Paul Pritchard

2009-11-01T19:00:00.004+11:00

Climbing mountains defined Paul Pritchard's existence and sign-posted his horizons.

He earned international respect as a cutting-edge climber and mountaineer. He has published three books:

'Deep Play' won the prestigious Boardman/Tasker Award for mountain literature in 1997 and the 'Totem Pole' won both the 1999 Boardman/Tasker Award and the 1999 Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize. He is the only author to win the B/T twice. In 2005 he completed 'The Longest Climb'. These books are available from Amazon (please click on the covers in the left column).

During a planned year-long trip climbing around the world, Paul had a head injury caused by rock fall whilst climbing the 'Totem Pole' in Tasmania. He suffered hemiplegia, a paralysis of one side of his body, and lost the power of speech for many months.

Since this accident Paul has continued to lead a challenging life, caving, tricycle racing, sea kayaking, river rafting, climbing Kilimanjaro, and, in 2009, a return to lead rock climbing.

Paul has devoted a considerable amount of time to raising awareness for the charity Headway and the Upendo Leprosy Centre in Tanzania. He is a patron of Hemihelp and Llanberis mountain film Festival.

In 2011 he is undertaking a journey by tricycle across the Himalaya from Lhasa to Kathmandu. This epic ride will be in the company of two fellow disabled tricyclists and will raise much needed funds for Braille Without Borders.

Paul lives in Tasmania.

A Game One Climber Played

2009-10-30T22:40:00.018+11:00

Pritchard was born in Lancashire, UK, in 1967 and, at age 16 began a life of climbing. He soon moved to North Wales and that Mecca of rock climbing, Llanberis and by 1986 he was climbing the top grade of the day. He began a life of mountaineering that would take him to the Indian Himalaya, the Pakistani Karakorum, Patagonia, Baffin Island, The Pamirs, the European Alps and the American Rockies.

El Caballo de Diablo, Torre Norte del Paine.

When he won the Boardman/Tasker Award for mountain literature in 1997, with Deep Play, he spent the prize money on a world climbing tour that found him in Tasmania climbing a slender sea stack known as The Totem Pole. It was here that all that he had known before was turned on its head.

On Friday the 13th of February 1998 a TV-sized boulder falling from 25 meters inflicted such terrible head injuries that doctors thought he might never walk or even speak again. Pritchard has spent his time since the accident in contemplation of the hemiplegia which has robbed his right side of movement and played tricks with his speech and memory.

However, he is still making a remarkable recovery and re-directing his life in continually inspiring and rewarding ways.

He has since moved to Tasmania, the place that did him so much harm, and is raising two children.

Always looking to the future, Pritchard story gives the message that life doesn't have to stop with the trauma of head injury or disability.

Pritchard on his recumbent tricycle, Llanberis, Wales.

An Adventurer's Life

2009-10-29T22:53:00.009+11:00

2011

To attempt an all disabled crossing of the himalayas on a tricycle from Lhasa to Kathmandu.

2009
Led first route after an eleven year gap.

Placca di Baone, Arco, Italy.

2008

Rafted the Franklin River in Tasmania's remote South West.

Coruscades, Franklin River

2004

Successful all-disabled ascent on Kilimanjaro (5896 metres) by the Western Breach Route. Rock climbing again in Colorado and Snowdonia.

Federation Peak ©Grant Dixon.

2002

Eighteen days spent traversing the Eastern Arthur Range and an attempt on Federation Peak in Tasmania.

From left to right: Bernard Kinyua, Jane Boucher and Paul Pritchard on the summit of Point Lenana, Mount Kenya.

2001

Success on Point Lenana on Mount Kenya. The climb was sponsored in aid of Headway - a non-profit brain injury charity that works with people who have suffered a traumatic head injury.

2000

Trekking in the Utah Desert (USA) and Tasmania and a failed attempt to climb Jebel Toubkal in the Atlas mountains of Morocco.

1998 and 1999

spent in hospital and rehabilitation

1998

Climbing upon Mount Kinabalu, Borneo, The Blue Mountains and Mount Buffalo in Australia. Accident on Friday 13th February.

1997

First ascent of The Wall of Dykes (1200m), an all free climb in the Ak-Su Valley, Khirgizistan.

1996

Two months winter climbing in Scotland. Last new routes at Gogarth, most notably Sign of The Sun Dog and 93 000 000 Miles.

1995

In Karakorum, Pakistan; Trango Tower (6350m), Slovene Route in alpine style.

1994

First ascent of Adrift (1000m, 5.10 A4) on El Capitan, Yosemite, California. First ascent of Hyperborea (1000m) on the West face of Mount Asgard, Baffin Island.

1993

Attempt on East face of Cerro Torre, Argentina and first ascent of Corn Wall (500m) on North Tower of Paine. Attempt on the Meru Sharks Fin in Gangotri, India reaching 6300m. More new routes in Karnataka, India.

1000m up on El Regalo de Mwoma

1991/2

First ascent of El Regalo de Mwoma (1200m) on East face of Central Tower of Paine, Patagonia. First ascent of El Caballo de Diablo (600m) on the North Tower of Paine - the first alpine style free climb in the Paine. First ascent of Planet Earth (600m) on Paine Chico. Eight months followed climbing in South America - New routes in Argentina, Big walls in the Brazilian forests and solos of 6000m peaks in Bolivia.

1990

Began mountaineering! Attempt on the Estrella Impossible on Bhagirathi III, Gangotri, India, ended without success after being hit by rock-fall. First new routes in Hampi, Karnataka, India.

1989

Much time spent in Europe experimenting with sport climbing. Six months climbing in the deserts of North America. First ascent of Knuckle Sandwich, Strone Ulladale.

1987

Many First ascents in the Dinorwic Slate quarries including; I Ran The Bath, Bathtime, Wishing Well and Cure For A Sick Mind. At Gogarth, first ascent of Super Calabrese (E8) and Unrideable Donkey (E7). In Llanberis Pass first ascents include Surgical Lust and King Wad. Perhaps, most impornt in climbing terms was the first free ascent, with Johnny Dawes, of The Scoop on Strone Ulladale in Scotland.

Making an early repeat of Dawes of Perception, E7 6c Vivian Quarry, Llanberis

1986

Moved to Llanberis, Wales at the beginning of the Slate boom and the Gogarth revival. Early repeats of Raped by Affection and Dawes of Perception on the enormous Dinorwig Slate Quarries in Snowdonia. But mostly active on the sea cliffs of Gogarth, Anglesey where new routes included The Enchanted Broccoli Garden, Schittlegruber, Come To Mother, Heart of Gold Direct and Salem.

1984/5

Soon discovered he had an aptitude for dangerous climbs and brought new levels of boldness to Lancashire with ascents of Perimeter Walk (E7), Strawberry Kiss (E7), Pretentious Gallery, Soot Monkey and On The Brink. Five months spent in Verdon Gorge, France.

1983

Began climbing in the quarries that pock marked the moors around his home town in Lancashire.

Public Speaking

2009-10-28T23:45:00.005+11:00

Speaking in Lecco, Italy, 2009.

Paul undertakes regular reading performances and will make an excellent speaker for your conference, lecture, after-dinner speech, sales meeting, in-house training, cruise ship, marketing event, workshop, seminar and in Schools and Colleges. With his background of high adventure and personal journey into disability, Paul would be a great choice for your event.

Paul has lectured in primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, at nursing schools and hospitals around the world. He has spoken at Banff, Telluride and Kendal MoluntainFilms. In 2009 Paul lectured in Italy and France and UK and was a guest speaker at The Domzale Mountain Film Festival in Slovenija.

Testimonial
Taroona High School, Tasmania 13/20/27 May 2011 - Paul, we would like to thank you on behalf of the students that listened to your incredible journey through life. Your message about looking back on the brighter side of life and bouncing back from disappointments is truly amazing. We hope you continue to work with our students in the future, Cheers, The Wellness Team.

Contact Paul: paul@paulpritchard.com.au.

Cool Links to Cool People

2009-10-27T23:58:00.002+11:00

The Alpine Club is the worlds first mountaineering club dating back to 1857. I am a member of the Alpine Climbing Group (ACG) a branch of the Alpine Club.

Traumahealing.com is a fantastic site if you have suffered any kind of trauma.

Warren Macdonald’s site is exceptional and the man inspiring.

Fresh Air Crew are Adventure film specialist working out of South Africa.

Headway has a network of over a hundred local Headway Groups and Branches across the United Kingdom providing support for people with brain injury, their families and carers, and for those working with them.

Bob Drury is an old time climbing friend of mine who quit the rock and took up paragliding. He’s bloody good at it too.

I ride a Greenspeed!

Feedback to Paul

2009-10-23T22:29:00.003+11:00

Let us know what you think! Have you read Deep Play or Totem Pole? Perhaps you have read some of Paul's other works or have heard about him some other way.

Feedback on published writings and other areas always helps. Let us have your feedback on your impressions of Deep Play, Totem Pole, assorted writings, or just general feedback. Comments from head-injured people are especially welcome.

Email form coming soon!! Why not email him on his gmail account: tas.prit@gmail.com

Eastern Arthurs

2009-10-22T00:18:00.005+11:00

Disabled but not Unable in the Eastern Arthurs
An adventure that appeared in Outdoor Australia in 2001.

Awaking from my fevered dream I pushed my attackers away. It took me a moment to recognise this place and to understand why I was lying in the dirt.

Looking about me the climbing gear reminded me of by what convoluted route I came to this place… The world climbing tour… Australia… Tasmania… The accident on the Totem Pole… The rock crushing my skull… The Royal Hobart Hospital… The year in Rehab … Making a home in this place that had scarred me so deeply.

