Original subtitles

(BREATHING HEAVILY)

(CLAN KING)

(DIGGING)

(WIND HOWLING)

(GRUNTING)

(CRACKLING)

We climb because it's fun

and mainly it was fun.

That's all we ever did.

We were fairly anarchic

and fairly irresponsible

and we didn't give a damn about anyone or anything else.

We just wanted to climb the world and it was brilliant fun.

And...

Every now and then it went wildly wrong.

And then it wasn't.

JOE: When I went to Peru, I was 25, Simon was 21.

But we had done a lot of climbing in the Alps.

SIMON: To climb mountains that have not been climbed before

or a new route to the mountain

which was what my climbing life had been moving towards.

JOE: A friend of ours who'd done an amazing amount of climbing,

in South America, had seen this face in the mid '7.0s.

I think he said it would be a challenging day out.

SIMON: It was the last big mountain face in this range of mountains

that haven't been climbed.

There's a great unknown there.

What's so compelling is stepping into that unknown.

SIMON: It was an isolated spot, two days walk from a road

and the mountains all around seemed very big

compared to the mountains I'd seen in the Alps.

We eventually reached a spot on the approach to Siula Grande.

You couldn't take the donkeys further than this point.

I guess it would be four or five miles from the bottom of the mountains.

We knew Siula Grande was at the back but we didn't see it.

We'd met this lad called Richard Hawking, in Lima.

He'd been travelling on his own,

and I think we said, "Why don't you join us on our trip?"

I think he said he didn't know anything about mountaineering.

I didn't really know what part of Peru I was in

or quite what I was letting myself in for.

We wanted Richard because when we were on the mountain,

if he was at base camp, he could look after our kit.

I got to know Simon quite well.

I don't know whether it was because of his personality

or whether it was because he was more forgiving towards me,

being a non-climber

in that environment.

But I found it very hard to get to know Joe.

JOE: I was much more ambitious about doing it than Simon was.

Siula Grande meant a lot.

We knew a number of expeditions had failed on it.

If no one had tried it wouldn't be the same.

It was the fact that people had tried and failed.

So we knew it was hard.

And my feeling was, "Well, we'll just do it,

"we're better than them."

SIMON: Since the 197.0's

people had been trying to climb mountains in the greater ranges

in what's called alpine style.

And essentially alpine style means, you pack your rucksack

full of all your clothing, food and climbing equipment

and you start off from a base camp

and try and climb the mountain in a single push.

You don't fix a line of ropes up it beforehand,

you don't have a set of camps

that you stock and come up and back down from.

That's the purest style,

and that's the style that Joe and I had climbed Siula Grande.

JOE: It's a very committing way of climbing

because you have no line of retreat.

If something goes wrong it can be very serious.

There's no rescue in this, no helicopter rescue,

and there's no other people.

There's no margin for error.

If you get badly hurt, you'll probably die.

(WIND HOWLING)

I hadn't seen it, from this angle and it looked steep.

I sort of thought...

You know, "Christ, it's big."

Looks harder than I thought, than I expected.

But I was excited.

JOE: At the start, doing it, it was brilliant.

This is what we live for.

(EXCLAIMING)

I love the actual movement of climbing.

It's when you're climbing well, it just feels brilliant.

It's like a combination between ballet and gymnastics.

It's that mixture of power and grace.

SIMON: For me mountains are the most beautiful places in the world.

When I go into these places, I feel an amazing sense of space

and an amazing sense of freedom when I get away

from all of the clutter that we have in our world.

JOE: I think we surprised ourselves at the speed

we got up the ice field, it was about 1,000 foot,

and got up to a point where the ice is running through rock bands

and you got vertical cascades.

And we started intricately climbing through these.

(SNIFFING)

The fact that you are tied to your partner,

means that you put an immense amount of trust

in someone else's skill and ability.

But at some point, I was thinking, "God sakes, I'm gonna dead fall here".

"God's sake, don't fall here. "

The rope can be something

that rather than save your life, could kill you.

If your mate falls off and all his gear rips out,

you're dead. You're gonna go with him.

If you're gonna do that sort of climbing, at some point

you're gonna have to rely wholly on your partner.

JOE: We were very pleased at the end of that first day,

we had done a lot of climbing, good climbing.

We were very confident at that point that we should make it.

JOE: At that altitude, you dehydrate enormously.

You have to drink a lot of fluid, four or five litres a day,

and the only way to get it is by melting snow.

(SIZZLING)

SIMON: Everything is so time consuming.

To make a single brew at that altitude takes a long time.

You're perhaps looking at an hour.

So perhaps we didn't brew up as much as we should have done.

But we didn't have an awful lot of spare gas with us either.

There's not a lot of risk in our lives normally now.

And to put an element of risk back into it

takes us out of the humdrum.

In that sense it makes you feel more alive.

JOE: I've never been that high before and it's very strenuous.

Not only is it difficult and unstable,

but your heart is going like nobody's business because of the altitude.

(WIND BLOWING FEROCIOUSLY)

JOE: It had now got very cold indeed.

We were up 20,000, 20,500 feet.

It was windy and it started snowing

and the whole face was pouring with powder-snow avalanches.

