The purpose of the ladders is to convey the searchers to the niches.
Those whom these entice no longer climb simply to get clear of the ground.
— Samuel Beckett
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Foreword by John Middendorf
Preface to the 2012 Edition
Introduction – Playing the System
Crack
1 Fire-Starter
2 Rubble Merchants, Slateheads and Others
3 Lost in the Broccoli Garden
4 A Piece of Driftwood
5 On the Big Stone
6 Bhagirathi Diary
Outside the Asylum
7 Central Tower of Paine: El Regalo de Mwono
8 Paine North Tower: El Caballo de Diablo
9 Just Passing Through
10 The Doctor and the Witch
11 A Game One Climber Played
12 Adrift
13 Hyperborea
14 A Survivor’s Affair
15 Making Castles in the Sand
Deep Players
16 On the Shark’s Fin with Philip Lloyd
17 Accidental Hero – Silvo Karo
18 A Lesson in Healing from Andy Parkin
Author’s Glossary
Notes about the Essays
Plates
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly I would like to thank Maggie Body, my editor, for doing such a fine job with the text. I am also indebted to John Middendorf for honouring me with his Foreword and to Andy Parkin for his wonderfully enigmatic drawings which embellish the text. Then I must thank Harold Wooley for teaching me how to climb and ruining my academic career. I am deeply indebted to Gill Kent for having so much faith in my writing for so long. Thanks too to Gwion Hughes, George Smith, Noel Craine, Jim Perrin and all my other mates for their reading and criticism and Greg Rimmer for his work with my manuscript. The photographic spreads have been strengthened by the contributions of Tony Kay, Bill Hatcher, Iwan Jones, Simon Yates, Ben Wintringham, Ken Wilson, Sean Smith and Alun Hughes, to whom I owe thanks. My earnest thanks must go to Marko Prezelj for his work on the cover photo too which was lost a long time since.
A thank you also to: the MEF and the BMC without whose financial help some of our trips might not have happened; Ben Lyon for his continued support for my pie in the sky schemes; Glenn Robbins for saving my life and Olly Saunders for finding us; Nick Kekus for saving it again and Robert Hester and Nick Burring for coping so well on that awful day; Lochaber and Valley Rescue Teams and the Holyhead lifeboat crew for doing their jobs so faultlessly; all my friends I have lived and climbed with and who have given me the raw material to write about in this book. I would also like to show my gratitude to my parents for letting me be what I wanted to be. Finally, thank you Celia Bull for the love, the laughs, the tears, the support – for sharing the adventure. Cheers Ed, Philip and Teo. My book is dedicated to those times.
This new edition is also dedicated to my father for teaching me the meaning of freedom.
FOREWORD
by JOHN MIDDENDORF
Shortly after Paul Pritchard extended the honour to me of writing the foreword for his book, I had the opportunity to catch up with him for a climb of The Old Man of Hoy, a five-hundred foot sandstone stack on the sea cliffs of the Orkney Islands, a climb which for me has been a lifelong ambition. In fine Scottish weather, a drenching rain and fierce wind, we crouched on tiny stances far off the deck and chatted about the state of affairs. “Bit of a job lately,” he told me of his most recent employment. “Been rappelling down a nuclear processing plant, sweeping out the dust in dark, deep chambers. Haven’t felt well since the work ended.” Paul is a natural story teller and always has an interesting tale, generally told in understated terms. We discussed different climbs around the world that we’ve mutually appreciated, and watched the sea waves pound on the rocky pedestal below us. It was good fun on the Old Man with Paul, terrified as I was after months at a desk, climbing the exposed, wet, and overhanging 5.8 and 5.10 crack pitches. We reached the summit toward dusk and shared the airy perch with dozens of calm puffins, who showed us their dance on the rims of the stack with magnificent hummingbird-like flight in the stiff ocean winds. I reflected on Paul’s book and on the emotive side of climbing, and how an essay of such moments is a treat for the times when we are bound to the reality of terra firma, towards which we soon began to descend.