This trip was the first roped climbing I’d done since the accident and although I was enjoying every minute of it I wasn’t finding it easy, dragging a useless arm and leg up with me. But that was precisely why I was doing it. I had been to many of the world’s mountains in my career as a climber, the Karakorum, the Himalaya, Baffin Island, Khirgizistan, and I had never gone for the easy option on a mountain.

In my hands I cradled my swollen knee. After a week spent towing my leg across the Eastern Arthur range I needed a rest day.

***

It seemed an age ago that Wak, Jane and I had set off along the Yo-yo track full of optimism. Then the Southwest National Park, an area of wilderness which covers almost half a million hectares, was all new to me.

There were big fallen trees lying across the path every hundred meters or so. Scrabbling onto one, with Jane hauling me by the scruff of the jacket, was like trying to climb onto the roof of a VW combi that had been smeared in Vaseline. At times I would have to crawl under a series of fallen trees with Jane pushing my sack, and hers, before her.

Whilst dredging one thigh deep pool with my right boot I stumbled in the cold gravy. Even with my light rucsac I couldn’t extricate myself so I just sat there with water lapping at my nipples. All Jane could think of was taking a photograph of me in my sodden predicament.

At first all the filth upset my sensibilities. It just didn’t seem right to get this dirty. I had spent all my life being told, “One has to be clean.” But as the days went by the muck began to have an emancipating effect on me.

The Huon River was kept well hidden from us by a dense hedge of Myrtle, sassafras and Huon Pine. The following two days we averaged ten kilometres a day. We were striking camp just after dawn and walking until dusk, about eleven hours.

Late on the third day we arrived at Cracroft Crossing, a place I felt deeply anxious about. The Cracroft river was infamous for its propensity to flood and I knew the bridge had been washed away sometime earlier. I needn’t have worried though as the level was low and, with my two companions aiding me, I had few problems.

The alarm woke me with a jolt half an hour before dawn and we shovelled soup-like porridge into our mouths whilst putting on cold, wet socks and boots. To an English person this is very strange behaviour. The reasoning is pre-emptive; you are going to get your feet soaked anyway so you might as well get it over with from the outset. Jane then packed the tent away and stuffed items in our respective rucsacs while I struggled, single handed, with my laces.

The day was dawning as we broke out of the woods and onto the button grass plain, with its heavenly duckboard. We made good time on our ascent of the Razorbacks and stopped to feed and water on the brow. Hearing voices on the plain below we soon enough encountered several women and men led by two older, bearded men.

“Well hello,” one of the older men shouted.
“Good morning,” said Jane.
“Which way did you come?” asked the man.
“Oh, the Yo-yo Track,” answered Wak with a smile.
“Oh yeah? Us too. Bloody horrendous wasn’t it? How long did it take you guys.”

There was a brief silence before Jane blurted out, “Three days.”
“We took eleven hours and thought that was slow,” piped up a young guy.
I should point out that when I am sat down I appear able bodied. It is only when I am up and walking that one sees just how disabled I am. I didn’t mention my disability. The last thing on my mind was the need to prove myself to anyone else, anyway since when did going into the mountains become a race.

Wak and I helped Jane to shoulder her monster pack, then Jane and I aided Wak in putting hers on and then Wak helped me with my little bag. To anyone spying on us this would have seemed an exceedingly farcical affair but it took place perhaps ten times a day.
After a few hundred metres of stumbling across a plateau I halted, “Could that be?” I was stuck for words. Filtered by cloud was the unmistakable point of Federation Peak that I had been studying in photographs and books for almost a year. Yet again I had developed an unhealthy obsession with a mountain that now, to me, appeared distant and aloof.

The Arthur Plains Track was definitely the most punishing so far. Often there was only swamp, where the only way to tell if you were on route was to feel with your boot for the deepest mud and stick to it. When the water was only shin deep bauera, a dense thicket with small razorblades for leaves, ripped the thighs until they bled, a little like fighting through a tangle of barbed wire with shorts on. This is possibly the weirdest of all Tassie bushwalking behaviour. They insist on wearing the very shortest of shorts for all bush walks and after a day or two of this kind of attack the thighs are red raw.

The following morning we wound our way up Luckmans Lead, a ridge that led to the plateau of the range. I put on my body harness and Jane roped me up a section of almost vertical path. We were expecting two extra members of our team and, sure enough, we spotted the tiny dots on the plain below. It wasn’t long before Emma and Damon had climbed up to us, emphasising just how painfully slow we were travelling.

On seeing me struggling up a sheer cliff Damon kindly offered to take my sack. This was a portentous moment for me. I believed that I was going to carry my own sack all the way but it was getting late in the day now. I realised that I was less jeopardising a worthy conclusion to the day, but risking a night out wandering on the mountain.

Slipping the bag off my shoulders I passed it to him saying meekly, “Thanks a lot.”
On one cliff a smooth wall, almost three metres high, lay directly in front of my nose. I could just reach a ledge on the top but pulling up was too much for my one arm to manage without anything for my feet. I fell repeatedly onto the rope and a wave of dejection flooded over me.
“Oh, what the bloody hell!” I lamented.
“I’ve got you good,” came a distant shout from above.
“Can you heave when I ho?”
“Okaaay.”

And so we overcame this one of many obstacles.
On cliffs of this nature I have a fear of projections pointing down that might spear the ten centimetres by three-centimetre hole in my head. It is precisely for this reason that I wear a helmet most of the time. In the accident I had failed to wear a helmet, preferring to follow fashion rather than safety.

“There’s a boy under that boulder,” Jane pointed up to our left, “He’s called Stuart. Died in the 50’s. Do you want to meet him?”
“No, not really,” I remarked wearily.
“So that’s why this place is called Stuart Saddle,” Damon giggled nervously.
My mind rested firmly on finding the platforms, which we did just as night was falling, fifteen hours after we had set out.

When I found myself standing on the duckboard of Thwaites Plateau it was all I could do to take a photograph of my feet; the most important photograph of the trip. Now that I was directly below ‘Feder’ I allowed the first seed of doubt to creep into my mind. I didn’t realise it was going to be this imposing.
On the final few metres to Thwaites campsite I studied the now familiar yabbie holes. To a Pommie these creatures must seem a figment of the Aussie imagination, like the Yowie or Drop Bears. I mean, little blue Lobsters that live in burrows and come out at night to roam around the moors in search of food. Really. “Wait ’til I tell the guys back home about these.”
***
Which brings us to the place I am in now, sat on the forest floor in the dirt nursing my swollen knee. Growing ever more tense about the following days climb. But when Liz’s flaming red hair and Ant’s smiling face come bursting through the trees any nervousness soon dissipates. They had come in the opposite direction with food and chocolate.
Liz said wearily, “I’m glad that I’ve done bloody Moss Ridge but never again.”
Moss Ridge I had been warned against as being near impossible for me because of the steepness and sliminess. But it could be as short as four days to the road compared with the original plan of retracing our steps, the whole long ridge, the Arthur Plains and the Yo-yo Track. And not comprehending your fate is always preferable to knowing what is going to be around each painful corner.
The new day brings a light wind and an ominous mackerel sky. I begin limping towards the rock that, I now realise, has guided my life for these last months. I limp with a fear that I have never known before, but I hide it well.
On the top of a knife edge ridge I clip the rope into my body harness and we walk along a narrow track with a drop of several hundred metres by my side.
When we arrive at the base of the climb I crane my head up to see a series of leaning, vegetated ledges zigzaging up to a summit chimney. I am terrified.
With twenty-five metres of rope, three slings and three carabiners we are woefully ill equipped for such a climb and my knee was flicking painfully back into hyperextension with every step. It also began to rain for the first time in ten days.
“Frankly I don’t think I can do this,” I say to Jane.
So, after watching Wak, Emma and Liz climb for a while I wander off on my way with relief and regret all rolled into one.

On the southeast side of the peak there is a chute with a giant chockstone wedged in it - Chockstone gully, down which I am lowered. Jane climbs down to me and sets off climbing up Geeves’ gully. She takes a stance at the end of a long leftwards traverse. After climbing up a way I then have to make the traverse from the right side to the left of the gully. Studying the rope looping down to my left and then peering into the void below, I am thinking, “If you fall now you’ll break your legs.”
But by the end of this infamous gully I am quite enjoying myself, popping from hold to hold and experimenting with the moves that my new body can perform.

On reaching the tent platforms Ant reaches into his jacket and produces a plastic water bottle full of whiskey. We pass the evening in a relaxed haze.
The following morning, after choking down lukewarm porridge, the track falls of into the abyss, down into the tangle of roots, branches and, of course, mud.

Jane slings trees and lowers me through the ooze. Eleven hours to descend two kilometres makes Moss Ridge our hardest day.
When we get into Cutting Camp I fall in the river and there, scratched in the sandy beach, are the words, “YOU’VE MADE IT.”
It is all I can do to shed a few tears.

Mount Kenya - from The Longest Climb

2009-10-21T23:37:00.005+11:00

Excerpt from The Longest Climb

The highest point on Mount Kenya is Bation at 17,058 feet and then Nelion being a few feet lower. They form the mighty twinned peaks for which Mount Kenya is famous. This was too big a burden for me at this stage in my recovery but Point Lenana is only 667 feet lower than Nelion and one can get up it with minimal technical know-how or ability.