SIMON: The snow would actually stick on your clothing.

It would then freeze on you like you're wearing a suit of armour.

JOE: The last section on the face was a few hundred feet

of the most nightmarish climbing.

Completely unstable powder snow,

no anchors at any point.

SIMON: It was physically very, very tiring

full body climbing really.

JOE: It took us the best part of five or six hours to climb 200 feet.

SIMON: We carried on way after it had got dark.

JOE: I was getting extremely cold

because I was just sitting still while Simon was trying to climb.

I was getting near hypothermic.

You just knew that if you just carried on regardless

it was gonna go tits up.

So we dug a snow cave.

JOE: In the morning, in good weather,

we actually saw what we'd been trying to climb.

It was this Andean nightmare

of flutings of the finest powder gorged out by snow falling down.

Meringues and mushrooms and cornices all over the place.

We'd heard about these strange powder snow conditions

you get in the Andes

and we'd never seen them before.

I don't know the physics of it.

Explains why powder snow can stay on such steep slopes.

In the Alps it would just slide off if the slope is above 40 degrees.

It is some of the most precarious,

unnerving and dangerous climbing I've ever done.

We were actually scared that we would get to an impasse

where we couldn't climb any further up

because we knew we wouldn't be able to get back down.

We were climbing ourselves into a trap.

(GRUNTS)

And we could see this 4,500-foot drop that was waiting for us.

(BREATHING HEAVILY)

So it was a great relief that by 2:00 in the afternoon

we got onto the north ridge and off the west face.

And we vowed

that we didn't want to go near Andean flutings again.

(HEAVY BREATHING)

SIMON: We were pretty tired

by the time we got up onto the ridge.

JOE: I was knackered,

and I remember thinking, "Sod the summit, we've done the face,

"I can't be bothered to go all the way up there."

And then we thought, " Hang on,

"we have come all this way, we might as well stand on the top."

(GRUNTS)

(BOTH BREATHING HEAVILY)

(COUGHING)

JOE: Long way down, isn't it?

SIMON: Yeah.

(BOTH LAUGHING)

JOE: I don't particularly like summits

because 80% of accidents happen on descent.

SIMON: We'd decided before we climbed the face

that we were going to come down the north ridge

down to a col between the Siula Grande and another mountain called Yerupaja

then we'd be able to abseil down a smaller section of the face.

JOE: Already the clouds were coming in from East, big clouds.

SIMON: We expected this ridge to be quite an easy way to descend.

We were hoping we'd be able to walk.

It turned out to be very difficult.

JOE: It was horrendous.

Vertical on the west side, with the cornices overhanging,

and on the east side, steep flutings

running down 3,000 feet below us.

SIMON: It was a shock, really,

and it was quite dangerous and it all got a bit out of control.

(WIND HOWLING)

JOE: Within about half an hour to an hour of leaving the summit

we were lost.

We were in a whiteout, we couldn't see anything.

Then we got a little break in the cloud

and I saw the ridge so I started climbing back up to it.

I didn't know, because of the side I was on,

but it was actually an enormous cornice,

an overhang of snow and ice,

and I was walking over the top of it.

(SCREAMING)

I was left hanging, looking down,

as all this snow and ice then fell away from me

down the west side of Siula Grande.

I got back up on the ridge

and I shouted down to Joe that I'd found the ridge.

I said, "I've found the ridge, Joe."

JOE: We'd hoped to have got down that day

but by the time it got dark we were still very high,

still at 20,000 feet.

And that night, as we made a brew,

the gas ran out.

SIMON: It was pretty obvious the following morning

that we'd descended the worst part of the ridge.

I was pretty confident

that we'd get back down to the base camp that day.

I thought at that stage it was pretty much in the bag,

the whole climb.

JOE: I was ahead of Simon

and suddenly there was this vertical wall

bisecting the ridge.

I had to get down on my hands and knees,

hammer my axes into the ice and lower myself off the ice cliff

When you hammer the axe in

you listen to the sound it makes and you look at it.

I was hanging by both axes, I took the hammer out

and I wanted to place it in the vertical wall.

I swung and the pick went in,

and it just made a...

Just a strange sound.

I thought, "Well, I'll take it out,

"make a good placement."

I just wanted to put bomber.

Dead solid axe placements in

all the way down.

And I was about to swing at the ice again...

(MOANING)

(WHIMPERS)

(SCREAMS IN PAIN)

JOE: This pain just came flooding down my thigh

and my knee was very, very, very painful.

oh! oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!

The impact drove my lower leg

straight through my knee joint.

(WHIMPERING)

As the bone went into my femur,

it split the tibial plateau straight off and carried on up.

(MOANING)

It was quite wild, the pain. I couldn't cope with it at first.

I just breathed a lot and it started to go.

I can remember looking across to the west

and seeing that we were level with the summit.

I had a height gauge of where we were.

And I just thought, "I can't have broken my leg,

"if I've broken my leg, I'm dead."

(PANTING)

Then the rope went slack.

I knew that meant that Simon was coming towards me.

JOE: I couldn't feel any bone under anything.

I brought my hand up and there was no blood on it,

and the pain had gone down a little bit,

and I thought maybe I was being a bit wet

and I'd just torn a ligament or something.

