Touching The Void

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Simpson could not climb up the rope, Yates could not pull him back up, they could not communicate and, although they could not know this, the cliff was too high for Simpson to be lowered down. Because the difficult terrain and the poor weather conditions prevented rapid progress with the descent, the pair had to spend a night in a snow hole on the ridge.

Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry. In Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival, English climber Joe Simpson offers an account of surviving a nearly fatal climb of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes.

They remained in this position for some time (Yates estimates in excess of one and a half hours [2]), until it was obvious to Yates that his unbelayed stance, merely a seat dug into the near vertical snow slope without any fixed anchors, was gradually collapsing as he began to be pulled downwards in 'small jerky steps'. Because Yates was sitting higher up the mountain, he could not see nor hear Simpson to fully assess the situation; he could only feel that Simpson had all his weight on the rope. They had triumphantly reached the summit, when a horrific accident mid-descent forced one friend to leave another for dead. When he regained consciousness, he discovered that the rope had been cut and concluded that Yates had probably survived but would presume that he was dead.

Touching the Void is a 1988 book by Joe Simpson, recounting his and Simon Yates's near fatal descent after climbing the 6,344-metre (20,814ft) peak Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. From there, Simpson spent three days without food and with almost no water, crawling and hopping five miles (8km) back to their base camp. The system worked; Yates lowered Simpson approximately 3000 feet by this method and the pair felt they were regaining control of the situation estimating that they had almost descended to the relative safety of the glacier.In a fortunate coincidence, although Yates had no choice as to where in the rope's 300-foot (91m) length he made the cut (it happened to be in the middle) it left each climber a sufficient length of rope to extricate themselves from their overnight positions. The two young and headstrong men choose to climb the daunting West Face of the 20,813 foot Siula Grande in the Cordillera Huayhuash mountain range. In 1985, 25-year-old Joe Simpson and another British climber, Simon Yates, 21, were climbing the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes when Simpson fell and badly broke his leg. He cannot climb up to the crevasse’s entrance so he has to lower himself deeper to find another exit.

Alex Honnold is an exception on various levels, but I was always struck by how selfish serious mountaineering is: you might love it, you might get killed and you have accepted that risk, but it’s your loved ones that pay. Exhausted and suffering from hypothermia and frostbite, Yates dug himself a snow cave to wait out the storm.

From 2000 to 2003, he attempted to climb the North Face of Eiger in Switzerland six times but had to abort due to bad weather conditions. Yates cut the rope not knowing how far Simpson was from the base of the cliff; Simpson plummeted down the cliff and into a deep crevasse. Yates realized the situation that Simpson had been in and that he must have fallen into the crevasse when the rope was cut.