If Yates did not abandon Simpson it was because he could not have lived with himself, being so young and with all of his future ahead of him. With zero visibility and Simpson unable to walk, Yates decided to ease his partner down with the support of two meter ropes they were carrying. Standing firm in the snow, Yates lowered Simpson down over the frozen edge, using a braking system that allowed him to control the speed of his descent.
There was only one problem: once Simpson had been lowered 50 meters, he had to stand up on his good leg so that the rope. This gave Yates enough slack so that he could move the knot between the two ropes to the other side of the brake system and lower him another 50 meters.
This had to be done every meters. Simpson stood firm in the snow and waited for Yates to descend before repeating the process. The system was as slow as it was effective. It worked and they were close to salvation. They were completely dependent on their tenacity: there was no way to get outside help. But everything became terribly complicated. The snow stopped Simpson from seeing a cornice in the mountainside, a hidden crevasse: he plummeted 30 meters.
Yates stopped his fall but Simpson was hanging in the air, and the weight of his partner was pulling on him. How long would he be able to hold on? The snow prevented Simpson from seeing the magnitude of the abyss below his feet. How many meters would he fall before dying on impact? How long would it take to die? Unable to climb up the rope, Simpson thought of saving Yates by cutting the rope that tied them together in such an awful way. The weight of Simpson became unbearable: Yates was fighting with everything he had to dig his crampons in the snow and stop himself flying off into the abyss.
He did everything he knew and was able to do to save both lives but after an hour of suffering, he understood that his life depended on a simple but terrible action: cutting the rope.
Simon Yates Self as Self. Joe Simpson Self as Self. Richard Hawking Self as Self. Kevin Macdonald. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. After a tough ascent they succeed but on the descent they run into significant problems.
Soon they are both in dire danger and the chances of surviving are slim. The closer you are to death. The more you realize you are alive. Documentary Adventure Drama Sport. Rated R for language. Did you know Edit. Trivia Some of the long distance shots of Simon and Joe climbing the mountain are played not by the lead actors, but by body doubles, who were Simon Yates and Joe Simpson themselves. Goofs When Joe reaches the bottom of the crevasse and starts crawling on his stomach towards the sunlight, you can clearly see the blue helmet of another person.
Quotes Joe Simpson : You gotta make decisions. Crazy credits During the first part of the closing credits before the crawl , the credits are accompanied by black-and-white pictures showing the three men's journey back into civilization; the final picture is of Joe in the hospital.
User reviews Review. Top review. Gripping from Start to Finish. There are exceptions, but mountaineering movies fall roughly into two classes; overblown, unrealistic cliffhanging in more than one sense dramas 'Eiger Sanction', 'K2', 'Cliffhanger', 'Vertical Limit' and rather trite descriptive documentaries often seen as padding for the 'National Geographic' channel schedules, although Jon Krakaur's 'Into Thin Air' managed to combine the worst of both worlds.
Both classes have in common usually Gortex gear, superb mountain scenery and splendid cinematography. What distinguishes this survival story is that it has sorry about this high drama, an understated style and absolute authenticity. The actual principals, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, and Richard Hawkins the non-climber base camp minder, narrate their story as it is re-enacted, partly at the original site in Peru though some filming was done in the European Alps , while actors with very few lines to say re-enact the saga of the Siula West Face climb.
And after that, just before he seems about to be tom from his deteriorating stance in the snow he has no snow stakes left , Simon does the presumably unthinkable: he cuts the rope and Joe drops into the void. The rest of the book is told in alternating points of views of the two men. At other times, however, the voices slide into a single bleak lyricism, and the characters are hard to differentiate. His escape, the result of his extraordinary coolness and tenacity and some equally extraordinary good luck, is fascinating to follow.
But even more striking is the way he rejects a death that most of us would have supposed inevitable. I thought carefully of the end. It seemed pretty sordid. Finally, his refusal to die so ingloriously gives him not just the strength but the canny determination to find his way out of his enormous icy grave.
Joe is still a long way from Base Camp when he emerges from the crevasse: miles of glacier and moraine intervene. Crawling and hopping, in his crippled progress he resembles no one, or nothing, so much as a Samuel Beckett character: grotesque, without hope, yet dogged. But the question of guilt and responsibility remains.
Joe dedicates the book to Simon and emphasizes that his severing the rope in fact saved both their lives. Never is there the suggestion that he had any choice, other than to do nothing and be dragged to his death. If forgiveness is required, Joe seems more than ready to provide it. Still, one wonders. Although the book has few digressions, there is one that embodies its entire emphasis: a brief, hair-raising account of Joe and a partner living through a night in the Alps after their bivouac ledge collapses beneath them.
Their ropes are cut, their hardware and even their boots are lost.
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