(WHIMPERING)

I tried to stand on it.

(SCREAMS)

I felt all the bone go, all grating and everything,

and I knew that it was broken then.

SIMON: The look that he gave to me sticks in my mind,

this look of shock and desperation and terror, really,

lots of things in this single look.

He said, "Are you okay?"

And I think it did occur to me to say, "Yeah, I'm fine,"

and I thought, "That's stupid."

I think I said, " No, I've broken my leg."

(EXCLAIMS)

Immediately, I... Just doom, really.

I thought, "oh, God, we're stuffed.

"We're gonna be doing well

"if either of us get out of this now. "

It did come into my mind, "If he slips off the mountain

"then I can just clear off and get myself down

"and I won't have to have all the hassle

"of trying to deal with him

"and with the situation we're in."

He gave me painkillers which were effectively headache tablets.

And he didn't really talk about anything.

It was almost as if he knew... He knew what this meant.

He knew that...

And I knew, that he was going to have to leave me.

He could've said something like, "I'm gonna get some help, "

and I'd have gone, " Right, yeah"

because I knew there wasn't any help.

It would've been an easy way for him to say it.

I didn't think we seriously thought whether there was any choice.

RICHARD: I couldn't put my finger on it,

why I thought something had happened.

And I started to think, "Is one of them dead, or both of them?"

Even if one of them's dead,

not, "Which one do I want to be dead,"

but, "If one comes back, who do I want it to be?"

It's kind of quite cold to say it

but I guess I would rather it had been Simon.

I thought, "oh, he's not leaving."

SIMON: I'd calmed down a bit

and managed to focus myself again

to think about how we were going to get...

How I was going to get him down the mountain.

We discussed between us what we were gonna have to do.

JOE: We thought, "We've got two ropes that are 150 feet long

"and if we tie them together we've got a 300-foot rope. "

So I tied to one end and Simon tied to the other.

In theory, he could lower me down 300 feet.

SIMON: Couldn't really get anchors to lower him from,

but it didn't matter, I cut a bucket in the snow

and sat in that and braced myself

JOE: And I sort of lay down between his legs.

okay, let's go.

JOE: And Simon started lowering me.

(GROANING)

SIMON: I'd lower him one rope length, 150 feet,

and then the knot would come up between the two ropes.

Now the knots would not go through the belay plates.

JOE: So he would stop me,

I would stand on my left leg, my good leg,

so that I could get the weight off the rope.

It gave him enough slack to unclip the rope,

thread the rope back through the lowering device

with a knot on the other side,

clip it back to himself and lower me the remaining 150 feet.

SIMON: He'd make himself reasonably secure

and I'd down climb to join him,

and we'd repeat the process again.

(SCREAMING)

JOE: Simon was trying to lower me fast

and it meant that my foot kept jabbing in and bending the knee.

(SCREAMING)

Excruciatingly painful.

I can remember feeling angry with him

because he was hurting me. I was thinking, "Do it slower."

I also knew that he had to do it this fast,

he hadn't got a choice.

And he was very grim-faced.

I remember looking at him, you know,

wondering if he was pissed off with the whole thing.

(SCREAMING)

SIMON: I couldn't take too much notice, unfortunately,

of these cries of pain

because we'd got to go down.

JOE: We would dig these holes for him to sit in,

in the powder snow,

and they would last

about the length of time it took to lower me.

They were crumbling around him,

and he was lowering me on an 8.8 millimetre rope, that thick,

with hands that were frozen.

What he did was extraordinary.

I've never heard of

any single-handed mountain rescue like that.

(WIND HOWLING)

We're now lowering in a full storm.

I don't know what the wind chill factor was,

but it would be like minus 80 or something like that.

I had lost a pint and a half of blood into my leg,

I was in shock and severely dehydrated.

It was a point where we should've dug a snow cave

and taken shelter,

got in our sleeping bags and made a hot brew

and rehydrated.

We couldn't 'cause we'd run out of gas.

And we just lost control at this point

because we couldn't dig a snow cave

and risk getting trapped by a storm that didn't break.

It was all starting to look up in many ways at that point

because we were virtually down.

And I started this lower thinking,

"After this we'll have one more and we'll be on the glacier. "

Suddenly it all got hard under my elbows, like icy,

and it got steeper,

it suddenly gets steeper.

And I just was full of alarm.

(SCREAMING)

Simon, slow down!

JOE: I was screaming at Simon to stop as loud as I could

and he just couldn't hear me.

(SCREAMING)

(GRUNTS)

SIMON: I did notice that more weight came onto the rope

but didn't really think a lot about this

and I just thought, "Well, he's going over some steeper ground. "

JOE: I'd looked down

and I'd glimpsed that there was a big drop underneath me.

I was horrified to discover what I'd gone over.

I could clearly see a large crevasse

directly under the cliff about 80 feet below me.

I was trying to get my axes

to see if I could reach this wall.

I think it was almost as I started to try and do that

I started being lowered again.

And I was thinking, "Christ, don't do it, "

'cause I knew that there wasn't enough rope

to get me to the bottom.

If I couldn't get my weight off the rope

he couldn't disconnect the rope

and I knew all this and I was screaming again not to lower me.

