Susil

Profile

Username:
susil
Name:
Susil
Location:
Carthage, MS
Birthday:
01/05
Status:
Single
Job / Career:
Other

Stats

Post Reads:
141,409
Posts:
759
Photos:
4
Last Online:
> 30 days ago

My Friends

> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago

Subscribe

News From Mississippi

Arts & Culture > Touching the Void
 

Touching the Void

Documentary of True Story; film on IFC

This a story of the most incredible feat of endurance I've ever heard about.
Touching the void is about two friends, Joe Simpson and Simon Tates, mountain climbing Brits, who undertake to scale an Andean peak. They summit a mountain and stand on the top at 20,000 feet. Most climbers are killed getting off mountains, and this one is treacherous.

As they begin their descent, Joe makes a mis step and incurs a horrible injury to one leg; the bone fractures and splits and pushes up into his knee. Simon, his partner, soon cuts the rope binding them together, and Joe's body falls into a crevasse. Simon left him and continues down the mountain.
Joe lands on a two foot ledge inside the crevasse, below was a bottomless chasm. He calls out for Simon over and over. He makes a valiant effort to climb upward out of the crevasse, but that maneuver failed. He can't get enough grip with one crampon. His injured leg is agonizingly painful. At the end of his rope, literally, he then makes a last ditch attempt to lower himself on his rope down the crevasse, since he can't go upward.

He lands on a fragile flat ice bottom. He looks up to see a shaft of sunlight coming throuh a chink above and drags himself up a rocky ice covered surface and comes out on a glacier. The glacier is gouged with deep rifts and is impassable, so he hauls out onto the rocks and boulders alongside the glacier. Days pass as he proceeds at a snails pace, crawling and dragging his leg. He describes himself as "insanely stubborn" to keep trying but acknowledged to himself he was going to die, but he'd die trying. He finds water trickling down a rock and licks the rock--he is severely dehydrated. The water gives him enough strength to keep crawling and endure the ordeal.

He began to hallucinate and in his delerium smells something. Incredibly, he has inadvertently crawled into the rocks that serve as the base camp's latrine. He makes feeble cries for "Simon!" The guide and Simon had planned to leave the base camp that morning and Simon had already burned Joe's belongings. Inside a tent, in a blizzard, Simon and the guide hear the faint cries for help and on the verge of death, Joe was found--and saved. The first thing Joe said to Simon, who had abandoned him, was forgiveness and understanding for cutting the rope and leaving him.
What a guy that Joe is!

posted on June 6, 2010 5:48 PM ()

Comments:

This was true? What an incredible story. Not Joe's day to die, but if I was him, I think I'd find a new buddy to do things with.
comment by troutbend on June 8, 2010 7:17 PM ()
This is a true story; isn't that incredible? Joe is one lucky and stubborn fella to have crawled down that mountain and live.
reply by susil on June 9, 2010 8:41 AM ()
What kind of insane selfishness leads a man to abandon a friend to what appeared to be a lonely, agonizing death? If Joe made it on his own, the two of them could have made it. I'd certainly not be his friend any more.
comment by tealstar on June 7, 2010 7:22 AM ()
I don't call Simon much of a man, and I for sure would never go mountain climbing with him again. In the documentary, Simon says he thought of scenarios as he was going down the mountain, that would explain why he left Joe. That sounds like he knew he was guilty.
reply by susil on June 7, 2010 11:03 AM ()
I also cannot understand why men have to be so macho and do these stupid and dangerous things.
comment by elderjane on June 7, 2010 5:31 AM ()
Me either!
reply by susil on June 7, 2010 11:07 AM ()
It's difficult for women to understand the effects of testosterone, but it is a major factor. It's what makes men what they are. Would we want it any other way?
reply by tealstar on June 7, 2010 7:24 AM ()
I couldn't have forgiven him that easily. In fact, murder would have been
on my mind.
comment by elderjane on June 7, 2010 5:29 AM ()
Apparently almost anything is excusable in mountain climbing--people go up there expecting they might die in falls etc, and it's every man for himself.
reply by susil on June 7, 2010 11:06 AM ()

Comment on this article   


759 articles found   [ Previous Article ]  [ Next Article ]  [ First ]  [ Last ]