Joe simpson mountaineer interview
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Interviewed by Jon Doran
- Joe Simpson answers the door of his isolated Peak District cottage with a scowl. He is an imposing man, six-foot two, 14 stone, a little like Sylvester Stallone but without the disarming softness. Simpson's heavily-muscled torso ripples beneath a Jonathan Cape promotional tee-shirt.
Whether the tee-shirt is a statement, I don't know and I don't ask, but it makes a point. With two highly acclaimed autobiographical books and a novel to his name, Simpson is probably one of the most readable, accessible and successful 'climbing' authors around. The 'climbing' bit is in inverted commas, because Simpson's appeal and readership goes beyond the mountaineering audience. Cape, moreover, are an established publishing house, with a stable of literary figures, many of whom have never languished in a Peruvian crevasse or dragged themselves for days over rocky moraine in order to write their first
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Joe Simpson recounts one of mountaineering's greatest survival stories
First it was the stuff of folklore: a tale about two British climbers – 25-year-old Joe Simpson and 21-year-old Simon Yates – who, in 1985, became the first people to scale the West Face of the 6,344m Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. It was a moment of triumph that quickly became a living nightmare.
On the descent, Simpson plunged down an ice cliff, shattering his leg. As night fell, and with a storm rapidly closing in, they were forced to continue in the dark, separated by just 45m of rope and with no way of communicating. When the injured Simpson was inadvertently lowered over a cliff, Yates hung on for more than an hour before making a devastating decision: he cut the rope, sending his companion plunging to certain death.
But Simpson survived, and four days later he crawled into base camp. Three years after that, he gave his account in a best-selling book, Touching the Void, which was adapted into a documentary in 2003 and a play in 2018. It’s a startling case study of a man facing death, but one that’s absolutely about living.
“Would I have cut the rope? In Simon’s situation, without a doubt,” Simpson tells The Red Bulletin. “My only criticism is that it took him more than an hour
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