I carried on lowering him until I reached the knot

then tugged at the rope,

my signal to him to take the weight off the rope.

And nothing happened.

And nothing continued to happen.

JOE: I knew that the only way out of this

is if I could climb up the rope.

I had two Prusik loops,

thin cords of rope,

and if you use a special twisting knot on the rope

you can slide it up the rope, pull on it

and the knot grips the rope.

Clip a snap link to it and a swing to it

and you can stand up.

If you've got another one tied above it, you slide that one up,

stand in this loop that's now higher...

I was trying to hold myself upright

to keep the rope in place

and then trying to put this knot through itself

And this fiddly bloody rope,

it's hard to describe how I couldn't do it

because I just couldn't feel my fingers at all.

I'd be looking at it and trying to push it in using my teeth

and getting it round and getting it round.

SIMON: My hands were cold, my feet...

I was very, very cold.

And, of course, you sat there, you don't warm up.

It was a desperate position made worse by the fact I'd no idea

what Joe was doing or what position he was in.

I just couldn't figure out why it was taking him so long

to get his weight off the rope,

there was no sensible explanation for it.

Joe!

JOE: I got one on and I clipped it to my chest

because that would keep me upright.

I tried to put the other one on

and I was having real trouble with my hands.

And I dropped the bloody thing and I watched it fall.

I knew that I was stuffed then.

I just thought, "Well, I can't climb the rope. "

This idea that you can climb a rope hand over hand, you can't,

especially if your hands are frozen, you just can't do it.

There's nothing I can do.

I felt completely helpless.

And really angry.

SIMON: There was nothing I could do.

I couldn't get the weight off the rope,

I was just there.

This went on for maybe an hour and a half

during which time my position became more and more desperate.

I was struggling to maintain this seat.

This sugary seat that I was sat in, in the snow

was gradually sliding away from under me.

So my position was just getting...

It was getting desperate, really.

Joe!

JOE: I think, psychologically, I was beaten.

There was nothing I could do

so I just hung on the rope and waited to die.

I think I would've died pretty soon, actually.

The wind chill was very low.

(CRACKLING)

SIMON: I was literally going down the mountain

in little jerky stages

as this soft, sugary snow collapsed away underneath me.

JOE: I was expecting him to come off,

and I couldn't do anything about it.

He was gonna fall about 300 feet.

You know, 150 feet away from me, he was gonna fall double that.

He was gonna die.

He really didn't know

whether I was 10 foot off the ground, one foot off the ground,

he just didn't know.

But he knew pretty certainly that he was gonna die.

SIMON: Then I remembered

that I'd got a penknife, and it was in my rucksack.

I took the decision pretty quickly, really.

To me, it just seemed the right thing to do

under the circumstances.

Because there was no way that I could've...

I couldn't maintain where I was.

Sooner or later, I was going to be pulled from the mountain.

I took the rucksack off

and managed to unzip the top pocket with one hand

and get the penknife out.

(EXCLAIMS)

(GASPING)

(WIND HOWLING)

SIMON: It was an awful night.

My mind was plagued with the thoughts of what had happened to Joe.

It took a long time to warm myself up.

Really, I didn't properly, I guess. I had a very cold night.

The overriding memory was feeling desperately thirsty.

To the point where I felt

I could smell the water in the snow around me.

I felt that very strongly.

It was quite a strange thing.

(GASPS)

JOE: I didn't know what had happened.

What I'd landed on wasn't flat, it was sloped on each side

and I was sliding in the dark.

I think I must have fallen about 150 feet in total.

I was pretty surprised to be alive.

The head torch beam just went down and down

and the darkness just ate it, it was just gone.

I felt very unnerved, very, very vulnerable.

If I'd landed two or three feet further to the right,

I would’ve just gone down this huge hole.

(GRUNTS)

I got this ice screw in pretty quickly.

And then looked around, thinking,

"Jesus, it's gonna be nearly impossible to get out of."

(PANTING)

My rope was going all the way up 80 feet

up to this small entry hole.

And I thought, "Simon's on the end of that. "

But I... I just felt sure he was dead.

And it didn't mean anything, really.

I just thought, "If I pull on this rope,

"it'll come tight on his body."

'Cause he would've flown off the cliff

onto the down side of the crevasse

and then, lying dead there like a counterweight,

the rope would've come back up and then dropped into the crevasse.

So I thought, "If I pull on this rope, it'll come tight on his body."

And it just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it had been cut.

I thought, "You're gonna die in here. "

I had a pleased feeling that it meant Simon was alive.

Simon!

Simon!

(WIND HOWLING)

Looking at where I was, it was an awful prospect.

You know, you don't die of a broken leg.

(GASPING)

I think I did turn my head torch off to save the batteries.

It was dark, and it began to get to me.

There is something about crevasses.

They have a dread feel,

not a place for the living.

I could hear the ice cracking and wind noises in the ice.

I turned the light on again

'cause I didn't like it in the dark.

(BREATHING HEAVILY)

I felt very, very alone.

And I was very scared.

(CRACKING)

I was also... I was 2 5, you know.

I was fit.

I was super ambitious. And...

And this was the first trip we'd been on, and I wanted to climb the world.

