‘Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in?’
JOE SIMPSON
IN 1956 THE mountaineer and author Sir Arnold Lunn said of Toni Kurz’s struggles on the Eiger, ‘In the annals of mountaineering, there is no record of a more heroic endurance.’
And, in 1956, that was probably true.
But those words were written before Joe Simpson and Simon Yates travelled to the Peruvian Andes. Their exploits would become a bona fide modern mountaineering legend.
Joe Simpson was no stranger to dangerous mountains.
In 1983 Simpson and a companion called Ian Whittaker had been climbing the Bonatti Pillar in the French Alps. It’s a 2,000-foot granite spire that you can see from the Chamonix valley, and a magnet for thrill-seekers. Their first day’s climbing had gone well. They decided to overnight on a ledge, where they could enjoy a view of the stars before finishing the climb the following day.
It didn’t happen quite like that.
The ledge itself formed the top of a rocky outcrop bulging from a sheer cliff face. It was only four-feet wide, but long enough for them to lie down next to each other in their bivi bags. They took the usual safety precautions – I mean, four foot doesn’t exactly give you much room to roll over, and on one side was a very long, sheer drop – so they tied themselves to their anchor point, which they had fixed into a crack in the solid rock behind them.
They were just settling down to sleep when the whole ledge that they were lying on suddenly broke clean away from the cliff face. For a few seconds of blind terror Simpson and Whittaker found themselves plunging into the void below. Then, suddenly, the ropes bit and stopped their fall.
They were alive, but hanging helplessly, unable to do anything to save themselves. If they tried to wriggle free and ascend the rope, their anchor point could easily break free from its crevice. They were trapped. Hanging free by a precarious thread of rope.
Beneath them was 2,000 feet of darkness. They could only hope and pray that someone might have seen what had happened or heard their screams, and call for rescue.
They were hanging for twelve dark, sickening hours before finally a rescue chopper came for them. The two petrified climbers were brought down alive. Ian Whittaker lost his desire for mountaineering after that narrow scrape with death. And who can blame him?
Joe Simpson, however, still had it. That strange, inexplicable, burning drive that forces adventurers on to bigger and greater endeavours.
Bigger and greater ascents.
What follows is a story of fear and bravery. Fear of the unknown. Fear of suffering. And fear of death. But it’s also the story of how one man refused to bow to that fear. And how Joe went on to pull off one of the biggest escapes in mountaineering history.
*
Siula Grande. The clue’s in the name. It is indeed Grande.
More than 20,000 feet high, it’s an imposing peak in the Waywash mountain range, deep in the Andes of Peru. And, like all magnificent peaks, its summit beckons out to the boldest mountaineers out there.
Joe Simpson was one of those. So was Simon Yates. Together they had set themselves a formidable challenge: to be the first men to climb Siula Grande by the as-yet-unclimbed West Face. Several mountaineering teams had attempted this. They’d all failed. But, in June 1985, Simpson and Yates were out for the summit’s blood. And they got it.
Blood, that is.
Joe Simpson and Simon Yates became the first men to climb Siula Grande by that formidable West Face route.
But this is not the story of that ascent.
It’s the story of one of the most gruelling descents of all time, as the pair battled to make it down off the peak and back to their base camp.
Bear in mind that at this point the team of two were exhilarated but exhausted, having just pulled off one of the fiercest and most demanding climbs the mountaineering world had ever seen.
As they left the summit, events were already beginning to stack up against them. After three and a half hours of treacherously difficult and slow down-climbing they had made very little progress. It was just after 5 p.m., as they were struggling along a particularly technical and awkward ridge, when Joe felt the snow suddenly break away beneath him. He tumbled out of control down towards Simon’s position, and then came to a violent stop.
The pair were completely exhausted by now. And they knew that the fall could have been much worse. It was a lucky break.
They needed to rest up, so the two climbers started to make an improvised shelter for the night by digging out an ice cave and hunkering down.