There isn’t one single peak named Mount Kenya rather twenty or so separate points, nine of them being above 16,000 feet. They create an ancient lava plug that used to be, long before mankind was born in the nearby Rift Valley, Himalayan in stature. It is said that back then the mountain may have been 6000 to 10,000 feet higher.
I wanted to prove to other people like myself that you don’t have to lie down and give up on life just because you have a head injury. You can still follow your passion, whatever it is, be it cooking, reading or hang-gliding. My passion happens to be mountaineering.
With this Mount Kenya climb I had been raising money for HEADWAY – the brain injury association. The recovery from brain injury is slow. Many people can’t see an end and their resolve to continue battling weakens. They give up on their physiotherapy or neuro-psychology and worse still their families give up on them. They get fed-up with the ‘loony’ member of their family and think they’re putting it on. But there is an end of some kind for most head injuries it just takes a hell of a lot of time. I’m still getting better after three years and I’ll never really stop getting better.
I had used up 5 months of my year arranging raffles and organising a signed book web auction with a hundred and twenty mountaineering books in it. Everyone was so generous but this put a certain pressure upon me to succeed. This pressure was then compounded when Margaret Wicks at Triple Echo Productions told me, with less than a month to go, that they had a commission from BBC Wales to film my ascent.
I was horrified. Would I be able to climb up it? What if I found the terrain too tough? What if I couldn’t cope with the altitude? I was having nightmares about the summit ridge were the rock would crumble and turn to dust when I touched it, with my feet pedalling loose shale.
My wife, Jane, was to accompany me. She was part of my nursing team in Tasmania when I had been in the Royal Hobart Hospital, on the Neuro-surgical Ward. We had been living together for the past two years in Wales and Jane had accompanied me on several of the summits of Snowdonia and Tasmania.
We had been refining our short roping technique were Jane would have me on the end of a tether, like a dog on a leash (I’m kind of wobbly and can topple over at any moment). She would keep a little bit of tension on the rope just to give me that extra confidence.

10th January, Nairobi.
“The short rains have not stopped and will run into the long rains I think,” said the abnormally skinny taxi driver. But I knew that taxi drivers the world over talk rubbish. Nevertheless it was supposed to be the dry season and it was pissing down. What would it be like on the mountain? Would it be deep with snow? This only exacerbated my disposition to worrying.
Jane and I were filmed in conversation with Mr Mount Kenya, Ian Howell. Ian has done more first ascents on the mountain than any other climber and has lived in Nairobi for thirty-three years. “I wanted to climb Mount Kenya when I was thirty-two and I never went home,” he told me. He confirmed that they were experiencing unseasonal weather in Kenya and that we may need crampons and ice axe, neither of which any of us had. I was getting edgy.
Although we were staying in one of the poshest hotels in Nairobi (BBC expenses) we were determined to find the cheapest way of getting to the mountain. The local bus was 50 times cheaper than a taxi and correspondingly less safe. We chewed Khaat (a very popular leaf with a natural amphetamine in it) and sped along chattering and smiling. All the while the driver was going for wild overtaking manoeuvres as if there was no tomorrow.

More than three years after the accident that changed my life I found I was lacking an ambition in my life. I needed a challenge. I guess it’s in the blood, once a climber always a climber. I settled on Mount Kenya more because I had never been to ‘Deepest Darkest Africa’ than any unfulfilled desire to climb the mountain.

Above the Gorges valley with Vivian Falls, the 1000m cliff of the Temple on the right

and in the background Bation and Nelion (in cloud) with Point Lenana in front.

We were attempting the most beautiful route on the mountain, the Chogoria route on the East Side. Most trekkers attempt the climb from the West Side, The Naro Moru route. At Chogoria Jane and I and the small film crew hired 9 porters and a guide and began the 23km drive up the boggiest road imaginable. I lost count of the number of times we had to get out of the Landrovers and start digging or rocking the things furiously. When I say ‘we’ I really mean everyone except me because the driver, Eddie was his name, just wouldn’t let me help. When he saw my disability, or lack of ability, he just wouldn’t let me out of the cab while all the others had to walk for long stretches (there are some perks to being disabled!).

'The boggiest road imaginable'

Urumandi Lodge is at 3000 meters and that is the first place we camped and the beginning of the long trek up Mount Kenya. There were the strangest noises in the dead of night, gruntings and howlings, which kept us awake.

The weather had changed in the night and the sun was beating down as we walked a short distance, just to get me acclimatised, to the next camp. I had been so busy fundraising for Headway that I hadn’t had time to train or go walking for months. This worried me and I thought, “What if I can’t even make the walk in?”

200 meters before the campsite I was forced to stop and deal with painful blisters. I can’t move my right foot at all and it is interesting to note just how much the ‘normal’ person uses the muscles in their foot when they are walking. I have to wear a drop foot splint because my ankle is effectively paralysed and this created problems with rubbing under my toes and on my calf.

At 5.30 in the morning the alarm sounded. When we unzipped the tent door bright lights blinded us. “What the hells going on,” Jane moaned. Meg (the director) and Keith (the cameraman) had been waiting in the bushes since pre-dawn and pounced with their head-torches when they saw movement coming from inside. “How do you two feel at this moment?”

I just turned to Jane and said in a not yet woken up voice, “I told you this would happen.”
We trudged up the hill and approached a flat ridge with the most beautiful view I have ever seen. On the other side of the ridge dropped steep orange cliffs, one thousand meters to a flat-bottomed valley. In The Gorges Valley Vivian Falls tumbled down from the Glistening waters of Lake Michaelson. There were the weird flower stems of cabbage groundsels here and there as well as a profusion of grey petalled and orange stamened Helichrysum (Jane assured me). This carpet was dotted with alpine buttercups and we could see our distant objective for the first time.

There was still a long way to walk that day and I was already feeling giddy with the altitude. I fell off the path and tumbled down a small drop but Bernard, our guide, was there, as he always was, to pick me up. I fall often as due to my one sided weakness as I’m unbalanced.
We had to scramble up a cliff face and as I grabbed onto the rock holds I remembered their texture. For a moment I was lost in a world of reminiscence. I was a good climber once. Now I had to have Jane behind me and Bernard on the outside making sure I didn’t fall. But I was doing it! I was climbing Mount Kenya. I felt much more comfortable now that I was actually on my way instead of feeling the trepidation that comes with intent.

When we came to a stream at 4000 metres I couldn’t go on. We were a couple of miles from our camp but I just had to stop so we put the tents up and got a brew on.
It was here that I felt the intense beauty of the mountain or indeed any mountain from Snowdonia to the Himalayas for the first time since my accident. I sobbed uncontrollably. All those emotions that I had felt when I had been to those wondrous places came flooding back into me. I had held those memories at bay for too long for fear of hurting myself. Now it was like I was seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling all those mountains all at once.

The next day found us walking the short distance to Mintos Camp, which was at 4300 metres. I was showing most of the symptoms of mountain sickness: headaches, lethargy, dizziness and unco-ordination. I needed an acclimatisation day and what more impressive place could I have asked for to kick around for a day. It was like one of those scenes out of Star Trek with the weird rocks and plants all around. The strangest plant of all has to be the giant groundsel, which stands 4 meters high with a massive pineapple head.

Early morning on the 18th February saw an ant line of porters, film crew and climbers traipsing of up the mountain on what was to be my most arduous day. Bernard said in his Eddie Murphy style, “rook in the distance to the far off lidge, well the hut is just the other side of thaat.” The

Kikuyu tribe generally speaks good English but Bernard more so. He spent 9 months at N.O.L.S. (the National Outdoor Leadership School) in Jackson, Wyoming learning how to be a guide.

After four hours of hard, sweaty work we rounded the ridge. The hut was nowhere in sight but across a couple of kilometres of loose scree and behind another ridge. “Well, you got us then,” I laughed wearily in Bernard’s direction.

The landscape was very different now, barren and desertified, hardly any vegetation in sight. We had to descend to a boulder-field, which is my enemy, to get to the continuation of the path. This was what I was so worried about; I could easily break my leg on these sections. At least I had my footballers shin pad on should my lower leg go down a hole. I was also wearing my usual skateboarders elbow guard for when I toppled over and my wrist splint to combat spasticity.

Jane ran ahead to set up camp. She had never been to altitude before and ran as though she were at sea level. She collapsed on the scree with her lungs about to burst after a hundred metres. When I eventually climbed over the ridge the camp was immediately there, all set up.

There was also a hut built of wood, which the porters would sleep in.
We now saw several brightly coloured tents amongst the moraine and quite a crowd of all nationalities. We had hardly seen a soul thus far and were somewhat put out to have our solitude interrupted. We were constantly surprised that this, the second most popular mountain in Africa, was so empty especially as this was the height of the tourist season. The west -side of the mountain or Naro Moru route is the busiest way up and that is why we left it well alone. I want a quiet time. The less number of people staring and questioning me about how I came to be like this the better.

The night was freezing cold and when the alarm sounded at 5.15 am there was rime ice all over the inside of the tent. We started the final 250 metres to the summit in the semi-light of the dawn of another perfect day. After about an hour we came to the first difficult section. I didn’t have a rope on and felt the exposure, the void bellow me, with a dizzying pressure from above.

I got stuck at one step on the sharp ridge for 15 minutes. I tried just about everything. Imagine a shelf sticking out at waist height with nothing underneath it. Now imagine you only have the use of one arm and one leg. Difficult eh? With Jane and Bernard on either side of me I hopped in the air and spun my bottom round so that I could perch on the ledge. Once sat down I walked my cheeks backward onto the projection and with my hand swung my leg up onto it. I lifted my other leg up and then powered up on just one leg. I was shaking with fear. I informed Jane that I would need a rope from now on.

A little further along the ridge was a wall, about 5 metres high and moderately steep and difficult. I had to be belayed up it and the joy of actually climbing again, on a rope, was overwhelming. My face was split from ear to ear with a huge grin. I made it quite easily and straight away my mind was occupied by pretensions of harder climbs.

