Rome

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favourite things about living in Rome is its proximity to the Apennines. When I lived in London it was a five or six hour drive to the best hill walking areas of Snowdonia or the Lake District, and a day or more to some of the less accessible peaks in Scotland.

Here in Rome the highest peaks in the the Apennines – in Gran Sasso and Maiella national parks – are only a couple of hours away. These mountains are twice as high as anything in the UK. Corno Grand...

Nepal stories: the monk, the witch and the mountain guide

Those of you who like Nepal might be interested in an unusual film project that will be taking place in the Everest foothills next autumn, if all goes to plan and enough euros are raised via their crowdfunding page.

Pemba Returns to Goli is the story of a Sherpani (or female Sherpa) who fled Nepal with her husband a decade ago and has been living in the village of Taradell in Catalonia for the last nine years. Every year she returns to her home village of Goli in the Everest region to visit h...

The Chomolungma Diaries now available as a paperback

This week’s blog post is a shameless advertisement. I hope you don’t mind.

For those of you who still prefer the waft of ink on the page, and have steered clear of reading any of my travel diaries because they’re only available in digital format, I’m delighted to say that you no longer have an excuse for not reading them.

The Chomolungma Diaries, available now in paperback format

Yes, that’s right. I’ve just published The Chomolungma Diaries, the journal of my 2012 Everest expedition, in pape...

Why The Economist thinks Mount Everest is so dangerous

Last week The Economist published an article with the headline Why Mount Everest is so dangerous.

Now you may be wondering what a magazine about economics has to bring to the table on the subject of mountaineering. You’d be right to ask.

The Economist explains: Explaining bollocks, daily

There are many reasons Mount Everest is dangerous, even on its standard routes.

Climbers on the south side have to pass through the Khumbu Icefall, with its giant crevasses spanned by ladders tied together wi...

Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa

While surfing YouTube the other day, feeling nostalgic for the mountains of Africa, I stumbled across David Breashears’ 2002 IMAX documentary Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa.

I hadn’t seen it before. While it’s not quite the same experience watching it on a modest tablet screen rather than in giganto-vision inside an IMAX theatre surrounded by hoofer-woofer speakers (or whatever they’re called) that didn’t matter to me. I’ve always been one for content over special effects.

The film is nar...

A long overdue, heroic story of rescue high on Everest

For the first 29 years of Everest’s climbing history the death rate was 100%. That’s to say that the only two people to climb it, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, (if indeed they climbed it) didn’t come back alive.

Then Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed it in 1953 and came back down again. Suddenly the death rate was down to 50%, and it’s been going down ever since. Today the overall rate is closer to 4%, with close to 300 deaths in total and 7500 successful summits.

This year 563 peo...

Did Everest’s Hillary Step collapse in the Nepal earthquake?

We were now fast approaching the most formidable obstacle on the ridge – a great rock step. This step had always been visible in aerial photographs, and in 1951 on the Everest Reconnaissance we had seen it quite clearly with glasses from Thyangboche. We had always thought of it as the obstacle on the ridge which could well spell defeat … Search as I could, I was unable to see an easy route up to the step or, in fact, any route at all. Edmund Hillary, High Adventure

After two years of tragedy...

Book review: Summit 8000 by Andrew Lock

I couldn’t bring much of my mountaineering library with me when I moved to Rome, but luckily Edita had a book on her shelf that I was very interested in reading: Summit 8000 by Andrew Lock.

In 2009 Andrew Lock became the first Australian to reach the summit of all fourteen 8000m peaks. Summit 8000 is his autobiography, and covers all of those ascents and more. I wasn’t counting, but he must have made around thirty expeditions to the 8000m peaks for those fourteen successes (and one extra asce...

The first ascent of the South Face of Aconcagua

A day’s drive up the Trans-Andean Highway from Mendoza, in one of Argentina’s prime wine-growing regions, is the ranger station at the entrance to Aconcagua Provincial Park. Here climbers on Aconcagua’s Normal Route will stare up the Horcones Valley and get their first good sight of the mountain they have come to climb.

At 6,959m, Aconcagua is one of the Seven Summits. It is the highest mountain in South America, the Southern Hemisphere, and the Western Hemisphere (whatever the *$! that means...