But there were problems. Simon had frostbite on both his hands. By morning, the tips of his fingers had turned black. They ate the remainder of their food and used the last of the gas in their stove to melt snow for drinking water. They both knew that, in terms of mountain survival for two men at the limit of their fatigue, it was crucial that they made it down to base camp that day.
They set out at 7.30 a.m. but, once again, the terrain was dictating their descent, and their progress was excruciatingly slow. Joe, who was now in the lead, was attached to Simon by one length of rope, and was using his ice axe to ease his way over the edge of, and down, a sheer section of the ice face.
It was from this position that Joe slipped. And found himself in freefall.
When he smashed into the base of the cliff, he felt the bones in his right knee shatter. He didn’t know it at the time, but his tibia had speared itself right into the heart of the knee joint.
He screamed in agony, but already he was falling backwards again, head-first down the icy face. As he fell, his thoughts turned to Simon. He knew they were tied together. At the end of the rope, the force of the fall would surely rip Simon off the mountain after him …
But then Joe came to a sudden and violent halt.
His whole right leg was burning with pain. He looked down. He could make out that the lower half of the limb was jutting out at an angle. When he tried to move it, he felt bone crushing against bone. Unimaginable pain. Like fire burning through his veins. It was clear that the bones and sinew were a total, mangled mess.
But above the pain, there was another overwhelming thought. They were 19,000 feet up in the mountains. If his leg was broken – and it surely was – he would have zero chance of getting down. Simon, if he wanted at least one of them to live, would have no choice but to leave Joe there to die. It was a hard but untenable situation. Joe knew that if Simon tried to help him off the mountain then, without doubt, they both would perish.
Is it any wonder Joe started to cry?
*
Joe had come to a halt because Simon had managed to drive his ice axes deep into the snow just in time. Steadily, he eased himself down to where his injured partner lay howling.
He immediately saw that Joe didn’t stand a chance. Not with that kind of injury. Not here.
Few people in the climbing fraternity would have blamed Simon for leaving his partner there. They had no radio or sat phone to call for help, and no one they could signal to for assistance. The only choice would be for Simon to get down and attempt to get help back up the mountain to Joe. Either way he would have to leave his injured buddy. It was certainly what Joe expected him to do.
Simon didn’t see it that way. Instead he started lowering his partner down the mountain.
They knew they needed to move quickly, but that was just not possible. Darkness was coming and the weather was now getting worse. The plan was this: Simon would repeatedly dig himself a snow seat where he could anchor himself, take the strain on the rope and lower his injured partner, length after length, down the slopes.
To make things quicker, they tied together two 150-foot lengths of rope. When the 300-foot rope ran out, Joe would hunker down and wait for Simon to down-climb to him.
It was a wildly ambitious plan and, in all truth, it was doomed to fail in those freezing mountain conditions. But Simon refused to leave Joe. And the plan seemed to be working.
The weather continued to deteriorate – as weather in the mountains has a habit of doing when you most need calm. The clouds were bubbling up ominously in the east, and it was now snowing hard. The loose powder was being driven by the biting wind into every crack in their down jackets and glasses. The conditions were blinding them.
Joe’s fingers then began to freeze, adding frostbite to the list of problems.
They finally reached a col – a ridge between two peaks – but here their descent became more difficult. With each movement, stabs of searing pain shot up Joe’s mangled leg, leaving in its wake an incessant, unbearable throbbing. He found himself howling impotently into the wind as the freezing snow bit into his skin. But no one could hear him – not even Simon.
Several times Joe’s boot caught on a rock, twisting the broken leg awkwardly, forcing more yells from the injured man’s throat.
The pain pushed every other thought from his mind. It consumed him.
The broken leg started to shake. Joe couldn’t stop it. His frostbitten hands were getting worse by the minute. Nausea and dizziness surged through him.
But still the pair continued their 300-foot descents.
Soon the conditions were a white-out. They could see nothing above them nor, crucially, below them. Should they continue their descent without knowing what kind of terrain Simon was lowering Joe into? Or should they wait, and surely both freeze to death?