And it just didn't seem...

This hadn't been part of our game plan.

It must have been quite late.

I think that I pretty much was thinking I wasn't gonna get out.

(SCOFFS)

Stupid. Stupid.

Stupid.

Stupid!

Stupid!

Stupid!

Stupid!

Stupid!

(SOBS)

Fuck!

Fuck!

Fuck!

JOE: As a climber you should always be in control.

You have to be in control.

So doing that could be seen as a mark of failure. You've lost it.

Fuck! Fuck! You cunt!

You fucking, fucking... You fucking cunt!

You cunt!

Cunt!

(SOBS)

It was just childish. I just cried and cried.

I thought...

I thought I was...

That I'd be tougher than that.

It was getting lighter, so it was 5:00 or 6:00.

And I started screaming Simon's name again.

Simon!

I got myself up,

got dressed inside the snow hole and packed everything away.

There was just a horrible feeling of dread.

By this stage I strongly felt

that Joe had been killed the previous day

and that now I was going to die

as some sort of, form of, you know, retribution.

But rather than just sit here feeling sorry for myself,

I'll get on with it and I'll die on the way down.

Very quickly the ground dropped away steeply

so I skirted around this area of steeper ground.

As I abseiled down, I could see this overhanging ice cliff,

which is what I had lowered him over

so I knew that he'd have been hanging in space,

which is the reason he couldn't get his weight off the rope.

As I went down lower,

I could see to my horror, at the base of this ice cliff

was an absolutely enormous crevasse.

About 30 feet wide

and just bottomless from where I was looking at it.

JOE: Simon!

JOE: He would've been up at first light, I thought.

'Cause I was desperately thirsty, and he would've been,

and he would've wanted to get down and get water.

And he would've wanted to find me.

Now, I did stop and pause and I shouted into the crevasse.

I yelled and yelled and yelled, "Joe! Joe!"

And I suppose again, with the benefit of hindsight,

after I'd got off the rope,

I should've gone and looked into the crevasse

to see where he was.

But to be quite honest,

the thought didn't occur to me at that time.

I was just convinced he was dead.

Simon!

JOE: Absolutely convinced by 10:00, totally convinced,

that I was on my own,

that no one was coming to get me.

I was brought up as a devout Catholic.

I had long since stopped believing in God.

I always wondered, if things really hit the fan,

whether I would, under pressure, turn round and say a few Hail Marys

and say, "Get me out of here."

It never once occurred to me.

It meant that I really don't believe.

And I really do think that when you die, you die.

That's it. There's no afterlife.

There's nothing.

And I was thinking, "Could I climb out of here?"

(CRIES OUT IN PAIN)

(SCREAMS)

80 foot of overhanging ice?

No way. I couldn't do it with a good leg.

RICHARD: I knew that they were both dead.

But I couldn't just clear off and leave the camp.

For one thing, I didn't know anything about them

except for their first names, Joe and Simon.

I didn't know their family names. I really knew nothing about them.

And I had this bizarre idea that if they'd fallen off the mountain,

they would have just landed at the bottom of it.

And I thought perhaps that from the bottom of the glacier,

I'd be able to see them.

And set off with the aim of going as far as I could.

SIMON: I started to go down the glacier on my own.

And at this stage, I was still certain that I was going to die myself

Crossing a glacier is very, very dangerous on your own,

because there are crevasses in the ice, and the snow covers them.

Fortunately, I managed to find a faint outline of our tracks,

from when we walked in.

As it was only when I got off the glacier

I realised that I was gonna get down and I was gonna get out of it,

I was gonna live.

JOE: I can't really describe how scary the night had been.

I thought, "It'll be like that for days. "

You've got to make decisions, keep making decisions,

even if they're wrong decisions, you know.

If you don't make decisions, you're stuffed.

JOE: Short of dying on the ledge,

my only chance was to lower myself deeper into the crevasse.

I didn't know what I would find down there.

I was just hoping there might be some way out

in the labyrinth of ice and snow.

I really struggled to make that decision.

I was so scared of going deeper.

(PANTING)

The other option was just to sit there,

blindly hoping that somehow it might get better

and I just knew it wasn't going to get better.

(PANTING)

I didn't want to look down.

I was horrified at the thought it was just empty down there.

(GRUNTS)

I didn't put a knot in the end of the rope.

If there was nothing down there,

I wouldn't be able to hold the rope

and then I would fall, it would be quick.

Fuck!

I thought, "Jesus, this is big. "

(PANTING)

By this stage, I was completely physically done in,

staggering back down these moraines, still desperately thirsty.

There were all these thoughts swirling around in my mind,

guilt, worry, thinking about how on earth I'm gonna explain this

to Joe's parents, my friends, to Richard.

The thought did cross my mind

that maybe I could think up a decent story

that would make me look better.

And I did think about that for quite a while.

RICHARD: The only image that sticks in my mind

from all the time in Peru

is seeing this figure.

And it was fairly close before I could see who it was.

But he looked absolutely horrendous.

You wouldn't recognise him.

And I said, "Where’s Joe?"

And he just said, "Joe's dead. "

I told him the whole story.

As we walked back to the camp

I told him the whole story of what had happened.

