Pritchard Deep Play

Climbing the world's most dangerous routes
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-906148-59-1
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

Winner of the 1997 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, Paul Pritchard's Deep Play is a unique, stylish and timeless commentary reflecting the pressures and rewards of climbing some of the world's hardest and most challenging rock climbs. Pritchard started climbing in Lancashire before moving to join the vibrant Llanberis scene of the mid 1980s, at a time when the adventurous development of the Dinorwig slate quarries was in full swing. Many of the new slate routes were notable for their fierce technical difficulty and sparse protection, and Pritchard took a full part in this arcane sub-culture of climbing and at the same time deployed his skills on the Anglesey sea cliffs to produce a clutch of equally demanding wall climbs. Born with an adventurous soul, it was not long before Pritchard and his friends were planning exotic trips. In 1987, paired with Johnny Dawes, Pritchard made an epoch-making visit to Scotland's Sron Ulladale to free its famous aid route, The Scoop. Pritchard and Dawes, with no previous high altitude experience, then attempted the Catalan Pillar of Bhagirathi III in the Garwhal Himalaya in India, a precocious first expedition prematurely curtailed when Pritchard was hit by stonefall at the foot of the face. In 1992, Pritchard and Noel Craine teamed up with the alpinists Sean Smith and Simon Yates to climb a big wall route on the East Face of the Central Tower of Paine, Patagonia. Pritchard followed this with an equally fine first ascent of the West Face of Mt Asgard on Baffin Island. Other trips - to Yosemite, Pakistan and Nepal as well as returns to Patagonia - resulted in a clutch of notable repeats, first ascents and some failures. The failure list also included two life threatening falls (one on Gogarth, the other on Creag Meaghaidh), which prompted the author into thought-provoking personal re-assessments, in advance of his later near-terminal accident on The Totem Pole in Tasmania. A penetrating view of the adventures and preoccupations of a contemporary player, Deep Play stands alone as a unique first-hand account of what many consider to be the last great era in British climbing.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pritchard, Paul

