Mark Horrell's Blog

A couple of weeks ago, my wife dropped a bombshell.

It’s not what you’re thinking. Edita is currently working in Haiti on a humanitarian mission, which means that we’re waking up each morning separated by a five-hour time difference. I understand that there isn’t much to do in Haiti on an evening, and earlier this month, Edita let slip that she’s been passing the time by listening to my last audiobook on Spotify.

This was a bombshell for two reasons. Firstly, somebody actually listens to my self...

In 2007, I visited Xinjiang, a desert region in the far west of China that doesn’t feature highly on many people’s tourist bucket list.

Wedged between the foothills of three huge mountain ranges – the Karakoram to the south, Pamirs to the north-west, and the Kunlun to the west – the giant snow dome of Muztag Ata (7,546m) rises far above the surrounding landscape of dusty brown peaks. I first learned about it from the writing of Eric Shipton, the great mountain explorer who served as Consul Gener...

The whole of Europe is in the middle of a scorching heatwave. Here in the Cotswolds the grass is as brown as a hay bale and the thermometer has been touching 30°C. Meanwhile, colleagues in Geneva have complained of temperatures approaching a scarcely bearable 38°C.

For Edita, none of this is extreme. She is currently working in Haiti, where these temperatures are on the moderate side. She was home for ten days of R&R, and it seemed like a good time to go hill walking. We decided to head for the ...

Much of the media coverage around Everest this year has focused on a brace of unusual speed ascents that have been framed as a game changer for aspiring Everest climbers. But there was another technological advance that is likely to change the job description for Sherpas much more significantly.

The two speed ascents were unusual in their choice of starting point. These speedsters weren’t trying to leg it to the summit from base camp in the quickest possible time, but to reach the summit in a mi...

In an interview for the mountaineering gear blog OutInUnder, tent designer Martin Zemitis described the moment he first met Babu Chiri Sherpa.

Down came this rather short gentleman about 5 feet in diameter. I think he was nothing but a big lung and a muscle, with legs like tree trunks.

Standing just 1.65m tall and weighing 82kg (or 5’5” high and 13 stones for those of you who prefer good old-fashioned measurements), nobody would ever have suspected Babu Chiri of being an athlete if he walked i...

A review of Sherpa by Pradeep Bashyal and Ankit Babu Adhikari

There have been many books about Sherpa mountaineers over the years. I wrote about some of my favourites in this post from a few years ago. Few have been written from the perspective of Sherpas themselves. Of the three in that post, one was famously ghosted by an American, one was co-written by an Australian, and the other was written by a Sherpa who has lived much of his life in America. Perhaps more significantly, they were by three...

It’s been a very dry April. For three weeks it barely rained and there are still parts of our garden that I haven’t needed to mow. When the Easter holiday weekend came, however, it was set to tank down. In what seems like an increasingly lawless world, it was comforting to see that British weather still obeys Sod’s Law.

Luckily, there was forecast to be one day of glorious weather on the Sunday, so I nabbed it to take a day trip to the Brecon Beacons, a range of hills in South Wales a couple of ...

There is a moment in your life when you start reminding yourself of your dad. For me that happened earlier this month while I was editing Edita’s videos of myself trekking the GR20 across Corsica. It wasn’t a agreeable realisation.

I should point out that I don’t have anything against my father. He’s an entertaining, amiable chap. He just happens to be 83 years old. I hadn’t previously been aware of looking like a wizened old man as I walk, and nor has Edita ever pointed it out to me.

I had anot...

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about climbing tiny Little Solsbury Hill above the city of Bath, the setting for Peter Gabriel’s 70s progressive rock classic, that’s right… Solsbury Hill. Two years on, here I am writing a blog post about another small English hill that was once the subject of a classic 70s prog rock album. So I suppose you could say this is the second in my series of blog posts about mountain-themed prog rock. I can’t promise that it will be a very long series.

Herges...

It’s that special time of year when you get to see more of my amazing videos. A full eighteen months ago, Edita and I had the great pleasure of trekking the GR20, the infamous long-distance trail along the spine of the mountainous island of Corsica.

I say infamous because it’s known to be one of the toughest, hairiest long-distance trails in Europe. There is no better person to confirm this than Paddy Dillon, the man who wrote the Cicerone guidebook Trekking the GR20 Corsica, who describes it as...