Mark Horrell's Blog, page 8

If Reinhold Messner wasn’t the first person to climb all the 8,000m peaks, who was?

There have been rumours in the mountaineering world for a couple of years now that all the records about ascents of the world’s fourteen 8,000m peaks might need to be rewritten.

The rumours were started by a German statistician called Eberhard Jurgalski, who runs the website 8000ers.com, arguably the second best source of data about ascents of the 8,000m peaks behind the Himalayan Database, and the only one to cover stats about the five 8,000ers in Pakistan.

Eberhard was troubled by the fact tha...

Is Peaks and Bandits the world’s funniest mountaineering book?

A few years ago I wrote a blog post lamenting the relative dearth of genuine laugh-out-loud-funny books in the genre of mountain writing when compared to the broader world of travel writing in general.

The post was partly inspired by a poll of mountaineering literature by the Sheffield-based outdoor book publisher Vertebrate Publishing. Now, thanks to Vertebrate and their Norwegian translator Bibbi Lee, I’m happy to report that the meagre pot of mountaineering mirth has become a little merrier w...

All 14 Welsh 3,000ers for the Queen’s jubilee

Our beloved monarch Queen Elizabeth II has now been sitting on the throne for 70 years, which is – I’m sure you’ll agree – an awfully long time to spend on the same piece of furniture, especially that one.

To celebrate this event, and because the people of Britain had been granted an extra day of public holiday to mark it, I decided to do something special.

But what does special mean when mountaineering records have been falling right, left and centre or – perhaps more appropriately – up, down, ...

Sherpa Hospitality now available as an audiobook

This is a quick note for those of you who prefer the spoken word to the written one – I know there are many of you.

I have recently completed narrating my latest book Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite, and it’s now available as an audiobook on a number of platforms, including Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Nook, Scribd, Libro.fm, Audiobooks.com and many more. Check your favourite audiobook site if it’s not listed here.

Sherpa Hospitality as a Cure for Frostbite is now available in 3 formats: ...

Snowdonia’s Nantlle Ridge the hard way

Another bank holiday weekend and another long mountain hike beckoned. After the comparative ease with which I managed to leg it for 31km over all the summits of Plynlimon during the Easter weekend, I was keen for something a little more testing, preferably that would leave me crawling back to the car on my hands and knees.

The Nantlle Ridge in Snowdonia National Park, North Wales, is one of those classic mountain scrambles that has been lurking on my list for many years. From what I’d gleaned ab...

Plynlimon: traversing the five tops of the fruitiest mountain in Wales

From high Plynlimon’s shaggy side
Three streams in three directions glide
Lewys Glyn Cothi

Many people think of Wales as having two principal mountain ranges: Snowdonia in the north, rising to 1,085m on the summit of Snowdon, and the Brecon Beacons in the south, whose high point is 886m Pen y Fan. But stretching for nearly 80km through the spine of central Wales is a third range, the Cambrian Mountains, that is less well known.

The Cambrians lack the steep, rocky summits of Snowdonia and dramati...

A walk through the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine

We live in strange and uncertain times. Two years of global pandemic and intermittent lockdowns have been followed by a war on Europe’s doorstep. Who knows where all this will lead.

In such a setting, it feels awkward and uncaring to post about frivolous things such as mountain climbing and global travel – in my case, even slightly surreal: I’ve not left my home country for over two years. But there is a counter argument that says we all need a release: something to give us hope, take our minds ...

A guided tour of Himalayan mountaintops by an Everest guide, from the comfort of your armchair

Most of us have used Google Street View at some point to identify buildings, reminisce about a place we’ve visited, or just to have a good nosy around the neighbourhood and see what our neighbours look like stretched at funny proportions with blobs obscuring their features.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about Google Street View, but it’s kinder, mellower, more refined, engaging and adventurous younger brother.

In its early days, Street View couldn’t show any panoramas that you couldn’t visit in...

One and a half ascents of Ben Hope, Scotland’s most northerly Munro

I first saw Ben Hope, the most northerly of Scotland’s 282 Munros (mountains over 3,000ft in height) while cycling the North Coast 500 in 2017, a journey I described in Feet and Wheels to Chimborazo. It was a Munro, which meant that one day I would have to climb it. I took the opportunity to study it.

That morning, Edita and I had set off from Durness, the gateway to Cape Wrath on the far north-west coastline of Britain, and pedalled along a stretch of coastline with rugged cliffs and sandy bays...

7 great books with Sherpa mountaineers at their heart

Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Nirmal Purja’s high-profile achievements of the last few years have been a game changer for Nepali mountaineering.

With his book Beyond Possible riding high on bestseller lists and his film 14 Peaks one of the most watched films on Netflix, the profile of Sherpas and Nepal mountaineering is at an all-time high.

But where do you go if you want to find out more? Here are seven insightful and entertaining books that have Sherpas at their heart. As ev...