SIMON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Thinker]

Nice write up in a SLC paper about Simon and his local appearances. Not sure I'm willing to part with $50 just to see the guy, though. Some photos in the article. They want you to register....feel free to use my bogus account. name: noway99 PW: noway99

 

Climber moving 'Beyond the Void'

 

Simon Yates, known as the guy who 'cut the rope,' brings memorable tales of adventures to Ogden

 

Wed, Jan 19, 2005 Larger Text Smaller Text

 

By BRYCE PETERSEN JR.

Standard-Examiner staff

 

Twenty years later, to his unending astonishment, Simon Yates is still living in the shadow of his first big expedition, a first ascent of the west face of Siula Grande in Peru. His participation in the 2003 acclaimed docudrama "Touching the Void," which was released to theaters last year, didn't help.

 

"I don't know how the press was in America, but it was bizarre in Britain," Yates said. "I was reading that I'd had a nervous breakdown (during filming) and that I was suffering from repressed emotions."

 

Yates laughs at that, saying that his outbursts were based on director Kevin McDonald's disrespect of the climbing team -- McDonald laughed in the face of a climber who told him that descending to base camp and returning would demoralize the climbers, Yates said -- and "nasty" interviewing techniques.

 

"I'd actually been back to the base camp in 1998," Yates said. "If there were any repressed emotions, I think they'd have come out there."

 

The trip in 1998 was for an attempt on the west face of Siula Chico, a neighbor to Siula Grande.

 

He stayed at the same camp where, 13 years earlier, returning from the top of Siula Grande, he had said, "Joe's dead." It was the same base camp where he waited, inexplicably, for three days. The same base camp where, the morning Yates planned to leave, Joe -- back from the grave -- shouted Yates' name in the foggy pre-dawn.

 

"I had a very nice time," Yates said of his 1998 return. That wasn't the case five years later with a full film crew and a director who had never climbed before.

 

Yates credits "a contract and some money, to be brutally frank" with inducing him to participate in the film. In a recent commentary published in the British Alpine Journal, Yates took issue with the director's attitude toward the climbers, along with "cynical" editing and two inaccuracies. (He didn't lower Simpson "at such breakneck speed," and criticism of his rope-cutting was limited to a few isolated climbers, not "intense criticism from the climbing community" as the film states.)

 

 

Photo courtesy Simon Yates

 

British climber Simon Yates stands at the summit of Monte Frances, Tierra del Fuego, in 2003.

 

Yates is the man who, in 1985, cut the rope that held his partner, Joe Simpson, who had broken his leg on the way down from the first-ever ascent of the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes.

 

The rest is history: Simpson dropped into a crevasse; Yates, believing him dead, continued his descent alone; Simpson found his way out of the crevasse, willed himself down the mountain, survived miraculously and wrote a best-selling book called "Touching the Void," the basis for last year's film.

 

Yates offers no apologies for his decision to cut the rope -- both would probably have died if he hadn't; Simpson was dangling hopelessly and Yates was unable to lower him farther -- but he does admit both of the inexperienced climbers made "an awful lot of mistakes" on the climb: too little fuel to melt snow into water; too little food; long days that ended with setting up a bivouac in the dark.

 

"We were exhausted . . . I don't think, with the experience that I now have, that the accident would ever have happened," he said.

 

For Simpson, the experience was life-changing -- he very nearly died and was out of the sport for two years recovering from his injuries. But he has never criticized any of Yates' decisions on the climb.

 

For Yates, it was just part of the "steep learning curve" of mountaineering. He came back from Peru with minor frostbite on a couple of fingers and more knowledge to apply to future trips. The next year, he was climbing 20,000-foot peaks in Pakistan.

 

Both climbers went on to complete dozens of epic ascents, but never together. Yates said that's just coincidence: By the time Simpson was back on the mountain, Yates had other partners and other plans. The two have done some minor climbing together and remain friends.

 

He has spent the last 20 years exploring remote peaks and ranges in the Himalayas, Pakistan, Alaska, Russia and South America. Tonight at Weber State University, in a presentation called "Beyond the Void," Yates will recount some of his most memorable experiences over the last two decades.

