Joe Simpson

Biographical Record & Archival Chronicle

Born on August 13, 1960, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to a British Army officer, Joe Simpson was educated in England and discovered rock climbing at Ampleforth College. By his early twenties, Simpson had established himself as a dedicated alpine-style mountaineer, tackling difficult classic routes across the European Alps, including the Dru and the Eiger North Face. In May 1985, Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates traveled to the remote Cordillera Huayhuash in Peru to attempt the unclimbed 1,000-metre West Face of Siula Grande (6,344 m). Climbing in pure, lightweight alpine style without fixed ropes, the pair successfully reached the summit on June 8, 1985. During the descent along the precarious North Ridge in a raging blizzard, Simpson slipped down an ice cliff and shattered his right tibial plateau into the knee joint. In an extraordinary display of partnership, Yates lowered Simpson down 3,000 feet of storm-blasted slopes using two knotted 150-foot ropes, until Simpson inadvertently slid over an unseen overhang, hanging suspended in free space above a colossal crevasse. Unable to hear Simpson's shouts and being pulled from his precarious snow belay, Yates made the agonizing decision to cut the rope. Miraculously, Simpson survived the 150-foot fall onto a snow bridge inside the crevasse. Over the next three and a half days, without food or water and suffering agonizing pain, Simpson crawled, hopped, and slid across five miles of crevassed glacier and boulder moraines, reaching their base camp tents just hours before Yates planned to depart. Simpson documented this triumph of the human spirit in his 1988 masterpiece Touching the Void, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize and was adapted into an award-winning feature documentary. Despite multiple surgeries, Simpson returned to mountaineering, climbing in the Himalayas, Andes, and Karakoram, and authoring several acclaimed books exploring danger, fear, and human resilience.

Notable Milestones & Ascents

• First ascent of the West Face of Siula Grande (6,344 m) in June 1985 with Simon Yates
• Survived a catastrophic crevasse fall with a shattered tibia and crawled across the glacier to camp
• Authored Touching the Void, winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize and NCR Award
• Pioneered challenging alpine routes across the Karakoram, Peruvian Andes, and Western Alps
• Elected honorary fellow and acclaimed patron of alpine safety and ethical mountaineering