Saturday, August 26, 2023, 00:13
Simon Yates was faced with one of the most difficult decisions a human being can face. He was on an icy wall of the Peruvian mountain Siula Grande (6,344 meters), in the middle of a blizzard that threatened to freeze him and prevented him from seeing beyond his arm. Attached to his waist was a hundred-meter rope from which his roped partner, Joe Simpson, dangled. He had broken his leg in a crevasse and Yates, who was trying to go down with him, did not know if he was still alive. What he was sure of was that they were both going to die if he didn’t cut the rope, since he couldn’t hold on much longer and Simpson’s weight was dragging him into the void. He could only save his life by killing his best friend, who had no chance of surviving. He had a hard time making the decision, but in the end he slashed the rope and let Simpson plunge into the frozen nothingness.
It happened in 1985, when the two British climbers set out to open a route in Siula Grande. Their ascent already started with problems because there was more snow on the mountain than they expected to find. The drama increased when, while reaching the summit, Simpson suffered a fall and broke his tibia. They began the descent but the blizzard arrived and Yates cut the rope.
Simpson suffered a fifty-meter fall from which he was saved by hitting a mountain of powder snow. He was trapped at the bottom of an ice crevice and there he managed to crawl until he found a way out. He then began to crawl up a glacier towards the place where he believed his camp was.
simpsons whisper
He had lost a lot of blood from the open fracture, was starved of food, and began to suffer all kinds of hallucinations. By the third day of crawling he was convinced that he was going to die. Then a foul smell hit him. It was his salvation. Without knowing it, he had reached the latrines of the base camp. He started screaming and Yates, the partner who had abandoned him, ran to help him. Before passing out, the survivor whispered a phrase to him.
Simpson recovered, climbed again, and wrote a book with his story that was made into a movie. What phrase did he say to the friend who let him fall into the abyss? A very simple one: “I too would have cut the rope.”
#limit #decision #kill #killed