Although I had never before climbed with him, I was nevertheless not surprised when I noticed Paul’s calm nerve on the stone. He belongs to an imaginative and talented group of individuals who I have had the pleasure to meet all over the world; people who share little in terms of cultural backgrounds, yet who have a common bond in their eclectic pursuit of a particular aspect of climbing. It is a group of folks who have honed a bold climbing style and who share an interest in the same thin strips of rock rearing up the most magnificent and giant rock walls on our planet. It is people who, in Paul’s own words, share the experience of “the wind and the waiting” in the mountains. It is interesting how climbers with diverse languages, meeting perhaps in the Mountain Room Bar in Yosemite or maybe in a remote campsite on a tributary of the Baltoro Glacier, will discuss in detail each feature of a particular unclimbed line on a mountain which is thousands of miles away. The discussions share a common thread: a desire to find a wild place where climbing is the most intense and pure.
Paul’s own realisations of such desire are on some of the world’s biggest rock faces: Meru, the Central Tower of Paine, El Capitan, Mt Asgard. He captures the common essence of these climbs in stories of his adventures of bold climbs, long climbs, cold climbs, and insane climbs. In fine British tradition of pushing the limits of human endeavour on difficult rock routes in the mountains, Paul’s climbs add to a rich history of British climbing which includes the original ascent of Trango Tower in 1976 by Martin Boysen, Mo Anthoine, Joe Brown and Malcolm Howells, the alpine-style push up the Golden Pillar of Spantik in 1987 by Mick Fowler and Victor Saunders, and the bold foray on Cave Man on the Cuerno de Paine by Twid Turner and Louise Thomas in 1993. Many of these climbers cut their teeth on the cliffs of North Wales and wild sea cliffs of Gogarth on routes of unmatched on-sight first ascent standards, and later took their bold techniques into the mountains.
The routes at Gogarth have always fascinated me – many times in my twenty-five years of climbing, I have seen the fear in climbers’ eyes while talking about their hands-on experience with Gogarth routes. Preserved from the modern trend of grid-bolting due to the general rejection of bolts on the sea cliffs (an attitude enhanced possibly from the fact that any bolts would corrode instantly in the saline sea air) and safe from the current view that regards difficulty solely by its number, Gogarth has been the arena of several generations of the world’s boldest routes. Paul’s route Super Calabrese on the Red Wall, which he climbed in 1986, represents the extreme of ground-up climbing. The Gogarth guide says of the Red Wall, “This superb orange wall gives open climbing of a serious and often precarious nature. None of the routes should be treated without respect, the situation contributing its fair share of intimidation.” In the story Lost in the Broccoli Garden, Paul reflects after a Gogarth pitch, “I wasn’t experiencing the anticipated satisfaction of completing such a frightening pitch. It was numbness.” The guidebook lists the route with the notation, “a contender for the poorest belay on Gogarth”. He explains the delicate experience of finding oneself in a crazy location, dependent only on one’s mettle and driven by adrenaline, and finding the body and mind take over for the climb.
Paul Pritchard’s tales are not only of the extre
me intensity of bold routes, but also of the essential nature of the lifestyle. The book begins with “Fire Starter” a background of his childhood and the political and social atmosphere in which he grew up. The stories give insight to the motives of climbing extraordinary climbs, and tell of Paul and his mates as youths getting into the vertical in a world without limits, rife with lawlessness and little regard for personal safety, and with an immutable code of retaining the purest climbing style. He tells of a life of irreverence and a tad of decadence, that seeks the experience of utter dependence on craftiness and motivation. These stories link the common theme of the spirit’s search for a purity of desire.
Deep Play is a collection of reflections on people and places, and of stories of deaths of close friends, and the experience of a brush with mortality. The author’s sensitivity in seeing the true nature of his friends is captured spot-on with tales of other climbers: José Pepe Chaverri, Silvo Karo, Philip Lloyd, Teo Plaza, and others. The book is an analysis of a climber’s mind, with the full realm of emotion. It’s about sharing with new friends, and climbing new things and being in new places, on adventures where climbing the mountain is only half of the experience.