They continued. It grew fully dark. The pair estimated that they had descended nearly 3,000 feet. Another lowering of the rope, maybe two, and they’d reach the top of a glacier. Here they’d be able to find a snow cave to last out the night, before aiming to finish their descent the following morning.
But, again, it never happened that way.
As Simon lowered Joe down the next section of mountain, Joe noticed that the slope was particularly steep. Suddenly he found himself sliding particularly fast. He tried to slow himself down with his arms, without success. He screamed up at Simon to slow him down, but his voice went unheard.
Suddenly, he was in empty air. Falling.
Showers of snow fell over him as he plummeted into darkness.
Then, with an abrupt yank of the rope, he came to a halt. He was spinning uncontrollably on the end of the rope, round and round in the void. By the light of his torch he could see an ice wall six feet away, coming in and out of focus as he continued to twist.
When the spinning stopped, he looked up. He was about 15 feet below the lip of the cliff that he had tumbled over.
Then he looked down. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but he reckoned there was 100 feet of empty air beneath him. Below that, the silhouette of a deadly crevasse – a massive tear in the ice leading down into the heart of the glacier.
Joe’s torch beam flickered and then died as the batteries wore out. An ominous jolt, as the rope bit into the snowpack at the lip of the cliff, reminded him his leg was broken and causing him agony.
The rope could break at any moment. Simon could break at any moment – and then they’d both go tumbling into the unknown.
But despite his pain, the frostbite, and the wretchedness of the situation, Joe didn’t give up. He knew that if he did, he was dead. And fear can be a powerful motivator.
His only option was to try to climb the rope from which he was suspended. He tried to do this using an improvised climbing knot called a prusik, but his hands simply wouldn’t work. They were frozen in place. Immobile. He knew he had no chance of climbing up.
The freezing wind spun him round. Loose snow blasted his face. The taut rope from which he was hanging dug mercilessly into his freezing body.
He felt dread, exhaustion and cold seep through his veins. Any moment now, he told himself, he’d be dead.
*
Above the edge of the cliff, Simon Yates was locked, unable to move. Joe was a dead weight at the end of his rope, unable to go up, unable to go down. A frozen and terrifying hour passed before Simon realized he had the Devil’s choice.
He could wait here to die, at which point they would both go tumbling into the void. Or he could cut the rope, and give at least one of them a chance of survival.
The pair had no way to communicate. They were out of visual and vocal contact.
What do you do?
There was a penknife in his rucksack.
The rope was taut. The knife sharp. If any semblance of life was to be salvaged from this disaster, there was only one choice.
The blade cut through the rope with no pressure or difficulty. The dead weight at the end of it was suddenly no more.
Simon felt no guilt. He had done what had to be done. He dug himself a snow cave and prepared to weather the harsh mountain night.
*
Joe knew the fall was coming. One way or another, it was the only thing that could happen.
The silence seemed to last for ever. He wondered if this was what death felt like, and for a moment he wasn’t scared.
Then he hit the ground with a solid thump.
The fear returned. He realized he was skidding down into the deep crevasse. He screamed again, as his body slid faster and faster into the deathly heart of the glacier.
Any moment now, he would surely be dead …
But, suddenly, he came to a halt.
His chest went into a spasm of retching and gagging. He tried to get air into his lungs as pain from his mashed-up leg surged through him once more. Somewhere, far above the ledge on which he’d landed, he could see stars twinkling.
In the pitch darkness, he touched the icy wall of the crevasse on one side. But he also sensed a dangerous drop right beside him. And then, when it hit him that he was still alive, he actually started to laugh. The sound echoed up around the chamber of the crevasse. Then he found his spare torch battery, and shone it down the black opening to his side. He stopped laughing.
The torch lit up 100 feet of empty space below him. One hundred feet of nothing. He could only guess the true depth of the crevasse.
He saw the cut end of the rope that had fallen with him, and understood what had happened. Then he turned off his torch to preserve the battery, and started to cry in the darkness.
There was no way Joe could climb out of the crevasse with his broken leg. Which left him two options: lie there and die, or abseil further down into the crevasse until he could find … something. He had no idea what was down there, and the prospect of finding out was terrifying.