He wasn't in the slightest bit judgemental

about me or what I'd done.

He took it very well.

(ICE SHATTERING)

JOE: I must have lowered myself about 80 feet

from where the ice screw was at the bridge.

I was now in the base of..

Seemed to be in the base of a crevasse

that was shaped like a big hourglass.

To the ceiling was about 160 feet.

I think it's as big as St. Paul's dome in scale.

I remember looking down

and there was solid snow,

and I thought, "This is the bottom of the crevasse. "

About 50 feet away from me there was a slope leading up.

And right at the top,

there was this sun coming through this hole.

And...

It was shining, there was this big beam of sunlight coming in.

This was the way out I'd been looking for.

I remember thinking, "Whoa, I can climb that slope,

"I bloody well will climb that slope.

"I'll crawl across this flat floor, "

and I started crawling across on my stomach.

(GRUNTING)

(RUMBLING)

Then I heard things breaking away underneath me.

I realised that this wasn't a solid floor.

It seemed to be hollow underneath.

I was absolutely horrified.

It was suddenly as if I was on an eggshell.

If I break through I'll never be able to get across to this slope

and that was my way out.

I thought, "Right, I'm on it, this is solid now. "

I started to get my axes in and hop up.

(GRUNTS)

It was extremely painful.

As your legs hopped up, they both came down together.

I'd try and get into a body position

so my left foot went in first.

But I inevitably went onto my broken leg.

(SCREAMS)

I'd feel the displacement go, the bone move.

At every hop I'd nearly faint.

It was just excruciatingly painful.

JOE: And it was a bright sunny day.

Wow. The whole world had just come back.

I was lying on the snow, just laughing.

(LAUGHS)

That was the relief of getting out of that place.

(LAUGHING)

(SIGHS)

And I then looked at the glacier

and I thought, "Well, you haven't even started, mate,

"it's miles, it's miles, "

and on really bad ground.

And I think I was contemplating just sitting there,

because I was coming at this

having done the most serious climb of my life.

If you come down safe from a climb like that

you'd be exhausted for days, you'd just eat and drink and sleep.

I'd just come out of that,

I'd badly broken a leg,

I was in great pain, I was highly dehydrated,

I had no food,

and I was looking at trying to do that.

There's just no way you're physically gonna do that.

Then it occurred to me

that maybe I should set definite targets.

I started to look at things and think,

"Right, if I can get to that crevasse over there in 20 minutes,

"that's what I'm gonna do. "

If I got there in 18 minutes, I was hysterically happy about it

and if I got there in 22 or 24 minutes,

I was upset almost to the point of tears.

And it became obsessive.

I don't know why I did it.

I think I knew the big picture

of what was happening to me and what I had to do

was so big I couldn't deal with it.

I stayed on Simon's tracks, and they were weaving around,

over humps and past obvious crevasses and stuff

I thought, "Unless I come to a hole with his body at the bottom,

"these tracks will lead me

"through the minefield of crevasses. "

You've got these huge mountains around you,

you know, big mountain walls,

and they do make you feel small and vulnerable

and you wonder whether there's some sort of malign presence

that's out to get you.

It was like somebody was just teasing an ant

and putting something in its way all the time

and was eventually gonna stand on it.

(WIND WHISTLING)

I could see that Simon's tracks were filling in.

They were my lifeline off the glacier.

(GROANS)

And I started to get very desperate.

I carried on crawling in the dark,

which is a stupid thing to do unroped on a glacier, but I was frightened

and I was just trying to see Simon's tracks.

In the morning, it was a bright sunny day.

All the tracks had gone.

And I started quite early.

And every now and then I had to stand up on one leg

and look around to try and see the way

and then sit down again and shuffle along.

(GRUNTING)

There was one very horrendously crevassed bit right near the edge

and I ended up in a maze of them.

I suddenly came to a point where I could see ice running down

and then I could see rocks.

(SCREAMS)

RICHARD: It was probably me that brought up the subject of leaving,

partly 'cause I was worried about Simon.

I just felt it was best to get as far away as possible

from where it had happened.

SIMON: I didn't want to leave immediately,

I felt I needed a day or two just to collect my thoughts

and to regain some strength, really.

I spent a long time washing myself.

That felt sort of quite good, to wash my hair

and to wash my face, to have a shave, to sort of..

Get the...

Get the remnants of the mountain out of my system, really.

JOE: I was desperately thirsty,

because it doesn't matter how much snow you eat,

you can't get enough water into your system.

And I saw the rocks, I knew how big these boulders would be

and how far it was,

and that was the first time I really thought about whether I could...

Could get the distance.

I got rid of all my gear.

I knew that I couldn't crawl over these rocks,

they were just too big and jumbled

and the only way to do it was to try and hop.

So I knew I was gonna fall a lot.

(GRUNTS)

(GRUNTS)

(GROANS)

(SCREAMS)

(WHIMPERS)

(SHOUTS)

I'd fall on virtually every hop,

and it's like having your leg broken every time.

I remember looking back at where I'd come from

and it was 25 yards, and it had taken ages,

and the pain just to get that 25yards.

(SCREAMS)

I can be insanely stubborn,

and I do like to have things my way,

and things were seriously not going my way over these days.