It is a rare and inspiring thing that such tales of intensity, joy and suffering have been put onto paper, rather than the usual event of the magic being lost via a rough translation from mind to paper, or mere lack of documentation before the essence leaves the consciousness. Thank you, Paul, for reminding us about that magic, and congratulations for your finest timeless testpiece yet.
JOHN MIDDENDORF
San Francisco, 1997
PREFACE TO THE 2012 EDITION
Dossing in The Land of the Midnight Sun, I didn’t give a stuff about how much climbing rocks could teach me. I couldn’t care less that this uncomplicated life would instil in me an unshakeable knowledge that I had my own place and voice in the world. That it would prepare me for the pain to come was but a lagniappe, which would equip me with the presence and will to heal. At that time I felt there were only two things in my life: me and the rock.
However, pertaining to Deep Play, this dedicated existence furnished me with the follow through to realise my dreams. And one such dream was this book. It is only now, from a twenty-first century perspective, that I understand just how important a record of a great era – perhaps the last great era – of British climbing Deep Play is.
The eighties was a unique decade in British climbing: a time of flux. It was a time of economic depression and special was the fact that it was the first depression truly buoyed up by a welfare system. For climbing culture the eighties didn’t just mean shit jumpers, bad barnets and god-awful tights. It was an age floating between more prosperous times. The seventies was notable as a climbing superstar culture with big names such as Doug Scott, Dougal Haston, Alex MacIntyre and Chris Bonington, who undertook major sponsored expeditions, the likes of which had not been seen since the first ascent of Everest – Barclays Bank put up one hundred thousand pounds for the Everest South West Face Expedition in 1975. The nineties saw the rise of the sharp-cut professional: Houlding, MacLeod, Cool and Emmett, an era which has continued to this day.
In a sense, climbing, at least for the adventure, lost its way in the nineties. However, the on-sight bold ascent has returned in the last few years with climbers on-sighting the ‘headpoints’ of the 1980s and making audacious first ascents on rock and in the Mountains. Dave MacLeod’s Echo Wall and many of Leo Houlding’s ascents on rock and in the mountains are examples of this. However, it is American Dean Potter’s B.A.S.E. solo of Deep Blue Sea on the North Face of the Eiger that really does show the future of climbing.
In Deep Play I mention the economic hardship, the huge rates of unemployment and the vast well of creativity that came with it. I also mention the distaste: some people simply felt that we should get jobs. With hindsight it is interesting to note that lots of artists made good in that time. Indeed, celebrated author Hanif Kureshi, who garnered a CBE in 2008, began his artistic career on the dole in the 1980s. One thing is clear: all the UK climbers of the eighties have one person to thank for giving them this golden opportunity: Margaret Thatcher.
As for my book: there are moments of naive pomposity within its pages. Yet far from being embarrassed about this, I believe these moments reveal an honesty that I would have trouble finding in my writing nowadays.
I opened the book with, “I am definitely a climber who writes.” The judges at the Boardman Tasker Prize thought I was being swell headed; in fact, I remember John Porter translating my statement to, “I was born to write about climbing.” I simply and innocently assumed too much from my readers whom I thought would have read their Drummond and their Child, who it is said of both that; it is not clear whether they are writers who climb or climbers who write. So the statement was my way of supplicating myself to these great writers.
Finally, I stand by the name of the book even though it could be seen to be self-indulgent. Eighteenth Century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who coined the term Deep Play, describes it as a game with stakes so high that no rational person would engage in it. Yet most climbers would describe themselves as rational. Wouldn’t you? It is precisely because your life matters to you, not the contrary, that you take risks. When you go out to climb a new route and publicly reveal such stakes there is an awful lot to lose. You risk your status, your pride, your dignity, your masculinity (I can only speak for males on this motivation) … but most of all your life.
