Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Elite climber known for first-time ascents, three Everest summits, and discovering George Mallory's body.
On the island
Eight records
bfings me to being in the mountains because when you’re out there and you’re doing a climb and it’s four or fifive days in a row and every night you have to find a place to sleep. Whether it might be scratching something out of the ice or hanging from a piton on the side of a granite clifff, you have to find shelter.
This is The Wolf… it’s this great story about a young man who leaves home and gives everything away and he goes out to see what the world is. And for me, one part of it is that when I got out of high school, I just disappeared. I think I sent my mom and dad one or two postcards… I wanted to see the world and experience it. I wanted to be responsible for myself. But moreover, what it sounds like, it’s just so haunting and evocative of being in really wild places.
Trumpet Concerto in E♯ major (opening)Favourite
Wynton Marsalis with English Chamber Orchestra
I love classical music and every day we listen to it, whether it’s at dinner or when we’re doing homework… Haydn is one of the best composers, and having played trumpet as a youngster in school and knowing how difficult it is, it’s just a wonderful thing.
This is a Pacific Northwest band… it’s kind of what it’s like in Montana.
Del Tit Nu. This is a track by a young artist from London and I had it with me in 2012 when I summited Everest and it just brings the emotion of being at the summit of the world looking out over a sea of clouds… there’s no lyrics. It’s just a great melody, a really nice riff. And to me, it says, I’m in the mountains.
I love the mandolin, and it’s an acoustic song by Led Zeppelin… It brings to mind the album cover. It was this old grainy photograph of an old man carrying sticks, and then you opened it up, and it was like this black mountain with spiraling up. I was a young guy when it came out… it is another song that brings the emotion of being in a high, remote, wild, cold, inhospitable place.
This is the song that goes out to everyone that I’ve lost out there, Alex and Muggs, and Kevin and Seth…
Old Man by Neil Young, but this is a remix by Red Light King. When I was 24, I had a spray-painted blue Econoline that I drove up to Alaska, and we did this great climb… I’m 50 now, Max is 24, and there’s that theme in there that what I’ve done, I’m passing on to the next generation… it pays tribute to the past, but it hints at the future.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:45How much risk is too much by your standards?
Too much risk is when you feel that you can’t turn around and you can’t control it anymore. But it’s what I love to do. And on my days off, I go climbing. I just love that playing with gravity and interaction with rock that’s millions and billions of years old. That connection I have with my partners of trust and reliance. And I couldn’t live without it.
Presenter asks
5:45When you’re living a day like today — walking down a big high street in London, sitting here having a glass of water — does it all seem very dull?
No, I’m always alive. Life is it’s just amazing. I mean to be in London, to walk where we’ve been and see the architectural highlights. And I was in the British Museum yesterday and saw the Egyptian and the Greek collection there and the school children looking at them. And yeah, every day is I live in the moment, so I’m psyched.
Presenter asks
6:23The fact that you’ve experienced touching the void makes everything more vivid for you, does it?
It does. And I mean some people are like, why are you doing this to yourself? But when you’ve done that, then you have an appreciation for people that are hungry, or people that are living on the street, or the 80% of this planet that’s pretty much living on a pound a day. So you have empathy for other people when you’ve seen how tenuous life can be.
The keepsakes
The luxury
It would be the rope and rack, and that is what I use to climb with. Okay. And I just hope the desert island has a cliff.
Presenter asks
13:44When you are climbing, you can at times be holding another person’s life in your hands. Where do you get the confidence to do that?
From the equipment, knowing that it’s going to work, knowing the systems that you can build into it, and then if someone belays me and they catch my fall, then I have that trust in them. And then we will go back the other way that they can trust me with the rope. And that’s a pretty important thing because getting dropped by a climber, that’s our parlance for someone that lets go of the rope, and the rope whizzes down, and the person hits the deck. Worst case scenario, they become an angel. Best case scenario, they crack a leg or hit their head.
Presenter asks
21:07There was controversy stirred up by the response to your discovery of Mallory’s body. Mallory’s daughter was upset, Sir Chris Bonington objected to the publication of photos, Joe Simpson described your team as grave robbers. How did you respond?
It was a tough thing. I was 36 at the time and my life and my identity was climbing. And I think the problem arose from the manner in which the photographs were released. And they went out to the highest bidder. And in this case, it was the tabloid press.
Presenter asks
25:15In 1999 you were climbing with your very good friend Alex Lowe, there was an avalanche and Alex was killed. You yourself barely survived. Can you tell me what happened?
We were in Tibet to climb Shishapangma, which is a 8,000 meter peak, and this huge avalanche high up cut loose and then came down. And we ran for our lives. David and Alex were buried in it. And there was a big white cloud of snow crystals in the air, and then it cleared and settled, and they were gone.
“Too much risk is when you feel that you can’t turn around and you can’t control it anymore. But it’s what I love to do. And on my days off, I go climbing. I just love that playing with gravity and interaction with rock that’s millions and billions of years old. That connection I have with my partners of trust and reliance. And I couldn’t live without it.”
“Yeah, it’s a portal edge and so you have an aluminum frame with a nylon bedding on it and you use your climbing hardware to clip it into the cliff and midway up an overhanging cliff you can set up camp and sleep in there. And I love after a day of being outside you and your buddies pile in there and you’re all stinky and you’ve just got that taste of adrenaline in your mouth and you’re just like, wow, here we are. We’re living life.”
“It does. And I mean some people are like, why are you doing this to yourself? But when you’ve done that, then you have an appreciation for people that are hungry, or people that are living on the street, or the 80% of this planet that’s pretty much living on a pound a day. So you have empathy for other people when you’ve seen how tenuous life can be.”
“I’ve found that climbing for me is that’s my therapy because I have to live in the moment. If I make a mistake, I’m going to break my leg or something worse. And so when I’m there, I’ve got to make that move. I’ve got to have the equipment. And the fact that there’s risk involved with it makes me be in the moment. And that is a great thing.”
“What we do as humans is all generationally passed on from one to the next, and figuratively I’m standing on the shoulders of all those that came before me in the climbing world… At the same time, if you are a high-altitude climber, you are going to see bodies. You’re going to have to make peace with death and mortality. And if this brings that conversation in a modern context, then that might be a good thing.”
“Jenny and I were close and brought closer because of the avalanche and both of us were suffering. Jenny through the loss of her husband and the father of her three sons and I was going through survivors’ guilt and compounded with the whole Mallory story that had just happened five months earlier and I was like, gosh, had I done something really wrong? And was this some sort of cosmic, karmic retribution.”