I'd look at a rock and I'd go,

"Right. Get there in 20 minutes."

once I decided I was going to get that distance in 20 minutes,

I bloody well was gonna do it.

(GRUNTS)

And it would help me,

because I'd get halfway through the distance and I'd be in such pain,

I just couldn't bear the thought of getting up and falling on it again.

But I'd look at the target and I'd think,

"I've gotta get there."

And I'd think, "I'll just lie here a bit longer here. "

"No, you've gotta get there! You've only got ten minutes left. "

It seemed like there was a very cold, pragmatic part of me

that was saying, "You have to do this, this and this

"if you're gonna get there."

"Come on, keep moving, keep moving. "

"Right, get up and do it again. "

It was quite insistent

and quite clear.

It was almost like a voice, or a separate part of me,

telling me to do something.

Very uncaring,

no sympathy, no...

No acknowledgement of the fact that I might be tired

or hurt or anything like that. It was very, very odd.

(GRUNTS)

So part of me kept saying, "Keep moving, stop resting. "

And the other part of me, my mind anyway,

just was, like, looking around and absorbing things.

And as the hours went and certainly as the day started to go,

it became weirder and weirder.

I was very, very, very thirsty, very dehydrated.

The agonising thing is, all these boulders, these moraines,

are on top of the glacier

and you could hear water running all the time.

(WATER DRIPPING)

I'd fall over and I'd hear water

and I'd start digging around searching for it.

(WATER TRICKLING)

Couldn't find it, couldn't get it.

And it was driving me mad, to be able to hear water.

(MOANS)

(WATER FLOWING)

RICHARD: I was worried about Simon, about his health,

because his fingertips were still quite bad from frostbite.

And I just felt it wasn't a place to be lingering in.

We just started getting ready to leave in the morning.

JOE: I did eventually collapse amid the rocks

and I didn't sleep very well.

My leg was very painful, it was agony.

It was the first night, I think, it hadn't stormed.

It didn't snow on me and didn't rain

and I could see the stars. I can remember lying on my back

for what seemed endless periods of time,

staring at the stars.

At one point I had this weird sensation

that I'd lain there conscious for centuries, for lifetimes,

becoming part of the rocks

and part of where I was never gonna move from.

The sun came up and it started to warm me.

And I thought it would be so nice to just lie there,

don't move and then it won't hurt,

and Christ, I got so, so close to doing that.

I genuinely believed that I wouldn't make the distance

and I also believed that I was going to die.

And I sort of acknowledged it in a very matter-of-fact way.

And it seemed very irrational to keep on crawling

if you didn't think it was gonna be of any good.

(GROANS)

I think that it was that loneliness,

that sense of being abandoned.

It was there all the time.

I didn't crawl because I thought I would survive,

I think I... I wanted to...

To be with somebody when I died.

SIMON: It was probably just a symbolic act

to say goodbye to him, really,

in my own mind, you know, by doing that.

(SLURPING)

(COUGHING)

I drank litres and litres of it.

(COUGHING)

It was just like putting fuel in,

I could feel myself immediately getting stronger.

(GASPS)

(GROANS)

(GAGS)

(SPITS)

(GRUNTS)

I kept wetting myself

and I can remember quite liking the sensation, the warmth of it.

It was just a slow, steady reduction.

Not just physically, physically it was very obvious,

but you, everything, yourself

I felt left with nothing, really.

I didn't care anymore.

You didn't have any dignity,

you didn't care whether you were brave or weak or anything,

you just became almost nothing, it was strange.

I was still doing these test 20-minute things,

get here, get there.

And then I saw these footprints.

And I got convinced that it was Simon and Richard.

They were up above me and they were just following on.

And I carried on crawling down,

utterly convinced that they were wandering along behind me.

And I can remember thinking,

"That's really stupid, they would come and help you. "

And I think I persuaded myself that they were just following on

because they didn't want to embarrass me

because I’d peed myself and I was crying.

I don't know how long it lasted, maybe about an hour.

I totally believed it,

and then suddenly it was like popping a bubble.

And I realised that they weren't there

and I felt utterly shattered.

JOE: It was about 4:00 when I reached the lake.

I knew that at the far end of it

there was a moraine dam, and from the top of that moraine dam,

I would be able to look down into the valley

where the base camp was.

In fact, I would be able to see the tents.

It was the first time I thought, "I'm gonna make it.

"I can make the distance, I can actually make the distance."

Almost as soon as I thought it,

the next thought that popped into my head was,

"Well, will there be anyone there?"

I thought, "Christ, this is the fourth day since I saw Simon."

And...

As I worked it out,

I thought, "Why on earth would they be there?"

I knew it got dark at 6:00,

and I thought, "I've got to get there, "

and I was trying to do it as fast as possible.

The rest of that afternoon I was plagued by this dreadful feeling

that they would've gone.

I hadn't paid attention to what was happening with the weather.

Between leaving at 4:00 and getting to the top of the moraine at about 6:00,

the weather had changed.

So when I looked down into the valley, it was just full of clouds.

JOE: Simon!

I listened intently,

hoping to hear a whistle or an answer, a cry back or something.

I didn't hear anything at all.

