Mark Horrell's Blog, page 8

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...

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, ...