Mark Horrell's Blog, page 7

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 ...

Wham! Bam! Langtang! Chang! Four days of trekking joy

This is the fourth and final post in a series about my recent visit to Ladakh in northern India, my first foreign holiday after the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my first post I described the start of my trek up the famous Markha Valley. In my second and third, I whizzed up 6,220m Dzo Jongo East and 6,280m Dzo Jongo West. In this post I recount our return trek up the Langtang and Chang valleys over two high passes.

Well, OK. Perhaps the title of this blog post is slightly over the top, but not by much. ...

Dzo Jongo West: the world’s shortest 6,000m-peak summit day?

This is the third in a series of posts about my recent visit to Ladakh in northern India, my first foreign holiday after the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my first post I described the start of my trek up the famous Markha Valley. In my second, I whizzed up 6,220m Dzo Jongo East. In this post I recount our attempt on the slightly (but only slightly) more technical Dzo Jongo West.

I woke up the morning after our ascent of Dzo Jongo East lacking enthusiasm for the climb ahead. We had been told by our guid...

The strangest tale about Kangchenjunga ever told

A book review of A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor

Hundreds of books have been written about the world’s highest mountain, Everest, and dozens about its second highest, K2. There have not been so many about the third highest, Kangchenjunga.

Some of the best known (in the English language at least) were written by the great mountaineers who were involved in those expeditions, a subject that sometimes provokes debate. Pete Boardman, Joe Tasker and Doug Scott all wrote books about their 1...

Dzo Jongo East: a 6,000m peak so easy you can just walk up it

This is the second in a series of posts about my recent visit to Ladakh in northern India, my first foreign holiday after the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my first post I described the start of my trek up the famous Markha Valley. Our plan to climb Kang Yatze I was abandoned after looking at it from a distance and deciding it would be too epic. The popular Kang Yatze II looked about as interesting as a round of golf, so we set our sights on the two Dzo Jongo peaks at the top of the Nimaling valley.

We ...

Markha Valley Trek: a perfect reintroduction to trekking in Ladakh

This is the first in a series of posts about my recent visit to Ladakh in northern India, my first foreign holiday after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Little did I know when my flight from Colombia touched down at London Heathrow Airport on 2 January 2020, that I wouldn’t be leaving on another foreign holiday for more than two and half years.

I didn’t really miss it at first. 2020 was our first year in the Cotswolds and being locked down in such a magical place for the pandemic wasn’t exactly a hardshi...

A return to the land of mountain passes

Wow, it’s been a hectic last few weeks for me and my apologies for not posting for a while.

The good news is that I’ve made it to the end of all the hecticness, and I will soon be leaving for my first real foreign holiday since December 2019 – which now seems an age away in a parallel universe (and for all I know, it probably is).

The venue for our adventure is Ladakh in northern India, a desert region north of the Himalayan watershed. The name ‘Ladakh’ translates as ‘Land of Mountain Passes’, b...

Life and Death on Mt Everest: a rare window into Sherpa culture

A few months ago someone recommended to me a lesser known volume in the Everest canon, Life and Death on Mt Everest by Sherry B Ortner.

It has an innocuous enough title that could be applied to almost any of the hundreds of books about Everest expeditions that went wrong (the expeditions that is, not the books).

But Life and Death on Mt Everest is more unusual, because it covers a subject that is sometimes alluded to in Everest literature (and more often brushed aside) but almost never written a...