what's Simon Yates up to?

[girlclimber]

all this talk of Joe Simpson has made me wonder about Simon Yates, is he still mountaineering, putting up more awesome routes?

[cj001f]

all this talk of Joe Simpson has made me wonder about Simon Yates, is he still mountaineering, putting up more awesome routes?

Yes, and yes. Last year (late '02?) he came out with "The Flame of Adventure" a book describing his recent exploits.

[texplorer]

On the Letterman show last night I heard Simpson say that Simon's wife had just had two miscarriages and that they were currently not on exactly friendly terms.

[fern]

I think Simon Yates is a guest at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival this year (late February).

[slothrop]

How come they're not speaking to each other anymore?

[pindude]

There's some insight to be gained by this NYT review.

[Rodchester]

Can you cut and paste that insight info for us?

 

[pindude]

The New York Times

January 18, 2004

You Think That Other Mountain Was Cold?

By BRUCE BARCOTT

 

OT long ago I asked a friend who climbs mountains for a living to name his favorite climbing movies. He paused. "Man, they're all so awful," he said. "It'd be easier to give you a list that started at bad and went down to very, very bad."

 

When movies meet mountains, bad cinema results. Consider "Vertical Limit" (2000), which finds mountaineering so dull that it adds nitroglycerin into the mix. Or "Cliffhanger" (1993), the Sylvester Stallone vehicle propelled by evildoers and stolen loot. The 1997 television adaptation of Jon Krakauer's classic Everest book, "Into Thin Air," proved so unwatchable that the rescued climbers probably outnumbered the audience by the end.

 

The singular exception remains "The Eiger Sanction," Clint Eastwood's 1975 spy thriller set on the north face of the Eiger, a sheer Swiss alp that is one of climbing's most deadly proving grounds. Mountaineers revere the film, which was released on DVD last year, because in the third act Mr. Eastwood climbs the Eiger himself. The action was so real that a falling boulder killed one of the movie's climbing crew on the second day of shooting. What makes "The Eiger Sanction" respected by mountaineers also makes it compelling to the rest of us: the actors didn't act; they climbed. That, it turned out, made a pretty good movie.

 

It's only taken three decades to make another one. In "Touching the Void," which is to open Friday in New York and Feb. 6 in Los Angeles, Kevin Macdonald has stitched together elements of documentary and dramatic re-enactment to create a film that should satisfy both moviegoers and the crampon crowd. Mr. Macdonald, who won an Academy Award for "One Day in September" (2000), his documentary about the 1972 attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, did it by employing the Eastwood rule — put the climbers on the rock.

 

"Touching the Void" tells the true story of a harrowing climb that has become part of mountaineering legend. Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, two young, fit, cocky British climbers, set out in the spring of 1985 to scale the unclimbed west face of Siula Grande, a 20,800-foot peak in the Peruvian Andes. Previous parties had attempted its near-vertical wall of ice and rock and failed. "My feeling was, well, we'll just do it," Mr. Simpson says in the film. "We're better."

 

After a two-day hike from the nearest road, the climbers made camp with Richard Hawking, a new friend they'd met in a Lima flophouse. Mr. Hawking wasn't a climber, but Mr. Simpson and Mr. Yates invited him along for company and to guard their tents while they climbed. For his part, Mr. Hawking just wanted to see the Andes up close.

 

The climbers made the summit in three days. Soon after beginning their descent, Mr. Simpson fell and broke his leg, the impact driving his shinbone into the knee with a sickening crunch. With no way to summon help, Mr. Yates began lowering Mr. Simpson down the mountain one 300-foot rope length at a time. Whenever the rope ran out, Mr. Simpson dug into the steep ridge face and waited for Mr. Yates to climb down. Then they repeated the process. In the dark of night, Mr. Yates accidentally lowered Mr. Simpson off a cliff. Dangling above a seemingly bottomless crevasse, Mr. Simpson could neither climb the rope nor reach the cliff wall.

 

Mr. Yates held the rope for nearly an hour. The constant pressure slowly eroded his anchor. "I was being pulled off," he later recalled. "I slipped a few inches. Stamping my feet deep into the slope halted the movement. God! I had to do something!"

 

What he did is still debated around cookstoves and base camps 18 years later. Mr. Yates took out a knife and cut the rope.

 

Mr. Simpson not only survived to tell the tale, he told it extraordinarily well. "Touching the Void," the book he wrote partly to exonerate Mr. Yates in the eyes of the climbing world, became a surprise best seller in England. Water-warped copies can now be found in climbing huts all over the world.

