Mark Horrell's Blog, page 7

A Grasmoor and Grisedale Pike horseshoe via Grasmoor End

Time flies quickly now. I was amazed to discover that, thanks to successive lockdowns and a focus on Scotland in the last few years, it has been a full four years since my last visit to the Lake District, England’s best hillwalking area.

A return visit was long overdue and the Easter weekend offered a good opportunity. After a March that only ducks could feel happy about, the weather was set to be fair that first weekend in April. Edita found a cottage in Kirkland, on the west side of the mounta...

The first 7 British people to climb Mount Everest

I’ve recently been reading The Everest Years by Chris Bonington, during which he states that he was the 7th Brit to climb Everest. In fact, on official lists he is usually described as the 6th. One of his predecessors’ ascents is uncertain (though Sir Chris himself obviously has no doubts).

So who were the 7 and what were their stories?

Clockwise from top left: Chris Bonington, Pertemba Sherpa (an honorary Brit), Dougal Haston, Doug Scott, Pete Boardman, Brummie Stokes, Bronco Lane, Mick Burke (...

BREAKING NEWS: Solo trekkers in Nepal will have to carry a live chicken

Solo trekking will be banned in Nepal’s national parks starting from next month, unless hikers carry a live chicken strapped to their backpacks. The move was announced by the Department of Oversight for Nepal’s Tourism (DON’T), the country’s main tourism body. A spokesman said that it would reduce the risks for the millions of thrill seekers who travel to the Himalayan country every year. It is understood that the crowing of the chicken will deter thieves and cutthroats from attacking trekkers, ...

Murder on the Nangpa La: why the 2006 Cho Oyu shooting should be remembered

On Saturday 30 September, 2006, foreign climbers at Cho Oyu Base Camp in Tibet watched a line of around 70 local people zigzag up a steep snow slope a short distance away from their tents. They were about to witness something that would become headline news across the world.

At the top of the slope was the Nangpa La pass on the international border between China and Nepal. The pass had been a trade route for centuries. It is likely that Sherpas migrated into Nepal over the Nangpa La in the 16th ...

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill, but is it a real place?

This blog is not just about mountains but small hills too, and today I’m going to talk about a very small hill indeed.

I was listening to the Easy 70s playlist on Spotify when I picked Edita up from the airport a couple of weeks ago.

As we drove back to the Cotswolds that Friday, Peter Gabriel’s 1977 hit Solsbury Hill popped up on the car stereo, which prompted Edita to remark:

“Peter Gabriel is British, isn’t he. Is Solsbury Hill a real place? If it is then we should climb it.”

“Good idea. Actu...

Did Rudyard Kipling’s explorer see Hamish MacInnes looking behind the ranges?

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges —
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!
Rudyard Kipling, The Explorer

The occupation mountaineer or even explorer doesn’t begin to describe the life of Hamish MacInnes, who in his 90 years pioneered the art of mountain rescue, invented an ice axe, a tent and a stretcher, made many first ascents all over the world, engaged as a cameraman in umpteen films and documentaries, and somehow managed to write nearly...

A short history of Everest by Kenton Cool

The two things I miss most since moving from London to the Cotswolds are live jazz and mountaineering lectures. Imagine my delight then, to learn that Kenton Cool would be giving a lecture about Everest a few fields away from where I live.

The venue in question was the Far Peak Climbing Centre in Northleach, a town best known as the setting for the hilarious BBC comedy series about life in the Cotswolds, This Country.

Northleach is a sleepy little market town with all the basic facilities such a...

How to survive a wet and wintry week in Glen Coe, Scotland

For many years I escaped Christmas (and winter) by fleeing to Africa or Latin America for a couple of weeks over the holiday period. Over the course of 15 years Ethiopia, Uganda, Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala, Ecuador, Tanzania, Morocco, Chile and Colombia all featured among my Christmas holiday destinations.

The idea of a week in Scotland at the end of December was far from my thoughts. For one thing, there isn’t much daylight. In the Highlands it’s dark by 3.30pm. Then there’s the weather. You’...

My favourite book of 2022: Snow in the Kingdom by Ed Webster

This is a poignantly belated book review, if ever there was one. Ed Webster died of a heart attack last month at the age of 66. His book Snow on the Kingdom had been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for more than seven years, ever since the writer Harriet Tuckey recommended it to me in a Twitter thread in 2015. I finally got round to reading it earlier this year.

Harriet said the book was ‘just as dramatic as you’d expect from his talk at the RGS’ and that she couldn’t put it down. The...

Did George Mallory climb Everest in 1924? I asked ChatGPT for an answer

Some of you may have heard about ChatGPT, the Elon Musk-funded chatbot that was launched to the public last month to much fanfare (although he has since left the project to concentrate on winding down Twitter).

ChatGPT is a web tool that you can type natural-language questions into and get scarily human-like answers back again. It has been trained using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning techniques with terabytes of information fed into it.

If you believe the hype then you may be ...