PAUL PRITCHARD
Tasmania
September 2012
INTRODUCTION
PLAYING THE
SYSTEM
I am definitely a climber who writes. I’ve always written about what I’ve done and how I felt about myself and those I went with. I have come home from trips with battered books full of scribblings, half of it illegible, self-indulgent babble. At home I have mulled things over, added reflection to the gut reaction of my diaries, and somehow ended up with finished pieces. But the rock has always come first.
Illness on return from trips has allowed me the time to create and smashed bones have also been kind to me, holding me back from my normal unquestioning frenzy of activity and forcing me to sit and think. Indeed I would not have found the time to put these writings together had I not suffered a broken back in Scotland. I used to be so single-minded. Girlfriends and great things I could have done were left behind as I kept searching for the perfect climb. Then, after I fell at Gogarth and momentarily died, I had so many questions to ask the night. I couldn’t make any sense of it all and I began writing as an exorcism. At first I thought that moment of drowning felt too good and this terrified me but, as I wrote, I began to make some twisted sense of it all.
Most importantly, the trauma of the events which are documented in this book have helped me to grow and have taught me valuable, very personal lessons. Falling at Gogarth revealed to me my position within humankind; as unimportant as anyone else. That insight allows me to treat all others as equal to myself more readily. There I also learned that death can be painless, yes, but more than that, utterly sublime. This simple knowledge has helped me reconcile the sad thoughts of friends who have died in pain – Ed and Philip and Teo – though it also revealed to me that death really was the end and that there is no time to waste in this short term that we have.
Joe Tasker and Menlove Edwards are two people who have inspired me to put pen to paper, Tasker for his honesty and Edwards for his sensitivity. I will never forget being shocked, as I first read Savage Arena, at the vivid description of the arguments which Tasker and Boardman had on their ascents, arguments which many climbers would try to hide for fear of causing offence and embarrassment. And the admission of the fact that their motivations often came from the less admirable corners of their psyche. What can I say about Edwards? Only that, for me, he transforms his insight into nature and the society around him onto paper better than any climber I know of. Nothing or no one seemed able to disguise anything from
him. I admit to wanting to emulate their traits but, I hope, I keep my own style.
This is not a simple autobiography. I have tried to give a whole image of the existence and psyche of a climber from my generation, for I do not see myself as so unique within it, though of course A Game One Climber Played and other moments in the book are very personal to me. This is why some of the chapters appear altered from what has been published in magazines. A magazine that readers dip into, not knowing what kind of excitement they are looking for, and so only happening across a piece of your life, is not the place for such intimate subjects. In a book, on the other hand, readers must go out and find, already knowing that they want to learn about you or read what you have to say.
The rock climber who learns his craft and then makes the transition to the mountains is less common now than in previous eras and so my stories of trips aren’t perhaps so typical of my genre. But there are a number of us who, even though we might not have experienced it first hand, have roots in the past, have a great respect for the old pioneers and the evolution of our climbing lives would seem to mirror theirs to some extent.
My generation of climbers, the ones who began making their impact in the eighties, had their own peculiarities that set them apart from other generations. These differences were a result of social circumstances in the UK at the time. We had time on our hands and an opportunity to forfeit the worker’s life and just go climbing. Some called us selfish. It was a world which produced a crop of British climbers in the early to mid-eighties who showed the world how it was done. I wouldn’t be so bold as to rank myself alongside eighties sport climbers – Myles, Moon, or others who were of that new ‘leisure class’ – but in my own way I feel I’ve given something to climbing in Britain. I have threaded lines up mountains and sea cliffs and shown others where to go. It wasn’t all selfish on my part; I have created steep, mind-testing challenges for climbers to stretch themselves out on. Asgard’s velvet smooth wall, Paine’s mile-long knife-blade crack, Meru’s Shark Fin I needed to try. They were only imaginable for me after a decade of living for the rock every day, blowing off everything else. My need to get stronger, to use all my time struggling towards my dreams, even though I had no private wealth, is what some found disagreeable.
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