 

Movie producers optioned the book soon after its publication, in 1988. But nobody could figure out how to make it. "The problem is, most of the book is a monologue," Mr. Macdonald said by telephone from his home in London. "It looks like an action adventure story, but actually it's very interior and psychological."

 

Mr. Macdonald, 36, thought its moral and philosophical questions might speak to a nonclimbing audience. But moving the story to film was difficult. There were not enough firsthand images to support a documentary and not enough opportunities for dialogue to support a drama. The climbers were alone through most of the ordeal. "There are ways around it," Mr. Macdonald said. " `Cast Away' did it by having Tom Hanks talk to a volleyball."

 

Mr. Macdonald's solution was to combine drama and documentary. He filmed young actors re-enacting the climb, then cut in contemporary interviews with Mr. Simpson, Mr. Yates and Mr. Hawking. The outcome is an existential drama straight out of Beckett. The jug-eared, happy-go-lucky Mr. Yates agonizes over his decision to cut the rope. The intense, ambitious Mr. Simpson confronts his own atheism and struggles to live even when there seems no point. Mr. Hawking, the outside observer, is a one-man Greek chorus.

 

In preparing to film "Touching the Void," Mr. Macdonald screened previous mountain movies and noted all the ways they could go wrong. "The crevasse in `Vertical Limit' doesn't even look cold," he said. The two films that impressed him were "Eiger Sanction" and Werner Herzog's "Scream of Stone" (1991), about two climbers battling to notch the first ascent of Cerro Torre, a terrifying granite spire in Argentina. It isn't much as drama, but its final reel contains some of the most breathtaking climbing sequences ever shot.

 

The Herzog film highlights the quandary of every mountain-movie director: whether to hire climbers to act or actors to climb. Mr. Herzog cast the great Bavarian freeclimber Stefan Glowacz as his leading man. He climbed spectacularly, acted woodenly.

 

Mr. Macdonald decided to cast actors who could climb. That ruled out established stars — not that his $2.7 million budget could have accommodated them.

 

After a long search he found Brendan Mackey and Nicholas Aaron, two British actors who "knew about rock, weren't scared of heights and were very keen to do it," Mr. Macdonald said.

 

The crew decamped to the Swiss town of Grindelwald (where "Eiger" was filmed), trekked into the Alps and shot the climbing and crevasse sequences during the worst local snowstorm in 10 years. Mr. Macdonald spent weeks tossing Mr. Mackey (as Simpson) and Mr. Aaron (as Yates) down steep slopes and dangling them in crevasses. "I kept saying to them: `Don't act. Just do it,' " Mr. Macdonald said.

 

The European Alps couldn't entirely stand in for Siula Grande, though. To get authentic shots, Mr. Macdonald left the actors home and took Mr. Simpson and Mr. Yates, along with a few crew members, to Peru. Even with a stripped-down crew, it took 70 donkeys and seven porters to haul cameras and gear to the mountain's base. Once they got there, the psychological burden nearly overwhelmed Mr. Simpson.

 

"We asked Joe to stand in for himself on a number of shots," Mr. Macdonald said. "It was a little strange, Joe playing an actor playing Joe. But he agreed to put on his costume, including a brace around his leg, and walk up a valley while we filmed from half a mile away. He was all alone out there and had an intense flashback. It was as if he was back in 1985 — that the intervening 18 years were just a fantasy and he'd woken up on the rocks and hadn't been saved."

 

Mr. Yates had no similar moment, but the return stirred intense emotions. Although Mr. Simpson has always defended him, in climbing circles Mr. Yates has never shaken his notoriety as the Man Who Cut the Rope, and the return to Siula drained him of his characteristic good humor. "It was hard for him to be back there," Mr. Macdonald recalled. "There were days when Simon wasn't talking to Joe or me or any of the crew."

 

Shortly after the trip, Mr. Yates declined to participate further in the documentary. "I think he's fed up with the story and wants to move on," Mr. Macdonald said. "Which you can understand. I think it's haunted his life."

 

Mr. Simpson and Mr. Yates continue to climb — separately. Mr. Simpson has written five more books; he is one of mountaineering's most popular authors and public speakers. Mr. Yates operates an adventure travel company in northern England. His first American book, "The Flame of Adventure," was published two years ago. As for Mr. Macdonald, he had known nothing about mountain climbing before reading "Touching the Void."

 

"One of the things that attracted me to the book," he said, "was how terrifying this sort of mountaineering seemed. I thought that once I saw it up close, I'd overcome that fear and want to do it. But having spent time in the mountains, I now think they're more crazy than I did before."

[Rodchester]

Thanks Pindude...U DA MAN

[pindude]

Thanks Pindude...U DA MAN

 

Timing is everything.

[sobo]

As always, pindude comes through...