Touching the Void — A cut rope, a crevasse, and a man who crawled out alive

In 1985, on the descent from the first ascent of the West Face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the British climber Joe Simpson shattered his right leg, and his partner Simon Yates — lowering him blind down the mountain in a storm and being dragged toward his own death — cut the rope, dropping Simpson into a crevasse. Both men survived. That is the rare and central fact of this case: a decision that should by every reasonable expectation have killed one climber instead left both alive, after Simpson, presumed dead, hauled and crawled himself across a glacier and down a moraine for roughly three days to reach base camp.

Simpson and Yates, both young and accomplished alpinists, climbed Siula Grande — a 6,344-metre peak in the Cordillera Huayhuash — by its previously unclimbed West Face in alpine style, carrying everything with them and leaving no fixed ropes or stocked camps behind. A third man, Richard Hawking, a non-climber, waited at their base camp. The ascent succeeded; the descent, down an unfamiliar and dangerous ridge in worsening weather, did not.

When Simpson fell and drove his lower leg into his knee, the two improvised a system of lowering him in 90-metre stages on their roped-together lengths. In darkness and storm, Yates lowered Simpson over an unseen ice cliff, leaving him hanging free in space, unable to climb the rope or descend it, and out of all communication. After holding the dead weight for more than an hour as his own snow anchor failed, Yates faced being pulled off the mountain to certain death, and cut the rope. Simpson dropped into a crevasse, survived on a ledge, and — rather than wait to die — lowered himself deeper, found a way out, and began the crawl that defines the story.