Touching the Void

Remember the film Touching the Void where Simon Yates cuts the rope holding Joe Simpson with a broken leg at the other end?
 
It is one of those epic moments in real life mountain drama and now in film history.
 
 
What would you have done in a similar situation? Well, I wondered how Simon  ( see extra photo) would handle it in his lecture in the Albert Hall, Stirling,  part of his  book tour in Scotland.
 
 
I expected it to be the grand climax to the evening talk. Instead it came up very early on and he dealt with it in a very matter-of-fact manner.
 
“ I had a choice,” he said. “Either I do nothing and we both die or cut the rope.”
 
So he reached in his bag, got the knife and cut.
Simpson plunged into a crevice yet miraculously managed to escape, despite a broken leg, and three days later made it to base camp.
 
It’s a story that has  become a mountaineering legend.
 
Today Simon is still known as “the rope-cutter” though it happened thirty years ago in the Peruvian Andes and he has gone on to has many more mountaineering  adventures.
 
Next week he is off to Greenland.
 

Well, todays blip had to be about mountains- this is sunset over Ben Lomond.