He would later say that he wasn’t brave enough to look down. But, to me, his next act was one of sheer courage.
At dawn, having endured the darkest of nights, lying twisted and broken on that freezing ledge, he twisted an ice screw into the wall of the crevasse to fix his rope to, and then started to lower his broken body further down into the darkness of the abyss.
He tied no knot into the end of his rope. If he didn’t reach anything solid by the end of his rope then he would simply abseil off it to his death …
Dread pumped through him. Claustrophobic and frozen, he abseiled further and further into the unknown.
And the ultimate risk paid off.
His rope lowered him on to a snow-covered floor. Just then, a shard of sunlight cut down from the top of the crevasse.
It’s amazing how simple things can give you hope.
Joe promised himself there and then that he was going to get out of there. He didn’t know when, or how, but he was going to survive.
*
His broken leg had grown stiff. It hung shorter than the good one. Walking was out of the question, but somehow he managed a kind of excruciating hop, aided by the use of his ice axes.
His progress was horribly slow. He saw a slope ahead of him of about 100 feet. With two good legs it would have taken him ten minutes to climb. As it was, it took him five hours. But it led him to a hole in the crevasse. He pulled himself through it. He was back in the sunshine on the mountainside.
He felt a sense of jubilation, but his escape from the jaws of death was far from over. He had no water, save the handfuls of snow and ice he could suck on. But he knew that, at this altitude, he required at least a litre and a half per day to stave off dehydration. He knew nobody was coming to rescue him, so his only choice now was to crawl and slide down the mountain.
At one point he tried to walk, having wrapped his sleeping mat round his bad leg as a makeshift cast. Bad move. As soon as he put pressure on it he almost vomited through the pain.
Joe hopped and crawled through the snow and ice. His jubilation faded as he realized how lost he was. He seemed to be in a sea of crevasse openings. Surely he would never survive a fall into these scars of the mountain.
But he didn’t fall. He just kept going. Past one crevasse and then past the next. Precariously dragging his limp and frozen body inch by inch through the minefield.
When he tried to sleep he was haunted by nightmares. And all the while, the physical pain was unspeakable. For three days, he crawled and hopped. Stubbornly. Tenaciously. He was at the very edge of endurance, not just physically, but also mentally. But somehow, through sheer doggedness, courage and unbending determination, he crawled his backside off that mountain.
Simon had since made it to safety too. He was at their original little base camp with a companion who had been looking after their tents. He knew he’d made the only decision he could, but it couldn’t have been an easy time for him. Certainly he had never expected to see Joe again in a million years. He’d even ceremoniously burned all his clothes.
When he saw his companion crawling towards them, sobbing with agony, barely able to see through snow blindness and exhaustion, it must have been like seeing a ghost, back from the dead.
And in many ways, that’s exactly what it was. In the course of that one descent, Joe Simpson had beaten death countless times. More than that, he’d done so having sustained injuries that would surely have killed off someone who didn’t have his resilience and fortitude.
Experienced mountaineers consider Joe’s escape from the crevasse on Siula Grande one of the greatest feats of mountaineering. I think it’s actually one of the greatest feats of survival ever.
A word must remain for Simon Yates, the man who cut the rope.
When he and Joe returned to the UK, there were words of criticism for the way he had consigned his companion to an almost certain death. Joe quickly quashed those criticisms by saying he had done exactly the right thing – just what Joe himself would have done in the same situation. It’s true. Simon Yates’s decision was not an act of cowardice. It was an act of courage. You could even say that the decision saved both their lives. If he hadn’t cut the rope, it’s unlikely either would have survived.
To keep a cool enough head to make the right call under extreme pressure is a mark of true grit. And, for me, the story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates is a reminder that sometimes, at the edge of endurance, when the natural world is bombarding you with everything it’s got, and death seems the only option, humans have shown themselves capable of summoning up truly extraordinary reserves of courage.
One day that might be a powerful thing to remember.