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION PLAYING THE
SYSTEM
I am definitely a climber who writes. I’ve always written about what I’ve done and how I felt about myself and those I went with. I have come home from trips with battered books full of scribblings, half of it illegible, self-indulgent babble. At home I have mulled things over, added reflection to the gut reaction of my diaries, and somehow ended up with finished pieces. But the rock has always come first. Illness on return from trips has allowed me the time to create and smashed bones have also been kind to me, holding me back from my normal unquestioning frenzy of activity and forcing me to sit and think. Indeed I would not have found the time to put these writings together had I not suffered a broken back in Scotland. I used to be so single-minded. Girlfriends and great things I could have done were left behind as I kept searching for the perfect climb. Then, after I fell at Gogarth and momentarily died, I had so many questions to ask the night. I couldn’t make any sense of it all and I began writing as an exorcism. At first I thought that moment of drowning felt too good and this terrified me but, as I wrote, I began to make some twisted sense of it all. Most importantly, the trauma of the events which are documented in this book have helped me to grow and have taught me valuable, very personal lessons. Falling at Gogarth revealed to me my position within humankind; as unimportant as anyone else. That insight allows me to treat all others as equal to myself more readily. There I also learned that death can be painless, yes, but more than that, utterly sublime. This simple knowledge has helped me reconcile the sad thoughts of friends who have died in pain – Ed and Philip and Teo – though it also revealed to me that death really was the end and that there is no time to waste in this short term that we have. Joe Tasker and Menlove Edwards are two people who have inspired me to put pen to paper, Tasker for his honesty and Edwards for his sensitivity. I will never forget being shocked, as I first read Savage Arena, at the vivid description of the arguments which Tasker and Boardman had on their ascents, arguments which many climbers would try to hide for fear of causing offence and embarrassment. And the admission of the fact that their motivations often came from the less admirable corners of their psyche. What can I say about Edwards? Only that, for me, he transforms his insight into nature and the society around him onto paper better than any climber I know of. Nothing or no one seemed able to disguise anything from him. I admit to wanting to emulate their traits but, I hope, I keep my own style. This is not a simple autobiography. I have tried to give a whole image of the existence and psyche of a climber from my generation, for I do not see myself as so unique within it, though of course A Game One Climber Played and other moments in the book are very personal to me. This is why some of the chapters appear altered from what has been published in magazines. A magazine that readers dip into, not knowing what kind of excitement they are looking for, and so only happening across a piece of your life, is not the place for such intimate subjects. In a book, on the other hand, readers must go out and find, already knowing that they want to learn about you or read what you have to say. The rock climber who learns his craft and then makes the transition to the mountains is less common now than in previous eras and so my stories of trips aren’t perhaps so typical of my genre. But there are a number of us who, even though we might not have experienced it first hand, have roots in the past, have a great respect for the old pioneers and the evolution of our climbing lives would seem to mirror theirs to some extent. My generation of climbers, the ones who began making their impact in the eighties, had their own peculiarities that set them apart from other generations. These differences were a result of social circumstances in the UK at the time. We had time on our hands and an opportunity to forfeit the worker’s life and just go climbing. Some called us selfish. It was a world which produced a crop of British climbers in the early to mid-eighties who showed the world how it was done. I wouldn’t be so bold as to rank myself alongside eighties sport climbers – Myles, Moon, or others who were of that new ‘leisure class’ – but in my own way I feel I’ve given something to climbing in Britain. I have threaded lines up mountains and sea cliffs and shown others where to go. It wasn’t all selfish on my part; I have created steep, mind-testing challenges for climbers to stretch themselves out on. Asgard’s velvet smooth wall, Paine’s mile-long knife-blade crack, Meru’s Shark Fin I needed to try. They were only imaginable for me after a decade of living for the rock every day, blowing off everything else. My need to get stronger, to use all my time struggling towards my dreams, even though I had no private wealth, is what some found disagreeable. There was a letter sent in to an American climbing magazine once deriding me for “lacking in character” because I indulged my passion “at the expense of the British tax-payer by claiming the munificent British Dole”. There are many of this opinion when it comes to judging the out of work. I would like a little room to explain the system I grew up in. I would like to give those people a portrait of the Lancashire of my youth. In ’79, after Callaghan lost, it could be said that the blanket attitude of the young began to change. By ’83 there were 4,000,000 men and women unemployed, workers’ morale was sinking. Companies won contracts by paying their workers less money for longer hours. The dismantling of the heavy industries and the move toward communications and finance sucked the life out of the industrial areas. This led to a widespread loss of respect for the Conservatives in my home, a northern mill town, which still endures today. To the north of Manchester the miners’ strike brought communities to tears, as the collieries of Brackley, Ashtons Field and Hulton stood silent. But, for us youngsters, this was now the land of opportunity, the government told us anything could be ours. We were free to gamble, but if we failed, we would be at the bottom of the heap. When it came time to leave school most of my friends either signed on as unemployed or went on government job creation schemes. The ones that signed on had free time to develop sometimes obscure skills that seemed at first to have no use to the community. Later this would be seen not to be the case as, throughout the country, champion runners and cyclists and famous painters and writers emerged. At Hulton some of our neighbours went through the picket lines to work because their families needed food. They compromised principles, though they agreed with the strikers’ cause. Moral decay had been forced. Nationally this went even further as armaments became one of the biggest industries of the UK, our most marketable product, and who the buyer was didn’t matter. How do climbers fit into this you may wonder? Out of the ashes of this social, economic and moral turmoil the full time climber rose like some scruffy, bedraggled phoenix to push the boundaries of what was possible on our crags, quarries and sea cliffs. There had already been full-timers for a while then. Bancroft, a gritstone cult hero, was probably the original dole climber back in ’77, followed by such masters as Allen and Fawcett who gave so much to us younger climbers. When I stood at the bottom of Beau Geste or Master’s Edge I could see them moving just as I wanted to move. I wondered if I could ever be like them. Many then could still use university as an excuse to climb. Grants were good and it gave lots of free time, and a chance for MacIntyre and Rouse to become such great mountaineers. Later, as grants decreased, students even had to work their summer holidays (as they still do) and the university life became less appealing to the dedicated climber. As the young athletes strove to ascend wilder and wilder rock climbs the endeavour became more time-consuming. They had to train long and hard to develop the power needed to create these masterpieces. These climbers paid little thought to the politicans in Westminster, who were inadvertently creating an environment most suitable for the serious climber – with so many unemployed it was easy to sign on. How could they prove you weren’t actively seeking work if there wasn’t any work to be found? And it became easy to justify too; you could go out to the sea cliffs self-righteous in the knowledge that another was working and feeding his family as a result of your sacrifice! We did look for work, me and my friends, but we were not going to go into a factory after the freedom we had tasted. That no jobs were ever offered to us by the job centre, as was the system, only reflected the economic circumstances of the country, especially in the rural areas of Wales. So why should I not use my time to go climbing? It now seems ironic that my passion contributed to the transformation of the gigantic Dinorwig slate quarries, the scar left after the community was near fatally wounded by its closure. Together we unemployed bums created, from what was once a thriving place of work, and then a vast, silent ugly space, a place of leisure for the weekend climber. And it was hard, dangerous graft, let me tell you, the clearing of loose rock and the drilling, just like the quarrymen had once done. Harder than any desk job I used to think. But the dole handout or the government climbing grant, as we...