Joe Simpson · 1988 · survival

Joe Simpson's 1988 account of what happened on Siula Grande in June 1985. He and Simon Yates made the first ascent of the West Face, and then everything went wrong on the way down. Simpson broke his leg, Yates lowered him into a crevasse and then cut the rope, and Simpson spent three and a half days crawling five miles back to camp.

1. 1
   Lima

   Two young British climbers arrive in Peru with very little money and a plan to climb an unclimbed face - alpine style, no fixed ropes, no support, and nobody but a non-climbing traveller minding the tents.

2. 2
   Base camp

   A tent by a glacial lake below the mountain, and Richard Hawking left behind to watch it - the only other person for miles, and the reason there is anybody at camp at all when Simpson eventually crawls in.

3. 3
   The West Face

   Four and a half days up a 4,500-foot face nobody had climbed, in deteriorating weather - the ascent that made their names, and which takes up rather less of the book than what happens next.

4. 4
   The summit

   They reach 6,344 metres and get about ten minutes of it. The descent by the North Ridge is immediately harder than expected, and they spend the night in a snow hole having eaten and drunk everything they carry.

5. 5
   The North Ridge

   Simpson goes over an ice cliff and lands badly: the tibia driven up through the knee joint. Yates lowers him three hundred feet at a time through a storm, until one lower puts him over an overhang in the dark.

6. 6
   The crevasse

   Yates holds him for over an hour, being dragged off his seat, and then cuts the rope. Simpson falls into a crevasse and does not die - and next morning, instead of climbing up, he lowers himself deeper to find a way out.

7. 7
   The glacier

   Three and a half days crawling and hopping five miles across crevasse fields, moraine and rock, with no food or water, rationing the effort into twenty-minute stretches and following a voice in his head that will not shut up.

8. 8
   Base camp

   He gets in at night, hours before the other two are due to leave, having lost more than a third of his body weight - and Yates, who has spent three days believing he killed him, hears him shouting outside the tents.