Joe Simpson – Motivations of a Mountaineer

  1. Where were Joe and Simon climbing?
  2. Describe what is meant by “alpine style” climbing.
  3. Describe Joe and Simons’ motivations for mountaineering as portrayed in the DVD “Touching the Void”. Were there motivations different?
  4. What motivated the pair to continue climbing upwards even though the weather was bad?
  5. Can a person’s motivation change during an outdoor experience?

The first part of the film describes motivations. The epic story of Joe’s survival is about survival, strength, hope, endurance, determination, ……….

  1. Describe your own feelings and reactions to his story of survival.

The film was made over ten years after Joe wrote the book of the same name. Joe Simpson continued his climbing career after his near death experience in the mountains of South America. The extracts below come from his second book “This Game of Ghosts”.

  1. Read through the extracts – they hopefully convey some meaning as to the motivation of mountaineers to climb mountains. The motivations are neither clear cut nor easy to explain. Go back through the text and describe the changes in Joe’s motivation for mountaineering.

p.85
So started our first Alpine season, that near suicidal baptism of fire undertaken by poor souls with enough skill and talent to get into serious trouble but no experience to help them get out of it...... All the words I had devoured about the exploits of the great Alpine and Himalayan climbers had fired my imagination to such a fever pitch of anticipation that it never occurred to me that I might become a victim of these mountains, a shattered bloody relic of overweening ambition.

p.87
I wanted to do only hard climbs, great north faces, impressive and daunting rock routes. I wanted a 'tick list' of hard routes under my belt. I wanted to be a great climber, craved the false glory that I thought went with being a 'hardman'. I did not realise then that I could never be something that existed only in my boastful mind. At the same time, it seemed wrong to want such things, shallow and superficial. I suppose it, was only ambition, vaunting ambition perhaps, a goal which gave me incentive, but which to my guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic mind was wrong. Pride was a sin. So I persuaded myself I climbed because the routes were good, so aesthetically beautiful, and so fine, which was partly true as well as being an easy way out. It cosily covered the real reasons.

pp 100-101
Dave moved fast and with confident efficiency while I wobbled along behind. He was unaware that I had no snow and ice experience in the Alps, and I didn't tell him in case he chose not to do the route with me. But my fear evaporated with the fleeing dawn shadows. It was replaced with a mixture of wonder and delight at being on such a stupendous mountain. As we climbed higher I knew, deep inside, that we were going to succeed. There was no reason why I should believe this but I did. I had never before had such an exultant feeling. I had stood at the foot of a huge north wall and knew unquestionably that I could climb it, that I was strong enough and good enough, and knew as certainly as 1 had ever known anything that this was exactly where 1 should be and what I should do. It seemed wonderfully irrational and ludicrously egotistical. It needed no justification, no rationale. It had to be done, and done well, and nothing more.

p 119
... When I walked away from the avalanche I was somehow committed irrevocably to a chosen path. I knew what I wanted, and that was to climb. I wanted to be good enough to go to the greater ranges the Andes, the Karakoram and the Himalaya, and to climb on those mountains. I wanted to travel, and to see other people's lives and cultures, to climb their mountains and keep putting myself back into that transient perspective I had found in the Alps. I didn't want a career, or marriage and a family, or anything that would tie me down and hold me back. I simply wanted to be free, and being in the mountains was the most liberating experience I knew. It was quite the opposite of everything I had been brought up to think and do. The fact that non-climbers could never understand made it all the more special, like a secret held within, the minds of a select few.

p 212
Suddenly climbing seemed to be a very silly thing to do. If climbers that good could be snuffed out so swiftly, then what on earth had I been hoping to achieve in Peru? The combination of the deaths of friends and associates and the terrifying experience of being left for dead on Siula Grande had stripped me of all my previous perspectives. It was a shock to find myself so abruptly alienated from a way of life that before had seemed so positive and enhancing. Seeing it with different eyes was uncomfortable. I didn't like to feel that 1 had been fooled, that we all had been fooled, and that the lives lost had been no more than a pointless waste. Yet I couldn't escape from the insidious idea that ready it was a mug's game, that we had simply been blindly chasing our tails.

p 257
Dropping our massive rucksacks to the ground, we stood silent and motionless at our first sight of the mountain looming above us. It was much bigger than we had expected and so much more beautiful. I felt the old familiar tingle down my spine as the mountain beckoned me at the same time as it repelled me. 1 knew at once that Richard had been right to encourage me to return. I felt at home here. It was where I needed to be.

In an inexplicable way it was like a great shadow lifting from me - a far more cathartic and healing experience than writing or psychoanalysis could ever have been. It filled me with a sense of joy and relief to discover that I loved the mountains; if I had rejected them and seen only menace and terror in their ridges and faces, then all the things I had experienced on them in the past would have become meaningless. All the summits reached and fears felt, and all the friends lost would have become worthless; everything would have seemed a senseless waste. Suddenly I realised that my fear of returning was as much a fear of this sort of disillusionment as it was of what the mountains could do to me.

p261
Nine weeks before I had flown out to Pakistan the doctors, with exquisitely bad timing, had chosen to clear a mess of fibrous growths and bone chippings from my damaged knee. The knee cap had been removed and the debris washed out of the joint. It was the fifth operation on the knee in two years. I went to the Karakoram without much hope of being able to climb. A month before departure 1 could barely walk. In fact the knee was so weakened by the operation I doubted whether I would even reach base camp. When we discovered that we had miscalculated the cost of porterage and could afford only half the required number of porters, it meant we had to carry ninety, and in Tom's case, one hundred pound rucksacks. I was convinced that my knee would not be up to the strain.

There was nothing else to do but to see how far I could get. The three days were purgatory for us all but, to my astonishment, I not only reached base camp but grew stronger and stronger as the weeks went by, eventually joining John and Rickets in a summit attempt. Then I had to drop out. The strain on the knee finally took effect and it became dangerously unstable. It would have been madness to continue with the climb. I watched my two companions carry on up the mountainside from the vantage of a high camp with a mixture of disappointment and happiness. Above all I was delighted to find that my love affair with the mountains was stronger than ever.

When John and Andy got back, having successfully made the first ascent, I knew I had to return, if not to Tupopdam, then certainly to the mountains. If I could no longer climb then simply being among them would suffice. This was a radical change in thinking for some- one who detested walking unless there was something to climb at the end.

p 276
In a curious way, maybe the climber stops living when he begins to climb. He steps out of the living world of anxiety into a world where there is no room, no time, for such distractions. All that concerns him is surviving the present. Any thoughts of gas bills and mortgages, loved ones and enemies, evaporate under the absolute necessity for concentration on the task in hand. He leads a separate life of uncomplicated black and white decisions - stay warm, feed yourself, be careful, take proper rest, look after yourself and your partner, be aware. Be aware of everything until there is nothing but the present and there are no corrosive fears to eat away at confidence.

Joe Simpson.doc

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