The Bation and Nelion were just on the other side of the Lewis glacier and we could see the summit hut glowing in the sun. Ian Howell built that hut by soloing up to the summit of Nelion thirteen times with pieces of the thing! Determination counts for a lot.
Just one last step of about three metres and we had made it. The summit after all the planning, worrying and fundraising. I’d raised nigh on £4000 for Headway by undertaking this climb. But more importantly was the awareness raised in the climbing community of head injury issues.

'Travails with a Mule' - From The Longest Climb

2009-10-21T23:33:00.005+11:00

sequel to the Totem Pole, 'The Longest Climb' details the epic road back to the mountains.
Mount Kenya, Djebel Toubkal, Federation Peak and Kilimanjaro all feature.

Excerpt from Chapter 6: 'Travails with a Mule'

How I would have relished the pain of a thousand metre slag-heap, the burning that I knew so well, like my muscles were on fire. How I would have cherished the freezing cold in the early morning, the dry thirst in my throat as we ascended, the glare as we contemplated the horizon of late morning, from up high. I would have given my right arm, literally, to climb to the summit of Jebel Toubkal. It only got in the way anyway.

After the guys had eaten lunch we headed on down. Worried as I was that I was still suffering mountain sickness I wanted to descend as quickly as possible. I mounted the mule with the help of my two friends and once again, less than twenty hours after arriving at the Neltner Refuge, rode down the narrow path in the direction of Imlil.

The descent was excruciatingly difficult and, as my legs were still not in stirrups, I felt the full weight of the right one. When the mule jumped down a one and a half metre drop I would almost be bucked off, but much more furiously than on the ascent. Over the beasts head I would repeatedly be thrown, but not completely, as I had my left hand firmly gripping the back of the saddle. The only way I had any chance of preventing this from happening was to lie on my back all the time, almost resting the back of my head on the mule’s backside. It must have looked very strange indeed to the other trekkers, a man, seemingly of good health, lying down on the back of a mule with a look of horror in his eyes. In this manner I rode for a few hours until what I had most feared happened:

Grids and Phil had ran ahead to have a cup of tea at Sidi Charamouche leaving me alone with Sid, and Mohamed the muleteer. We were traversing a particularly unstable scree slope, which fell away to the right, my weak side. The dead weight of my dense, limp leg coupled with the ever-loosening saddle strap around the mule’s belly to affect a disastrous consequence. The saddle swiftly spun around the mule’s girth with me loosely sat in it.

Suddenly I found myself upside down with my head between the mules kicking legs. There was a vertiginous, ballbearing scree-slope dropping off by my shoulder. On looking up I could see the Mizane River raging several hundred metres below though the rucsacs, on which I had been riding.
The rucsacs were strewn across the path and one sack was balanced awkwardly on top of a crag. Sid went down to the bag and gingerly grabbed it and lugged it back up to the track. If it had rolled off down the slope it wouldn’t have stopped until it reached the river.

Unfortunately I had omitted to wear my climbing helmet; I normally would wear one during such a hazardous pass-time as horse riding but it was packed deep in a rucsac (I forgot to ask for it when the mule was being loaded up). When I am wearing the helmet I get rather odd looks from other trekker’s; I expect they must think, and rightly so, that I have epilepsy. My head hit the rocky path with a thud and, momentarily, I feared that I had cracked my head open again though I soon discovered that it was with little impact.

Because of the hole my skull it feels vulnerable, delicate like a paper lampshade, brittle like an eggshell,. With a 10-centimetre gash in my head it feels as though the skull could be squashed in a fist, and it seems open too, for it is only covered by a thin mantle of scalp and dura mata.

The mule stilled quickly and stood quiet while I clambered and squeezed out from between the piteous creature’s legs. Noticing a rock by the path I dragged myself over to it and perched there, holding my head in my hands, beneath an over-zealous sun. After four hours of dangling my legs were as if dead.

Where were the guys?
They were nowhere in sight as I fell into a new chasm of despair. I wasn’t feeling any better than I was in the refuge even though we had shed 400-metres. This gave cause for some hope though; hope that the affliction I was experiencing maybe wasn’t due to the altitude. It was an occasion for jubilation really, that I had only got a stomach bug and that my head was fine with this altitude, but I was in no mood for rejoicing and anyway, I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

Mohamed loaded down the mule again as Sid ‘urged’ me to get up onto my feet and mount the beast. A sweeping motion of the hands accompanied by a deep growling accomplished this ‘urging’. When I attempted to get back on the mule my spastic right leg repeatedly kicked the poor creature in the face. Sid kept motioning for me to stop my involuntary action and shook his head in dismay as if to say, "How could you be so cruel to a lowly animal."

Finally I was back lying in the saddle and the mule clopped and clambered down the steep, rocky path...

'The Longest Climb' will be out soon! Keep an eye on Paul Pritchard's website!

Deep Play

2009-10-21T23:30:00.009+11:00

A Game One Climber Played Chapter 11 of Deep Play.

I AM LYING in long grass, naked I think, foetal. Warm. It’s so pleasantly warm.
I can hear distant cries. Children playing? I am adrift, going further and further toward slumber. I don’t see but I feel I am surrounded by tall hedges. Insects buzz. Darkness begins to creep over me - my eyes are shut but I can feel it. Still warmth and a smiling comfort. Someone takes my hand - she must be knelt by me. I don’t open my eyes, nothing need be physically gestured.

Then the hand slips inevitably away and I am left in a cavernous night with all the contentedness of a young child dozing in the afternoon. This is it, the most beautiful part of all my life. Utterly final.

“Paul.” A distant voice calls out.
“Paul,. wake up.” Nearer now.
“WAKE UP.”
Leave me alone. Let me sleep. Let me go.
“Come on, Paul, WAKE UP My body is being shaken violently. In anger now I turn to scold my disturber. “Why don’t you just…”
… LIGHT My eyes open. Someone has just thrown an electrical appliance into my wet dream and 240 volts are put through me. A blur. It’s too bright for me to see. I want to ask questions (Where am I? What the hell is going on?) But it’s impossible. I am just a single painful thought in a space of white noise. Then somewhere, below me and my thought, a body, I think related to me, attempts to breathe. An implosion of sharp points. The body convulses and is thrown onto its side. Lines, horizontal, vertical, diagonal. Beginning to focus. And colours, too. I gain some comprehension of what I am. And colour! A jet of red pisses out of my mouth and then a deafening sigh. Convulsions follow. More red water. Enormous gasps. Daggers are screwed further into my chest. My chest!

“Paul, you’re in Wen Zawn and you’ve just ripped all your gear. You hit these rocks and then you went in the water. This is Glenn.”

The words swim around in my head looking for a place to attach themselves. They settle in all the wrong places, though anagramatically they make some sense … Glenn Zawn … Hit the sea rocks …“You’ve been wedged under water for about ten minutes. I pulled you out feet first.” Glenn … Gogarth… “Glenn,” I shout but no sound comes.

Again I try to inhale the white noise but my throat will not allow it. Something, stabs and twists. This is it. You’ve done it now. You’ve punctured your lungs for sure. Sleep … Sleep. Yeah go on, go to sleep and you’ll die, you pathetic shit. Is that me or someone else being cruel?
I sob uncontrollably. My eyes focus now on Glenn. He’s trying to solo up the wall of the Zawn. My whole body feels broken. Is it spread over all these rocks.

“Don’t leave me, Glenn.” Still nothing comes out. Like a dolphin I dive in and out of a sea of unconsciousness. I want to continue my sleep, but my slumber is intruded upon.

“Paul, wake up - I’m your doctor and I just want to put this tube up your nose. Swallow as I push it in.”

The sky, the sea, the walls of the zawn are stark white and ugly. The whole world is ugly. The pieces of my life are shaken through a sieve and the finer particles settle around me. My family, my friends, the woman I love. My body shudders in waves. I’m falling again but I can never tell if it’s for the last time.

“Paul, it’s raining outside. Let’s stay warm under the covers. Let’s stay in bed.'
Am I this sad for them or for me? What a profound welling up of all the unfinished stories. The potential fairytale endings or the emotional farewells.

From my right temple blood wicks across my wet face. It’s still raining. My shoulders feel like they’re in pieces. With each tiny gulp of air I inhale more panic. I want oxygen. Another time I slip into blackness.

“Paul, wake up - the stars are out, the weather’s clear. We could be at the base of the Torre by 8.30.”

Pain in back, in pelvis, in both ankles.

Glenn has dressed me in his clothes, but still I have gone beyond the shivers. From time to time the rigidity falls from me as though I am soaked in a hot bath. Then again distant voices laugh and shout. I strain but they don’t come nearer. My imaginary saviours drift away. I am held.
“Paul, wake up.” Glenn is slapping me about my face. “Don’t sleep, it’s dangerous.” Now he’s holding up a piece of frayed wire.

“Look, you snapped a bloody wire. And the tide’s coming in pretty fast.” The bag of bones rattles on the hard, spiky floor. The tide could come in, night could fall, a storm could blow in from the west. I could slip out of my own back door and never return. It’s not a problem for the bones. But it is a problem for Glenn. I hear him shouting. He informs me that five hours have passed.

My eyes hinge open. Above, the walls of the zawn are like the ribcage of some giant animal seen from the inside. The clouds are bent. For a fabulous moment my view becomes the cupola of Madrid’s church of San Antonio, a circular sweep of Goya’s colourful people against dull grey and green. The saint performs his miracle as the murderer slinks off into, the crowd. The livid corpse I don’t see. Over the railing San Antonio beckons to us down here. He waves. I feel important, at the centre of his miracle.

They all wave.

The Totem Pole

2009-10-21T23:29:00.009+11:00

Excerpt from THE TOTEM POLE

The day dawned cloudy and blustery. Celia and I ate banana, mango and oats, filled the Nalgene bottles from the outside tap of the toilet block, slung our rucsacs on our backs and walked off up the narrow track. The path wound all over the place and up and over fallen trees.

Celia was nervous. I attempted to make conversation, “we seem pretty lucky with the weather", but she wasn’t having any of it. It was then that I realised that she didn’t want to be there at all. She was doing this for me and me alone. I had been so selfish that I hadn’t seen it in her or, to put it more succinctly, chose not to see it in her before, such was my obsession. Whenever I was involved in a climbing project I was completely obsessed, from the beginning until its completion.

The tormented water had the consistency of a creamy head of beer and lumps were breaking off and flying round and round in the wind that was rushing through the narrow channel. I felt nervous for the first time. It was a mad perspective from where I was hanging. The tower’s twelve-foot width seemed to taper to nothing at the base and it felt strange that it should still be standing.

The rope danced in the updraft as if it were some uncontrollable serpent as we cast it loose. I put my Decender on the rope and slid over the edge watching Celia’s face depart.

I was aiming for a two-foot dry patch on a half drowned boulder alongside the Totem Pole. As soon as I landed I commenced fighting for my balance on the seaweed-greased rock, first sticking my crotch out and then my arse. All the while my arms behaved like the crazy cop in the silent movies who is trying to stop Harold Lloyd’s motor car.

The next minute I was up to my waist in the sea that was flushing through the narrow channel. I couldn’t believe my bad luck, we only had one try at this and I just blew it. I would be hypothermic soon if I didn’t get out of these soaking clothes and, besides, my boots and rope were wet and my chalk bag was full of water.

I fixed my jumar clamps onto the line and took in the slack, which is about two moves on the rope. I cut loose in a swing off the boulder.

I had to tuck my knees up to avoid getting my feet in the water as I flew around the arete… And that is the last thing I remember - until I came around with an unearthly groan.

When I regained consciousness I was upside down, confused and there was blood pissing out of my head. I was immediately aware of the gravity of the situation. I needed to get back upright if I was to stem the flow of blood so I concentrated on shrugging my pack off. Once off, I tried again and again to get myself sat up in my harness but failed miserably. I was too weak and strangely uncoordinated. I gazed despondently down at the orange stain spreading in the salt water from an obtuse angle.

I had a moment to reflect on what seemed to be my last view. A narrow corridor of pale grey cloud flanked by two black walls, with the white foam of the sea, which was turning quickly red, right there by my head as a ceiling to my fear. I could feel the life’s blood draining out of me, literally, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Suddenly Celia was there, by me, telling me sweet lies about how it was all going to be OK. “I heard a splash", she said in her Buckinghamshire/Yorkshire accent. “You’ve taken a little rock on your head but you’ve had worse.” It’s funny but those untruths are extremely comforting in moments like these. It’s like you want to believe them, so you do.

She prussiked the thirty meters back up to the ledge and rigged up a simple two-way pulley system through a carabiner. Now, I weigh eleven stone and she weighs nine stone, so you may ask how is this humanly possible? You must have heard about the child who lifted a car off her father who was being crushed when a jack failed. There are numerous such stories of superhuman strength fuelled by adrenaline. I can only put this down to just such an event. She says it was hard, but it had to be done, she had no choice in the matter. She either did it or I died. So there was no decision to make.

Celia struggled in desperation for three hours to get me up to the ledge but faltered at the last hurdle. There was a right-angled edge to be surmounted to get me onto the ledge and the harder she pulled the tighter the rope became without moving me. “You’ve got to help me here if we’re to get you out of this", she barked. It was the first time I’d heard her lose her composure over this whole episode. I tried to placate her by telling her not to worry but a tired moan was all that came out of my mouth.

She gave me a hug, then told me she was going to have to leave me and get help. I was terrified that it was the last time I was going to see her but I didn’t show my feelings. She was probably thinking the same thoughts.

Writing as Catharsis

2009-10-21T23:28:00.005+11:00

It was difficult to recognise the moment when I came round. It could have been two minutes or two days ago. I didn’t know where I was. Where was up? Where was down? Where were all these tubes and wires going? Up my nose. Into the jugular vein in my neck. Into the vein in my arm. Onto a peg on the end of my finger. Nurses kept coming over to my bed to administer drugs and I could feel their icy trickle flowing down my neck or up my arm. Then, as if by magic, my pain would disappear.

I regained consciousness again and felt down below my waist with my left hand, as my right arm felt like wood, well there was no feeling in it at all. I felt down past my cock, which had a tube coming out of it as well, stretching it. I then felt lower down the bed. My left leg was intact, all the feeling of a normal leg.

But where the hell was my right leg? I franticly felt around the mattress groping, unseen. I couldn’t sit up to see what they’d done with my leg. A thousand thoughts ran through my head. They’ve amputated my leg! Am I going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life or could I get by with a wooden leg? “WHAT IN FUCKS NAME HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY LEG!” I screamed out silently to a passing nurse.

Why do no words come out of my mouth? Not even an unintelligible sound. I became desperate. Then, all of a sudden, there was Celia’s face, full of compassion and sorrow. She shed a tear and hid her face behind her hands. Again, I tried to speak. I wanted so much to comfort her. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right. Just fine".
I hadn’t a clue what had happened to me. I couldn’t even remember the last place we had been.

“And by the way, I love you.”

Nothing came out. I couldn’t even ask the nurse whether I would be like this for the rest of my life.

Celia is attempting to communicate with me. She is saying that I am in Tasmania, in the Royal Hobart Hospital, and that I was trying to climb the Totem Pole, on the Tasman Peninsula. “You had a rock hit you in the head and you have just gone through a six hour surgery".

It doesn’t make any sense. How can I be on the Totem Pole one minute and then here, in hospital, with all these tubes coming out of me the next. There’s a huge, squishy hole just left of the centre on my skull and I can feel metal staples through the tape.

I remember the day now. Waking up in the tent and walking the eight kilometres out to the Totem pole. I remember the rope traverse onto the ‘Pole’ itself and rappelling down it. There, I can hear the roaring of the waves like distant bombs exploding. I can still smell the seaweed, like iron tastes. We were alone.

No sooner had I got to the foot of the ‘Tote’ than I was up to my waist in the sea. Soaking wet. I shouted to Celia to come on down, but to stop at the ledge, and to tie the rope off there. I remember putting my rope ascenders on and making two moves on it before swinging wildly to the left… Then nothing. I don’t remember anything else about the next fifteen minutes.

I am now upside down and shrugging my rucsac off into the sea. Celia is shouting at me; “You’ve got to help me here if we’re going to get out of this.” I’m being held upright in slings, the grunting and laborious haul up which I’m told took three hours. I am making noises that sound nothing like me. I lost half my blood as I lay, shaking, for ten hours on that ledge, as Celia climbed out and ran the five miles for help.

***

Over two years have passed since I had that life-changing occurrence. Some would say I am gathering up the scraps of a life torn apart by a terrible accident but I would prefer to call it progressing on life’s pilgrimage. If there’s one physical act that has helped me more than the interminable physiotherapy it is writing.

Writing about, dissecting and studying my misadventure has aided me beyond reckoning. It helped me make sense out of what, at first, seemed not to have any sense at all (there was no nurse trying to kill me. That was all a twisted hallucination). That nurse wasn’t a complete figment of my imagination though. She really existed and by writing about her, amongst other more important subjects, I found I could well and truly lay her ghost.

By placing every little fact out on the page I have seen that I do have mental strength after all and that has given my weakening self-esteem a much-needed boost. Analysing the altered relationship with my family and my ex partner, Celia, has been essential to my present disposition as has the whole exploration of my changed mind (head injuries really mess with the way you think).

Perhaps most importantly writing about what happened to me has aided me in seeing more clearly my place in human kind as no more or less trivial than anyone else’s. In the words of the wise neuro-scientist V.S. Ramachandran:

If you think you’re something special in this world, engaging in a lofty inspection of the cosmos from a unique vantagepoint, your annihilation becomes unacceptable. But if you’re really part of the great cosmic dance of Shiva, rather than a mere spectator, then your inevitable death should be seen as a joyous reunion with nature rather than as a tragedy.

There are many others throughout history who have used the same tool as a way of coming to terms with loss or acceptance. Two obvious examples are Helen Keller with her ‘Story of my Life’ and Christy Brown with ‘My Left Foot’. Another historical figure who may have found healing in the form of writing is Seigfreid Sasoon.
Sasoon’s poetry is well documented as having changed radically after the deaths of his brother Hamo and best friend, ‘Tommy’ Thomas in short succession of each other in WW1. After being given the nickname of ‘Mad Jack’ for a series of death defying missions into no mans land against the German army Sasoon wound up in a military hospital with shell shock. It was there that his whole philosophy on the war swung antipodal, as did his poetry.

Geoffrey Withrop Young, the greatest of pre-great war mountaineers, lost his leg whilst in charge of an ambulance on the Italian front. Despite the surgeons having to amputate above the knee he didn’t give up and went on to climb the Matterhorn on his prosthesis. He published many books but this verse from ‘I Hold the Heights’ in ‘April and Rain’, penned in 1923 shows mental healing at work most poignantly.

What if I live no more those kingly days?
Their night sleeps with me still.
I dream my feet upon the starry ways;
My heart rests upon the hill.
I may not grudge the little left undone;
I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.

In 1997 Australian Warren Macdonald lost both his legs at mid-thigh when a massive boulder fell on top of him whilst climbing Mount Bowen, on Hinchinbrook Island, in far north Queensland. His book, ‘One Step Beyond’ reads like an ode to his lost legs. At first he consoles himself with the positive memories of having been places “that most people have never been, given me experiences most people had never had.” One can sense the sadness in those words. But by the close of the book he has quite accepted what he has become.

At the beginning of his story he likens himself to a baboon he saw once in an African wildlife documentary on the TV. The baboon is trying to get to a water hole that is writhing with crocodiles. In the end, dying of thirst, the hapless primate risks everything and approaches the pool. He finishes up with his head in the jaws of a crocodile but miraculously wriggles free. Macdonald recounts how the rest of the troupe stares at him as if he were a ghost, “because it forces them to face their own mortality.” He likens himself to the baboon as, now in his wheelchair, he feels the eyes of strangers boring into him.

Immediately after the accident he thought “that part of my life has gone forever.” But by the close of the book, just two years later, he has climbed a mountain and, mischievously, can’t wait to pick up his first hitchhiker in his car. Moving on from ‘One Step’ he has climbed Federation Peak, a remote mountain in Tasmania’s wild Southwest. The approach alone involved a three week crawl through dense rainforest and bogs.

I sent him an email asking him if he felt that writing the book had helped him heal at all and his immediate response was; “I didn’t, and still don’t see my writing as a kind of therapy. I saw it more as a chance to tell my story in a way I wouldn’t be able to tell in that kind of depth in general conversation. So I saw it mainly as a huge relief rather than a purging of my soul so to speak.” I didn’t ask him why it was ‘a huge relief’.

Obviously it takes a strong willed person to be on the end of the pen. But you can tell that plenty of this stuff would have just been forgotten if he hadn’t started writing and that would have made healing a longer, more painful process.

Joe Simpson, mountaineer and author, made headline news when descending off a mountain in the Andes, in 1988, with Simon Yates. He fell and badly broke his knee whilst still three thousand feet from the bottom. Yates commenced lowering him down the face for two long days until, in a white out, he lowered him off an ice cliff. After an age Simpson’s weight was threatening to pull Yates out of the snow seat he had created for himself so he did the only possible thing. He cut the rope. When Yates went down the slope and saw the yawning crevasse that Joe had fallen into he naturally believed him to be dead and staggered back down to camp. Meanwhile Joe was having his own private nightmare crawling through the caverns underneath the glacier, over rubble-strewn slopes and eventually into base camp. A very traumatic ordeal to say the least.

When I interviewed Simpson for this piece he said of ‘Touching the Void’ that “digging all those skeletons up only served to scare the hell out of me but that spending twelve years lecturing on the same story, telling it repeatedly, almost fictionalised it somehow, distanced it from my mind.” He continued “That’s the way that the survivors of the Kings Cross fire or the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster were told to deal with it. They told their psychologist and friends the same story over and over until it just didn’t seem real any more.” I ventured that writing a traumatic story down was surely the first step in just such a process. “My second book, ‘This Game of Ghosts’ was definitely a cathartic exercise. An exorcism of the ghosts of friends I’d lost to the mountains.”

With compassion, in ‘Void’, Joe writes himself into Simon’s shoes and in doing so explores what it must feel like to play the part of a killer.

“I had never felt so wretchedly alone. I could not have won, and began to understand the reason for my dreadful sense of condemnation in the snow-cave. If I hadn’t cut the rope I would certainly have died. Looking at the cliff, I knew there would have been no surviving such a fall. Yet, having saved myself, I was now going to return home and tell people a story that few would ever believe. No one cuts the rope! It could never have been that bad! Why didn’t you try this, or try that? I could hear the questions, and see the doubts in the eyes even of those who accepted my story.”

It could be a yearning for what you once were (and could have been) and an acceptance of what you have become that impels one to write, as in my case or simply a preparation for death as was the case with Jean-Dominique Bauby. The author of ‘The Diving bell and the Butterfly’ suffered a massive stroke and consequent Locked-in Syndrome. Completely paralysed and unable to speak, he only had the use of his left eyelid. His speech therapist developed a communication system by way of which he could use his eye to ‘dictate’ these beautiful words:

"My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for king Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realise your childhood dreams and you adult ambitions.”

Bauby died five months later having perhaps through the writing of the book reached some kind of resolution.
It is well documented how Native American shaman or Indian aesthetes will take hallucinogenic drugs to visit that other world which few of us are ‘privileged’ to see. Through severe trauma one gets to places, sees things in the mind’s eye, which others have a morbid fascination in seeing but are, understandably, too scared. Bauby paid the highest price possible to see that ‘other’ side and he had no choice in the matter. He was going on a one way trip whether he liked it or not. He has left an extraordinary book which people can content them selves by reading without, hopefully, ever having to go there.

Victims (survivors) of child sexual abuse are counselled to write about their experiences. It is said to help them in remembering their experiences, exploring and expressing their feelings, facing up to their fears and accepting themselves more readily as who they are now.

"Now I think things out and write them down instead of pushing them down. Once I started writing I couldn’t stop. It really surprised me - I could write better than I could talk. It’s best to deal with things. I’m quite good at that now.”

Claire (survivor in Breaking free).

This has led to some remarkable pieces of literature also, ‘Cry Hard and Swim’ by Jacqueline Spring being, perhaps, the most intense. Described on the jacket as being a ‘beautiful and ultimately healing journey’ it documents in the form of letters and poems to her mother her immense bewilderment caused by her father’s sexual advances. By writing these ‘letters’ she has moved on from feeling psychologically mutilated and an all consuming self-hatred to seeing her father as an ultimately pathetic figure:

"I gather together all the known facets of my father, attempting to join the ragged edges that will not fit, to reconcile the inconsistencies, not, now, with a child’s understanding, but as an adult becoming free. The awareness settles upon me that he is not to be looked at differently, that he is not a different kind of being, that he was neither the hero nor the ogre of my childhood, but perhaps only a human being, beating blindly about in his distress.”

I have mentioned accidents, physical disabilities (which is the category I now fall in to), preparation for death and psychological scarring. You may never be able to change or, ultimately, heal completely but you can learn to live, or die, within your shell. If you are disabled by an accident it will take you some time to accept your new body image. It has taken me nearly two years and I’m still not all the way to accepting mine. But it does get better with time and by writing about it I am convinced that one can accelerate if not precipitate that process.
The question is still begged why Macdonald or Spring or Bauby feel the need to put down in print their very personal story of tragedy for thousands of people to read? We are social animals through and through and we need to share our story with others, compare notes or just tell the world what we’ve been through.

I think that apart from a healing process that is going on here there is also genuine want to empathise or help some one if we can. I have dedicated my book to all those who have had head injuries. As such I have had to be totally honest about my fears of not being able to urinate again and all consuming self-doubts about (at first) my inability to have sex. These are things that others with traumatic head injury will, as I have done, fret about to all heaven.

Oliver Sacks, whilst walking up a hill, alone in Norway was confronted by a bull and, as he turned to sprint, fell off a drop and tore his quadracep off his knee. After a dramatic rescue and long recuperation, when he had the pot removed, he was shocked to find that the leg had no feeling in it at all. Not only was it completely numb but, what was more, Sacks couldn’t call any movement into it. To all intents and purposes it was a corpse leg.

After extensive surgery feeling and movement return to the limb. As a neurologist Sacks had many interesting insights into what horrors await the patient with paralysis. He wrote in his 1984 book, ‘A Leg to Stand on’:

"Now I was free - morally free, as well as physically free - to make the long trek, the return, which still lay before me. Now the moral obscurity and darkness was lifted, as well as the physical darkness, the shadow, the scotoma. Now the road lay open before me into the land of light and life. Now, unimpeded, without conflict or blocks, I would run this good road, swifter and swifter, into a joy, a fullness and sweetness of life, such as I had forgotten or never known.”

Scar Tissue

2009-10-21T23:26:00.003+11:00

Scar Tissue is a short essay I wrote about when I had a Cranioplasty in 2002

Looking in the mirror it is with some effort that I recognise you. The shaved head with the grotesque notch cleaved out of it; a flat, horizontal shelf indented into your skull for two inches and vertical for two inches - just as though a quarter segment has been chopped out of an orange. We shall have to get to know each other again.

This is the first time I’ve seen you bald and I can’t avert my eyes. I feel awkward for staring - one shouldn’t stare. It is with the unwholesome fascination with which one looks upon a ‘cripple’ (just glad that it isn’t you), something I know a lot about, that I now stare at you.

That huge scar makes excessive demands upon my mind, coerces it to take a trip back in time… all the way back to Tasmania…The Totem Pole. Like an indelible, long abiding stamp of misadventure that ditch in my skull serves the past and I am drenched in memories.

It aids the recollection my being on the same Neuro-surgical ward in the Royal Hobart Hospital that I was brought to on a trolley five years ago… The very same grey view out of the ward window, the same sterile white walls (and I assume the same sterile disinfectant smell though since my accident I am bereft of that function), the same sounds; alarms, screams of head injured patients and footfalls of nurses. Drip stand - shower chair - bath hoist - commode - blood pressure sleeve - pulse and temperature. And there, still, Moi, the same nurse whom I hallucinated was trying to kill me the last time I was here. Now it’s only good to see her.

To stare into your eyes is to look into the past, to that Friday the 13th… The tyrolean, the long abseil down The Pole, the water up to my waist, shouting up to Celia that you will have to jumar back up the rope, swinging in a pendulum, the whistling of the boulder through the air… and then… the black silence.

Gawping at that yawn in your skull makes you reconsider what you once were; a climber through and through. It forces you to evaluate your life over these past years - you don’t even recognise that bloke with the paunch and bald head (who’s staring at who here?).

But although your life with certain disability is hard you can’t help smiling at me, with pride etched in your crows feet, and thinking, “You really know how to go for it don’t you.”

As you study me, waiting for them to take you down to the theatre (to get a plate in your skull), I ponder what your being means to you now. You have traversed mountain ranges with a dodgy leg, slept on the ground and scrambled up rocks with one useable arm. Although you are using your body again, the reflections of your past life as an climber, full of agility, keep appearing, all grainy, at the most inopportune moments.

You used to say that the accident was the best thing that ever happened to you for it put you on a different life course; a one-eighty shift from the predictable existence of a professional climber. But now you realise this was you in denial. Although it gave you a beautiful wife and an imminent baby, after five years, you are more realistic. Nobody would wish what you went through upon themselves.

Whatever was to be was to be.

Then I hear a familiar male voice off to my left, “Paul it’s time to get on the trolley mate.”

Foreword from Extreme Rock and Ice

2009-10-21T23:24:00.004+11:00

Extreme Rock and Ice - 25 of the World's Greatest Climbs by Garth Hattingh - is Published by New Holland 2000. This is Paul's foreword for the book:

When I had an accident on the Totem Pole the one question I was repeatedly asked by non climbers was, “Why did you do it? Why did you nearly kill yourself just to climb a rock?”

Because it’s there? Because it’s there? Nonsense!

What about the adrenalin rush? That’s a popular reason for climbing rocks, yet I don’t see it. You will get an adrenalin rush when B.A.S.E jumping or sky diving every time but not when climbing, even extreme climbing. It is much more complex than just a charge of chemicals to the brain.

The only activity I have found that comes close to the act of extreme climbing is yoga. The suppleness required to hold a single position for several minutes, the muscles screaming as lactic acid floods in and the nerves stretch and become taught as steel cables.

The mental agility and strength that is required to overcome the fear that is often engendered on these climbs is that of a yogi master. You are living in that moment and when that moment is gone there is the next moment to contend with. To climb routes of an extreme nature you must transcend your conscious mind, normally so cluttered with, “Have I paid my tax bill and mortgage.”

The climbs in this book are about pain and dread, whether it be the lung bursting agony of climbing in the Himalaya or the fear factor of soloing a big wall. These routes are enjoyed only in retrospect. When you are back on the safe, firm earth, then and only then can you appreciate the magnificence of the Great Trango’s rock architecture or the beauty of an alpine sunrise.

Yoga teaches one to appreciate the journey and not to look to an end. This doctrine in the climbing of such extreme routes might one day save your life.

Introduction to 2003 BMC Year Book

2009-10-21T23:23:00.004+11:00

(BMC is the British Mountaineering Council in the UK)

As begins many assignments into the computer I tapped my key word, ‘ADVENTURE’. The search engine came up with four hundred and sixty five thousand seven hundred and ten links; all of them were advertisements for ‘adventure’ holidays, the whole lot. Between scuba diving on The Great Barrier Reef, canyoning in The Pyrinees, ski touring in Iceland, on safari in Africa or hangliding in Russia, you had the choice. Are these real adventures or does a more authentic manifestation lie out there waiting for us somewhere?

At one time I used to think that to live a life of adventure one simply had to live life on the edge, climb miles above ones gear, Shoot the hardest rapids and dive from the greatest heights. To jump headfirst into that unfathomable, dark hole. With a more mature hindsight I now realise that I had missed the point.

In Deep Play I wrote that the entirety of life was the adventure and the mountains were the mirror (with which to see the reflection of a life were anything is possible). Now I believe that the entirety of life is the adventure AND the mirror. That true adventurer Helen Keller wrote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

It doesn’t matter what one does with this life as long as it isn’t wasted. To fritter ones life away through torpor and sloth is perhaps the greatest sin.

My own experience may be a little different to other people’s as I hold that I have been on an unimaginable adventure without leaving the bounds of my, then immediate environment, which consisted of hospitals, ambulances, doctors and therapists. When I had my now well documented brain injury, I looked upon it as the longest expedition I had ever been on. That was 4 years ago and I am still travelling along that very same path, the path of healing, taking it one precise step at a time. This is the most vital adventure I have ever lived through and it didn’t involve traversing snowy lands or sailing vast oceans. Letting go of all earthly ties and abandoning my ego, that was what I did, to be taken by the hand to wherever that path led. The rock landing on my head wasn’t the adventure, that was just bad luck. But it did precipitate it, and it was at that point there began a whole lifetime of very different adventure.

Adventure is a journey of which one doesn’t know the outcome. Just as Doug Scott, with his legs broken, didn’t know if he was going to make it down the Ogre or Peachey Carnehan, in Kipling’s ‘The Man who would be King’, couldn’t fathom the culmination of his arrogant scheme. OK so he was killed; everybody knows that death is the ultimate adventure. Don’t worry we won’t go there.

I often look to eastern philosophy when I am having trouble understanding a problem. One would think that Buddhism would teach that adventure is for those who don’t want to look in on themselves, don’t want to face themselves. Simply a distraction. On the contrary: Even Buddhist texts advise us to live an adventurous life. Geshe Sonan Rinchen in the ‘Thirty-Seven Practice’s of Bodhisattvas’ urges us to, “Give up your homeland.”
Perhaps the untrue adventure, those holidays and other journeys were all the looking is done for you, do not allow you to grow, but are just yet another example of detached consumerism. Whereas on an adventure of which one doesn’t know the direction, a hard on-sight lead perhaps, or a new cave passage, there is plenty of deep searching and learning just who’s in there to be done.

The word adventure dates back to the fourteenth century French, which in turn originates from the Latin adventus – to arrive, when the Hundred Years War was in full swing. It is girdled by words such as danger, risk, loss and daring and these were definitely adventurous times that supplied all these elements. Yet the word has become stale like an old loaf of bread and its currency depreciated so that it would take a wheelbarrow of untrue adventures to pay for the genuine article.

In my mind adventure is the opposite of holiday, the two just do not go together. They are anathema. Assuming adventure is of your own making; this is a great ironic mistake. You can’t pay to be mollycoddled in a real adventure. However much you dig and scrape you will not find it. You need to stray a long way from your intended path and perhaps, just perhaps, adventure will then find you.

Back on the rock after nearly seven years

2009-10-21T22:39:00.004+11:00

The Stiltskin Shuffle

Rincon 5.4, Eldorado Canyon, Co.

This was a whole new concept to me; one armed and mostly one legged rock climbing. I was feeling along the wall of a dark cave here not knowing what to expect of my body.

The little bouldering I had attempted seemed contrived in the extreme - a bizarre series of strenuous one arm pull-ups and hops with my foot up the rock. It bore no resemblance to what climbing a boulder used to entail.

In fact that act of bouldering was so alien to me now that I doubted whether rock climbing was for me anymore.

Limp and leaning heavily on my stick I sweated up to the Wind Tower in Eldorado Canyon, Colorado. The approach to the climb itself was a steep winding path, which terminated in a shuffle along a narrow ledge.
Pausing repeatedly, looking up, I had to take care not to topple backwards, so confusing to my senses was this landscape, which once I would have pranced up with inborn content.

Rincon, although a lowly 5.4, seemed dizzyingly high and imposing and I felt daunted. What was I about to get myself into?

“Hey Cris-Ann, that looks really very steep,” I raised my voice up to her as she drifted over the rock as light as a piece of silk caught in the updraught.

“Yeah, but ya know there’s buckets all over here.”

From where I was sitting the rock face appeared practically smooth so this information was well received. I was supposed to be resuming my climbing career on a forty-five degree slab not an imposing near vertical wall, but - one may say strangely - I was quite calm.

I was expecting my post serious injury mind to be freaking out. You know, “I can’t do this. Your going to die,” that sort of thing.

But being without the emotional sack of fear that one drags up to the start of his/her first climb is of great benefit: I’d been through all that twenty years ago.

Dieckhoff lowered Cris-Ann down and tied me in with a bowline. He asked me to check the knot but I declined.

So, with a rope above me and complete trust in Cris-Ann’s belay building skills my climber’s mind reassured me, “You WILL be safe.”

I was used to fluid graceful movement, like a water trickle that had decided to disobey Isaac Newton (though some of my mates would disagree), not this Stiltskin Shuffle. This scraping and scrapping with the rock was interspersed with long, maybe ten minute, pauses whereby I would be at sea on a ledge no bigger than a cigarette packet that had been jettisoned overboard.

Forearm pumping… My forearm… My forearm looking like a bag full of worms! After seven years I could not believe how good that felt… That burning sensation… The red-hot forearm nonchalantly gripped in a pair of tongs and slammed onto the blacksmith’s anvil… The swollen appendage then agonisingly tempered with blows of the hammer and the arteries achingly extruded.

But the transport experienced belied the fact that my body was about to part company with the rock if it didn’t come up with something very soon.

As my other, spastic arm fought to push me from the rock I was unable to release my fist-like grip from it’s precarious hold, because to do that would be to fall from the face.

The knowledge of complete safety brought no salve to my conscience. I clung to the rock; a worn old jumper that would not - could not be disrobed from it.

For several years I didn’t want anything to do with rock climbing. I thought I had quit the rock; But the bud of begrudging casual interest - to throw away climbing would be to throw away many close friends - slowly transformed into a hungry rose which had to be sated. It had been almost seven years since my accident and I was famished. If this was to be my first climb then I was going to give it my all.
Side stepping the outside edge of my left shoe onto a high foothold I powered up on a single thigh made strong by all the mountain hiking I had done these past four years. Aiding me in this manoeuvre was the finger hold my four left digits were crimped onto, and pulling down on, directly in front of my face.
My one useable arm, having to do the work of two arms in daily life over the years, has also seen an increase in strength, as have my fingers and thumb.

Once the leg was straight, and ever so delicately, I let go of the hold now at my waist. Reaching up in a fan like motion I contemplated how students are taught to observe the ‘three points of contact’ rule at all times; and here I was with my one lonely toe.

My fingers discovered a long, deep sloping ripple, as rough as coarse sandpaper. Blindly massaging the rock in an attempt at finding the comfiest spot the fingers settled down to a night slouching in front of the telly.
My right leg then realised it’s turn for action had come. Whilst stabbing at the rock repeatedly with my toe I was mithered by the, “Eee, eee, eee, eee,” of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho shower scene score.

Eventually, with elephantine precision, the limb found its ripple and the foot stayed. Leg shaking like a pneumatic hammer I stood up.

I wouldn’t say this system worked well for me, but it was the only way I could use my new body. So with the rock face always to my left and mugging it with violent kicks I found I was actually climbing.
Reading the rock became much more important than it had been in the past. Sure, I was used to studying the rock around me but not a whole four metres above my head. The precise layout of the holds was as important as the shape of each individual layaway, edge, crack. Was it a sloper or incut? a two centimetre hold or three? the sort of decisions a climber normally has to make, but I was finding a need to force these judgements much further in advance.

The bare knuckle fight with the rough sandstone - more the texture of granite - was leaving a trail of skin and blood behind.

I made a mental note, “Must wear a leather gardening glove next time.”

Being a couple of stone heavier than my pre-injury days the single shoulder, having to do all the work, was feeling it (the day after the climb it was in bits).

But I was loving this. Kilimanjaro was profoundly challenging and brought me back into the circle, the fold of humanity that only exists when you are in close proximity with other like-minded people. But rock climbing was what had always given my life meaning; whether it be in a luminous green gritstone quarry or on the sun-drenched granite of El Capitan. It was impossible to shake off twenty years of tactile memory it would seem.

Dieckhoff soloed up an adjacent route and hung by one arm above me pointing to, “A great bucket here,” or, “A killer pocket there.”

And before I knew it, an hour after leaving the sanctuary of the ledge, and sweating in the glare, here I was at the belay.

There were whoops of delight for me from below.
A cool, “Good work,” from Steve Quinlan, and even a delayed, “Right on,” from my eighteen month old daughter!

There was still a lot to learn about my new (and unlike washing powder) unproved body and many novel techniques to be mastered. After all I was moving into uncharted territory.

Now normally I would shed a tear after such an emotional event but there was too much excitement within me.

Rock climbing would have a place in my life again, only to climb slabs sure, where I would always be in balance, but there are plenty of those - Lliwedd on Snowdon and Idwal Slabs in the Ogwen Valley. The Cioch block on the Isle of Skye and the Rannoch Wall on The Buchaille. I would be able to achieve endless routes on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire. And then there are the international climbing grounds such as Yosemite in California and Handeg in Switzerland.

Six years ago when I sold my eight point eights, big wall rack, skis, plastic boots and desert rack of Friends I thought that climbing rock would be forever out of the question… But I must have suspected something as I couldn’t part with one piece of equipment; my first nut, an original MOAC on rope.

I have realised for some time that I am not going to wring much more movement out of my arm or leg. Correct the brain never stops healing but does get less plastic and therefore slower and slower.

Now I am approaching the end of the road as far as getting better goes and must adapt to what I’ve got (something I have been doing for the past few years).

This doesn’t discourage me one bit and all the striving has not been in vain: it has permitted me to have new adventures such as pedal boating, fishing and caving and allowed me to walk again, write again, cycle again, dance again…

…And now climb again.

The Longest Climb - The Book

2009-10-20T22:32:00.000+11:00

Launched in Hobart on 13 October 2005 at The Hobart Bookshop

Off the grating southern coastline of Tasmania stands a rock monolith known as the Totem Pole. It is the most slender sea stack in the world.

It is nearly seven years since I had a life changing occurrence on this 4 by 60-metre rock needle. A computer monitor sized block landed on my head from 25- metres and smashed my skull. The resulting brain damage meant that I lost the use of my right arm and my right leg has only limited movement. I also lost the power of speech for several months and developed post traumatic epilepsy.

My then girlfriend Celia Bull played a pivotal role in my rescue, hauling me 30-metres to safety and running to the nearest telephone, 8-kilometres away. When paramedic Neale Smith lowered me into a waiting boat I had been lying on a ledge in a pool of blood for ten hours.

Thus began my year-long journey through several hospitals. After a brain operation that lasted the whole night - the theatre nurses had to transfuse two litres of blood - I was in an induced coma for three days. When I awoke I couldn’t move or speak. I was in an hallucinatory nightmare where I feared for my life.

Gone were the days of living for the rock. I had been all over the world with one motivation - climbing. Pakistan, India, South America, the Pamirs. I’d been to those places which dreams are made of. The midnight sun summit of Mount Asgard on Baffin Island, straddling the top of Trango Tower in the Karakorum mountains. Now all that was gone.

Spending the best part of a year in a wheelchair I was evacuated to the Wirral Neuro-Rehabilitation Unit where slowly I learnt how to talk, walk and use my brain again. Some would say I am gathering up the scraps of a life torn apart by a terrible accident but I prefer to call it progressing on life’s pilgrimage; forging ahead and taking the adventure of being head on.

I used to say that the accident was the best thing that ever happened to me, for it put me on a different life course: a one-eighty shift from a predictable existence. I even entertained the idea that I had the accident purposefully, albeit subconsciously to avoid a humdrum life. I didn’t want to go down the road of many of my mates, doing bolder and bolder climbs, maybe getting my own guiding business or, perhaps, coming to a sticky end.
No, knowing what lay around life’s corner was never for me.

But now I realise that this was me in denial. Although my accident gave me a beautiful wife and child now I am more realistic. Nobody would have wished what I went through upon themselves.

Shortly after my accident, like many who have had a near death experience, I found myself making the most of everything in life. Sat in the rehab unit I saw the true beauty and symmetry of everything before me, from flowers and clouds to frying pans and wheelchairs.

After leaving the unit I began tricycle riding and hill walking. I read avidly and cooked and gardened and experimented with my new sexual being.

My first real summit was Snowdon in Wales and it rests on the toss of a coin whether the multi-day climbs of my previous life were more painful and tiring. In Patagonia, following twenty-one nights suspended in a hammock on a vertical wall over 1000-metres of air, I slept for three days.

Snowdon is but a blip on an ECG to that mountain’s spike, but in the upper reaches the path had its own technicalities for me.
“How can a footpath be technical?” I can hear you asking.
But a 10-centimetre difference in the size of a group of steps can alter, for me, what was to be a fairly straightforward day into a complete epic.

Three years after my accident I found I was lacking ambition in the very core of my being. I had been going on expeditions for 15 years of intense thrills and insight into life and death. Now I was in a vacuum in the excitement that was going on all around me.

Like the nourishment of food I needed a challenge. It’s in the blood - once a climber always a climber. The hills of Snowdonia were relegated to a distant murmur. In the dusty recesses of my mind I harboured a desire to go to 6000-metres again.

Being a hemiplegic meant that the actual nuts and bolts of climbing a mountain would be far more complicated than they had been previously. Whole new ways of approaching a problem would have to be developed. What if I had an epileptic fit at 4000 metres? I had to make sure that I never taxed my body too much.

Whatever mountain I did climb now would take several months of planning. I had to be prepared, mentally to say, “Let’s forget it,” again and again and treat whatever I came up against with detachment.

I wanted to prove to other people like myself that you don’t have to lie down and give up on life just because you have a head injury. You can still follow your passion, whatever it is, be it cooking, reading or hang-gliding.

So I wouldn’t be hanging from my fingertips with hundreds of metres of air below my boot-soles any longer, but I could still do easy mountains. In fact, I am becoming aware that these escapades are every bit as challenging as anything I have done.

What I did miss for a while was the yogic element of climbing, holding a strenuous position on a rock-face as if in meditation. But I learned that through disciplined, careful movement on scrambles this is still possible. Trying to pick a way across a boulder field, with dreadful balance and without one of those boulders rolling on your legs, I soon found the yogic element I had misplaced.

The first step on Kilimanjaro was of immense importance to me. It wasn’t just the first step on a mountain close to 6000-metres but the first step on a new voyage, a life of adventure in my new-fashioned body.

Climbing up Kilimanjaro with three other disabled people was profoundly challenging and brought me back into the circle, the fold of humanity that only exists when you are in close proximity with other like-minded people.

The brain never stops healing but it does get less plastic and therefore ever slower. I have realised for some time that there is not much more movement to be wrested out of my arm and leg.

With that half-paralysed leg I have traversed mountain ranges and with one useable arm scrambled up rocks. Although I am using my new body, reflections of my past life as a climber, full of agility, keep appearing at the most inopportune moments. Perhaps that will never cease.

Now I am approaching the end of the road as far as getting better goes and must adapt to what I’ve got. This doesn’t discourage me and all the striving has not been in vain: it has permitted me to have new adventures and allowed me to walk again, write again, dance again…

…And now climb again.

Paul Pritchard

Paul Pritchard

A Game One Climber Played

An Adventurer's Life

Public Speaking

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Eastern Arthurs

Mount Kenya - from The Longest Climb

'Travails with a Mule' - From The Longest Climb

Deep Play

The Totem Pole

Writing as Catharsis

Scar Tissue

Foreword from Extreme Rock and Ice

Introduction to 2003 BMC Year Book

Back on the rock after nearly seven years

The Longest Climb - The Book