 

Many of Yates' early expeditions are detailed in his 2002 book, "The Flame of Adventure," published by The Mountaineers. "Beyond the Void" will start there and follow the highlights of Yates' career, including last summer's trip to Pakistan.

 

Pakistan

 

Yates has made several trips to Pakistan, climbing mostly in the rugged Karakorum Range.

 

On one trip, Yates stayed in a town where the drinking water was also used as a communal wash basin and as a toilet by livestock. He contracted dysentery, which made for some memorable moments, graphically and hilariously described in "Flame," on the successful first ascent of Leyla.

 

"I was ill on that trip, but it didn't stop me climbing," Yates said.

 

Once he returned to England, Yates spent a humiliating week in the hospital just to get a diagnosis he already knew and a prescription for some pills he already had. It took him a year to get over that.

 

"My hair stopped growing for months," he said. "Saved money on razors."

 

On his latest trip, he was introduced, conspiratorially in the rugged mountains of Pakistan, to Osama.

 

On the day's walk from the nearest village, past herds of yaks to the base of 22,000-foot Hispar Sar last September, the porters were anxious to introduce the climbers to a guy they called Osama.

 

As it turns out, "He wasn't the world's most-wanted terrorist; he was actually a 14-year-old yak herder," Yates said.

 

That trip also illustrates the hazards of camping perched on a high cliff. After Siula Grande, Yates has always packed enough food. But the Hispar Sar attempt was a hungry one, after a partner's "fumble in the gloom" lost most of the food on the first bivouac.

 

Tierra del Fuego

 

A few of Yates' most recent adventures have taken place in the Cordillera Darwin Range, accessible only by boat from the world's southernmost city, Ushuaia, Argentina. The peaks are not high -- not by Weber County standards, much less Himalayan standards -- topping out at just more than

8,000 feet.

 

But they are rugged and virtually untouched.

 

"It is just pristine. The mountains, hardly any of them have been climbed," Yates said.

 

Ascents of Monte Francis, for instance, are so uncommon that they have always occurred on anniversaries. The second ascent was 30 years after the first, and the third was 10 years later, in 2003, by a party that included Yates.

 

Another, Monte Ada, was first climbed in 2001. Yates and his group named the peak after the boat that sailed them to the range, one of the most remote outside of the polar regions.

 

Besides its remoteness, the range has other ways of keeping people out: 3,000-foot faces are common, and glaciers are fast-

moving and especially unpredictable. The latter is helped by extraordinary weather.

 

"The weather's filthy down there," Yates said. "Windy, wild weather systems go through at a very fast rate."

 

At Saturday's fund-raising dinner for Weber Pathways, Yates will speak exclusively on his climbs in the Cordillera Darwin Range.

 

********** LOCAL APPEARANCES

 

Climber Simon Yates will make two local appearances this week. Copies of his books, "Against the Wall" (Vintage, 2004) and "The Flame of Adventure" (Mountaineers Books, 2002), will be available for purchase at both events.

 

* 7 p.m. today, "Beyond the Void," a humorous look at climbing adventures from 20 years of climbing around the world, at the Wildcat Theater on the campus of Weber State University, 3750 Harrison Blvd., Ogden. Tickets are $8.50, $6 for WSU students. Visit the campus Wilderness Recreation Center for tickets or call 626-6373 for information.

 

* 5:30 p.m. Friday, dinner with Simon Yates, at the Timbermine Restaurant, 1701 Park Blvd., Ogden. Tickets are $50, $75 or $100. Proceeds go to Weber Pathways. Call 393-2304 for information and reservations. Yates will present a slide show on his adventures in the Cordillera Darwin Range, accessible only by boat from the world's southernmost city, Ushuaia, Argentina.

[Dru]

I saw his show at VIMFF this time last year, nice pictures but his talk was a 1 hour petty rant on how the maker of Touching the Void had screwed him over.

[Jedi]

I saw his slide last weekend in Keene NY. It lasted a good 2 hours. We paid $10 to see his slide show. He has lived quite an interesting life. I find his dry humor amusing.

Jedi

[Thinker]

$10 is more like it. I'd have sprung that much to see him.