Touching The Void

We climbed 'cause it's fun.

And mainly it was fun.

That's all we ever did.

And we were fairly anarchic

and fairly irresponsible,

and we didn't give a damn about

anyone else or anything else,

and we just wanted to climb

the world. And it was fun.

It was just brilliant fun.

And every now and then it went

wildly wrong. And then it wasn't.

Got into Peru when I was 25, Simon 21.

But we had done a lot

of climbing in the Alps.

To climb mountains that have not been

climbed before, or a new route at a mountain

is what my climbing life

had been moving towards.

A friend of us, who'd done an amazing

amount of climbing in South-America

had seen this face in the mid-70's.

I think he said it would

be a challenging day out.

It was the last big mountain

face in this range of mountains,

that hadn't been climbed.

There's a great unknown there.

What's so compelling is

stepping into that unknown.

It was an isolated spot, a 2

- days walk from a road.

The mountains all around seemed very big,

compared to the mountains

I'd seen in the Alps.

We eventually reached a spot,

on the approach to Siula Grande.

You couldn't really take the

donkeys any further than this point.

I guess it would be 7-8 km from

the bottom of the mountains.

We knew Siula Grande was at

the back, but we didn't see it.

We'd met this lad called Richard Hawking

in Lima. He'd been travelling on his own.

And I think we said, "Why don't

you just join us on our trip?"

I think he said that he didn't

know anything about mountaineering.

I didn't really know

what pot of brew I was in.

or quite, what I was

letting myself in for.

We wanted Richard because

when we were on the mountain,

if he were at base camp he

could look after our kit.

I got to know Simon quite well.

I don't know whether it was

because of his personality,

or whether it was because he

was more forgiving towards me,

being a non-climber

in that environment.

But I found it very

hard to get to know Joe.

I was much more ambitious

about doing it than Simon was.

Siula Grande meant a lot.

We knew, a number of

expeditions had failed on it.

If no one had tried, it

wouldn't be quite the same.

It was the the fact that people had

tried and failed, so we knew it was hard.

And my feeling was, "Well, we'll

just do it. We're better than them."

Since the 1970s people

have been trying to climb

mountains in the great ranges

in what's called "Alpine style".

And essentially, Alpine style

means you pack a rucksack

full of all your clothing, your

food and your climbing equipment,

and you start off from a base camp

and you try and climb the mountain

you're gonna climb in a single push.

You don't fix the line of

ropes uphill beforehand,

you don't have a set of camps

that you stock and come down from.

That's the purest style and that's the style

that Joe and I had climbed Siula Grande.

It's a very committing way of climbing,

because you have no line of retreat.

If something goes wrong,

it can be very very serious.

There's no rescue, there's no helicopter

rescue and there's no other people.

There's no margin for error.

If you get badly hurt,

you'I probably die.

I hadn't seen it from this

angle, and it looked steep.

I sort of thought, you

know, "Christ, that's big".

Looks harder than I

thought and than I expected.

But I was excited.

Starting doing it was brilliant.

This is what we live for.

I love the actual movement of climbing.

When you're climbing well

it just feels brilliant.

It's like a combination

between ballet and gymnastics.

It's that mixture of power and grace.

For me, mountains are the most

beautiful places in the world.

When I go into these places I

feel an amazing sense of space,

an amazing sense of

freedom, when I get away

from all of the clutter

that we have in the world.

I think we surprised ourselves as

we got up the icefield about 300m,

and got up to a point where the

ice is running through rock bands,

and you've got vertical cascades.

We started intricately

climbing through these.

The fact, that you are

tied to your partner,

means that you put an immense amount of

trust in someone else's skill and ability.

But at some point, you may be thinking,

"For god's sake, Simon, don't fall

here, for god's sake, don't fall here"

The rope can be something that rather

than save your life, could kill you.

If your mate falls off then all

this gear rips out, you're dead,

you're gonna go with him.

If you're gonna do that sort of climbing

at some point you're gonna have to rely

wholly on your partner.

I think we were very pleased

at the end of that first day.

We had done a lot of

climbing, good climbing.

And we were very confident at

that point that we should make it.

That altitude, you dehydrate enormously.

You have to drink a lot

of fluid, 4-5 liters a day.

And the only way you can

get it, is by melting snow.

Everything is so time-consuming.

To make a single brew at that

altitude takes a very long time,

You're perhaps looking at an hour

just to make a couple of cups.

For that reason, we perhaps didn't

brew up as much as we should have done

but we didn't have an awful lot

of spare gas with us, either.

There's not a lot of risk

in our lives normally now.

And to put an element of risk back

into it takes us out of the humdrum.

In that sense, it makes

you feel more alive.

I've never been that

high before, and it's

very very strenuous

to climb ice like that.

Not only is it technically difficult

and unstable and frightening,

but your heart is going like

crazy because of the altitude.

It would now go very cold indeed.

And we were up

Then it started snowing, and it meant

that the whole face was pooring

with powdersnow avalanches.

The snow would actually stick

on the outside of your clothing.

It would then freeze on top of you,

like you're wearing a suit of armor.

The last section on the face

was about 100m of the

most nightmarish climbing.

Completely unstable powder snow.

No anchors at any point.

It was physically very, very

tiring, full-body climbing really.

It took us the best part of 5 or

Carried on way after it got dark.

I was getting extremely cold,

'cause I was sitting still

while Simon was trying to climb.

I was getting near hypothermic.

You just knew that if you'd

just carried on, regardless,

it was gonna go tits up.

So we dug a snow cave.

In the morning, in good weather,

we actually saw what

we'd been trying to climb.

It was this undeering nightmare of

flutings of the finest powder

gouged out by snow falling down

meringues, and mushrooms, and

cornices all over the place.

We'd heard about these strange powder

snow conditions you get in the Andes,

and we've never seen it before.

I don't know the physics that explains why

powder snow can stay on such steep slopes.

In the Alps it would just slide off

if the slope was about 40 degrees.

It is some of the most precarious, unnerving

and dangerous climbing I've ever done.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes