Touching the Void

Joe Simpson

On 19 May 1985 Simon Yates and Joe Simpson began an assault on the 21,000 foot Siula Grande mountain in the Andes. Yates and Simpson had already climbed in the Alps but this was their first ascent outside Europe. They were young, fit and talented climbers. They probably believed those qualities to be enough. The Siula Grande had been climbed before but Yates and Simpson were attempting to be the first climbers in history to scale the 4500 foot West Face.

Their tents were pitched at a base camp at 15,000 feet with a colleague guarding them. The two mountaineers expected to need four to six days to make the round trip, up, down and back to base. Progress up the West Face was hard but steady and they reached the peak in good time after three and a half days.

Disastrously, while on the descent, Simpson fell a short distance and broke several bones in his leg. The accident was severe enough, and the location still high and remote enough, for both climbers to think briefly that Yates would have to leave him to die and descend without him. There was no hope of rescue. Instead the two began a slow painful descent with Yates lowering Simpson 300 foot at a time. By the fifth day they had run out of fuel, food and water and were still a day or so from base camp. At this point Yates unknowingly lowered the stricken climber over the lip of a crevasse and, with the change of gradient from steep to vertical, was no longer able to hold onto him without being pulled in himself. Certain that they were about to be pulled jointly to their deaths Yates cut the rope. Now certain that Simpson was dead he descended quickly and unhappily on his own.

Simpson, instead, had survived this second fall perched precariously on an ice bridge inside the crevasse. Without the strength to haul himself out and knowing now that he had been abandoned he decided to use his climbing kit to descend further into his own tomb and struck lucky. Further down he encountered a second bridge, this time leading horizontally to an exit on the mountainside.

An extraordinary journey down the mountain now began with Simpson crawling and falling, semi-conscious and in terrible agony, on a three day journey to the base camp. By the time he made it he was very close to death. Around the time Simpson appeared Yates and a colleague were clearing away the camp and were about to begin the journey to the nearest settlement - an almost unbelievable further two days down the valley, such is the remoteness of the Siula Grande. Simpson arrived among the tents just in time.

It's a great read. The last quarter, the terrible crawling descent, I read utterly unable to put it down. Cruelly and grippingly, as the gradient became easier and he hourly neared the tents, Simpson in fact came closer to death, such was the depletion of his physical and mental resources. And, satisfyingly, instead of writing "and then I reached the camp and all was well - The End" he briefly describes in the last few pages his long and painful journey back to the capital, Lima, and his hospitalisation there. An epilogue tells us that Simpson has since had six operations and is still climbing mountains.

It's also uncompromising, in that there is little attempt to explain the jargon of the climbing business. The different surfaces and geography of the mountain, the many different grades of ice they encounter, the different types of kit they're carrying - all are crucial to the telling of the story - but I'd be lying if I said I understood even a half of it. For example, two questions. How can you be dying of thirst if you're surrounded by snow? And how do you recover your kit, your anchor point and so on which is presumably stranded above you, if you've just abseiled down a stretch of mountain? Never mind, I just skimmed the technical stuff and enjoyed the story.

Right at the end of the book Simpson says something along the lines of "however painful readers may think these experiences were this book falls far short of articulating just how dreadful it was". Which is rather an unsophisticated way, almost a lame way, to finish off. But also rather touching and very human and somehow appropriate.