#16 - Touching the Void

What an incredible story, as anyone who has seen the documentary knows, Touching the Void tells the tale of two men, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who summited the West Face of the 6344m Siula Grande in the Peruvian Alps.

During their descent, Simpson slipped, then fell, and broke his leg. Faced with the impossible, Yates began lowering his climbing partner down the mountain using their ropes. In extreme amounts of pain, Simpson's almost down when he slips right over a crevasse. Faced with himself being dragged over the edge, Simon cuts the rope. And then suffers massive amounts of guilt for doing so, even though, truly, he didn't have any choice.

Miraculously, Joe climbs out of the crevasse, crawls almost back to base camp, where Simon finds him, and ensures that he gets out of there safely, but barely alive.

I love stories about climbers, granted I've only ever read Into Thin Air, but I've watched numerous documentaries on Mount Everest and even interviewed Peter Hillary, and I'm consistently amazed at how much can go wrong. How people willingly know that much can go wrong but still push themselves to both the limits of their own bodies and the limits of the Earth, subject to all the whims and fancies of the weather, the elements, and the impossible battle with altitude.

Maybe because I know I could never climb a mountain. The closest I ever came was living in Banff and hiking to the top of Sulphur Mountain, which was incredible for me.

The documentary is good too, don't get me wrong, but Simpson's an amazing storyteller, and even if you're not remotely interested in climbing or climbers or mountains or tragedy or, well, you get the picture, you should read this book anyway.

From Touching the Void:

"If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious -- a bit more dangerous."

Isn't that a solid observation for life in general, never mind risking life and limb to climb to the top of a mountain?