(WEEPING QUIETLY)

I spent a long time sat there

crying, really, not sure what to do,

and I thought about getting in my sleeping bag.

For some reason it just seemed a bit of a pathetic way to end things,

just in a sleeping bag.

I thought, "Well, might as well just keep going.

"You'll end it down there somewhere. "

(MUTTERS INDISTINCTLY)

(LAUGHS)

JOE: I don't know entirely what happened

for the rest of that night.

Yes.

I stopped looking at the watch, and everything just started to go apart.

(INDISTINCT WHISPERING)

And I think I just got lost

and I didn't know what I was doing any more.

I don't remember thinking of anyone or

anybody I loved or anything like that.

(GROANS)

I did have one time when I'd got a song going through my head

and it was by a band called Boney M.

I don't really like Boney M's music.

♪ Brown girl in the ring

♪ In the ring...

♪ She looks like a sugar in a plum

♪ Plum plum

♪ Show me your motion

What is that?

(LAUGHS)

♪ Show me your motion

♪ She looks like a sugar in a plum

♪ Brown girl in the ring

♪ There's a brown girl in the ring

♪ Brown girl in the ring

♪ She looks like a sugar in a plum

♪ Plum plum

♪ Show me your motion

♪ Come on, show me your motion

♪ Show me your motion

And it just went on and on and on for hours.

♪ She looks like a sugar in a plum

I found it very upsetting

because I wanted to try and get it out of my head

and I wanted to think of other things.

♪ There's a brown girl in the ring

(DISTORTED SONG CONTINUES)

I can remember thinking,

" Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M."

(GRUNTS)

♪ Show me your motion

♪ Come on, show me your motion ♪

I remember sometimes,

not waking up, I think I was awake all the time,

but coming to. It was like waking up,

and finding myself sitting there.

I didn't know where I was.

It was pitch black and snowing and I'd think I was back on the glacier

or in a pub car park and I'd been beaten up again.

Then I’d just drift off again.

(GRUNTS)

I remember smelling something.

(COUGHS)

It was a really strong smell.

It acted like a smelling salt, sort of cut through all this delirium.

And I couldn't understand what it meant.

It took me ages to try and work out what it meant.

I thought it was me.

Very slowly I worked it out.

I thought, "I've crawled through the latrine area of our campsite."

I realised then that I was close to the tents.

Simon!

As I was shouting it, I thought, "This is it.

"This is as far as this game goes. "

"I'm not capable of going any further. "

Simon!

I made the mistake of having a little bit of hope

that they'd still be there.

When I shouted and they weren't there,

I sort of knew I was dead then.

(SOBBING)

That moment when no one answered the call...

Simon.

It was...

It was... I lost something.

I lost me.

I woke up, not knowing why,

and was aware of this strange atmosphere.

I could hear the wind howling outside the tent

and started hearing something.

It did slowly dawn on me

that, really, the only thing it could be

would be Joe outside, shouting.

But that was completely impossible

because he was dead

and he'd died three or four days ago.

And then heard it again,

much sharper.

And it really sounded like somebody shouting, "Simon ".

I kind of got in a panic

that first it couldn't be Joe because Joe's dead,

and then, if he is out there,

it's gonna be this horrible thing, it can't be a human being

because no human being can possibly go through that

and be outside the tent.

I was just laying there, really not knowing what to do.

And then Simon woke up.

"Simon," you know, it was quite clearly a shout of my name.

I knew it was Joe, actually. I knew immediately.

JOE: I was looking around and then I saw this thing, floating.

of course, Simon exploded into action.

JOE: Suddenly, I heard voices.

SIMON: Joe?

Is that you?

RICHARD: I was holding back,

because I didn't really feel it was a human being out there.

JOE: Simon.

We went back up the stream bed from where these cries had come,

about maybe 200-300 yards outside the camp

and there was Joe.

- Simon. -oh, fuck. oh, fuck.

I couldn't completely believe it until I actually saw him.

But then it was still a little difficult to believe that

because of the eerie night and the fact of the state he was in.

Simon.

SIMON: Absolutely awful state.

It was almost like he was a ghostlike figure.

It was like I had to pinch myself almost

to believe this was true,

that this was really happening.

- Help me. -oh, fuck, Joe.

Shh. You okay? Shh, shh. oh, fuck.

Simon was...

He was swearing a lot.

Swearing a lot.

Fucking hell.

Richard! Lift him!

Richard, hold him, you stupid bastard! Lift him!

Okay, Joe. Shh.

JOE: I remember Simon grabbing my shoulders

and holding me.

SIMON: Lift his legs.

JOE: I remember that.

That feeling of being held.

okay, okay. Shh, I got you. Shush, you're safe.

He thanked me

for trying to get him down the mountain,

for all that I'd done up to the point

where I'd cut the rope, you know, and he said...

And he said to me, "I'd have done the same."

Those were the first words he uttered to me.

(QUIET SOBBING)

RICHARD: And I remember, before we'd done anything to him,

before we'd even closed the door, he said, "Where are my trousers?"

We had to explain that we'd burnt his trousers,

which made him quite angry.

I think that kind of brought me back into life to some extent,

realising it was the same old Joe back again.