Meet the British mountaineer chasing small adventures after a life-changing stroke

13.11.2023 - 15:55 / nationalgeographic.com

When did your thirst for adventure begin?
Adventure has been with me my whole life. I spent my earliest years on the island nation of Fiji, where my parents, who were themselves very adventurous people, were working at the time. They once recalled seeing me wandering out into the shallow ocean, lost in my own private quest. Me being a toddler, this was obviously quite alarming for them, and even when we returned to England, the only way they could stop me from putting myself in danger was to quite literally tie me to a rope. Had they not, I would have been off scrambling up some rock face.

What attracted you to mountaineering?
I’d always dreamt of climbing big, snowy mountains, but with the highest peaks in distant countries, I took up the forms of adventure that were available to me. I grew up hiking across the North Yorkshire Moors before getting into caving at university. In the UK, many caves still haven’t been surveyed, so I had the opportunity to explore completely unmapped terrain, which then gave me the confidence to go out and find new climbing routes in the Scottish mountains.

It was the punk era and I was highly influenced by the idea that you could just go out, learn three chords and release a single — it made me realise that I didn’t need anyone’s permission. After learning to climb a Scottish Grade 5 — a difficult route involving vertical ice — I went straight to the Himalayas. I didn’t want to spend my whole life waiting.

What would you say has been your most challenging moment as a climber
Probably my first lead up a piece of vertical ice — a climb called The Pumpkin in the Scottish Highlands. It was very early in my career, and not only did I have no idea what I was doing, but I’d also managed to bring completely inadequate equipment, my bendy boots and outdated, straight-shafted ice axes being the worst offenders. When leading, you have place screws in the wall and clip into them as you go up, while the belayer controls the safety rope. I had some ice screws on my harness but no way of hammering them in, so I just sort of pressed them into the melting ice in a rather pathetic way and shouted down to my companion that I was stuck. I pressed on and eventually made it to a section where the ice had completely melted away, allowing me to put in stable screws and belay my friend, but it was touch and go for a while.

What about your most euphoric moment?
Many years later, my friend Paul Figg and I had made it to the summit of Alaska’s Mount Hunter [Begguya in the language of the native Dena’ina people] using a new route on the east face, the base of which we’d reached via ski plane. Because of a lack of airspace, the plane couldn’t come back to pick us up, so we were forced to descend over the