I’ve just finished a lecture series called Beyond The Void. I talk about my climbing career, from the accident in Peru to what I’ve achieved since. People tend to look at my decision to cut the rope out of context. I’d spent a large chunk of that day, after Joe [Simpson] broke his leg, lowering him down the mountain. When he went over the cliff and the weight of his body started dragging me down, I didn’t know what had happened to him. All I knew was that my position was desperate. I was going to be pulled off the slope and likely as not I was going to fall to my death. When I finally cut the rope I had been thinking for quite some time about the predicament I was in and then I remembered I had a knife and the solution presented itself. It was a pragmatic decision, really.
When Joe turned up at the camp in the middle of the night three days later there was a whole raft of emotions; happiness that he was still alive, sadness that he had had this horrific ordeal. I was worried about his condition and how I was going to get him out of the mountains. I moved on quite quickly from the accident. It’s like falling off a bike – you have to get right back on. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to live through, but it had a happy outcome and I learned from the experience. I realised that we weren’t doing a lot of things as well as we could have done. I’m a cautious person and I’ve been lucky since.
In Patagonia I learned how to climb big walls in a mountain setting. These massive granite faces only occur in a handful of places in the world – Paine in Chile, Fitzroy in Argentina, Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, Pakistan – they take days to climb and are incredibly steep. It’s a slow, laborious process, so I’ve gone back to climbing more snowy mountains now.
I keep going back to the Cordillera Darwin in Tierra del Fuego. It’s a pristine mountain wilderness. There aren’t proper maps of the area, there’s only a handful of people who’ve ever climbed there and that’s what I find so attractive about that part of the world. It’s genuine mountain exploration. I also love climbing in the Pakistani Karakoram. It’s the most raw, dramatic mountain range in the world. I have huge admiration for the people that live there – it’s a tough place to eke out a living.
I’m 46 and I’ve devoted my life to climbing since I was 21, but I’m not as obsessive about it as I was then. I’m away on mountaineering trips for three to four months every year, but I’m always travelling and I don’t have a problem with sitting on a beach reading a book. Over the past 10 years I’ve been taking my wife and children around the Scottish Islands and we’ve nearly done them all. They’re fantastic places. Some of the best beaches I’ve been on anywhere. A lot of the islands only have a few kilometres of road, so we travel on bicycles, which are also easy to move from one island to the next.
I’ve made a lot of first ascents and climbed new routes in my career. It’s the adventure that drives me – going and doing something that other people haven’t done before. In April I will be covering new ground in the St Elias range on the Alaska/Yukon border and in July I’m going to be climbing in a part of the world I haven’t been to before – the Pamir Mountains in Central Asia. I’ll be leading a group for World Expeditions up Pik Lenin in Kyrgyzstan. It’s over 7,000 metres high – the height alone will be challenging – but it looks like a nice mountain to lead a group up.
The person I admire most in the climbing world is Mick Fowler. He’s actually a tax man – he works for the Inland Revenue – but he’s done a vast number of impressive first ascents of mountains and mountain faces around the world, and he’s managed to do this on the month-long trips he gets as annual leave. I know it sounds unlikely, but that’s what’s so wonderful about it.
Comments are closed.