Yorkshire mountaineer Joe Simpson was left for dead high in the Andes but survived to tell the tale. Mike Priestley reports

It's the worst nightmare for everyone who climbs mountains - and for everyone with a powerful imagination who would love to climb mountains if only they had the courage.

Two of you are roped together on an icy ridge high in the Peruvian Andes, one with a leg shattered in a terrible fall.

You start to descend as best you can in the circumstance, you - the injured one - sliding down first while the other controls the rope. But then the descent steepens suddenly and seconds later you find yourself dangling over an abyss.

With your injured leg, you are unable to climb back up to the snow. Time and again your companion above you tries and tries, but can't pull you to safety. He feels himself slipping and knows that unless he does something dramatic, something unthinkable, the two of you are certain to plunge to your doom.

So he cuts the rope and you fall alone, into a deep, dark crevasse.

Certain that you are dead, he begins his own slow, guilt-laden descent to base camp to recover his strength and make plans to return home.

But you aren't dead. You are perched precariously on an ice bridge in the crevasse with just empty darkness below you. Every movement of your twisted, swollen leg is agony. You have no food and no water and very little in the way of climbing equipment.

But what you do have is a powerful will to survive and to find your way out of the crevasse, across the glacier and down the boulder-strewn moraine to the safety of the camp you left behind days earlier - assuming, of course, that the camp is still there......

That was the situation in which Joe Simpson found himself at the age of 25 when his ascent of the unclimbed West Face of the remote 21,000ft Siula Grande with 21-year-old Simon Yates turned to disaster as the pair made their way back down, triumphant.

Joe did make his way to safety eventually, of course - yard by yard, foot by foot and sometimes inch by agonising inch - and wrote his gripping account in the book Touching the Void, which has just been republished ten years on with a postscript putting the blame for the incident squarely on errors of judgement by the climbing companions.

They hadn't taken enough gas to melt the snow and keep them hydrated. They hadn't eaten or drunk enough, and they carried on climbing long after nightfall. They allowed themselves to become exhausted and dehydrated.

"Ninety per cent of accidents are down to human error," says Sheffield-born Joe. "We are fallible, and accidents will happen."

To survive such an ordeal could reasonably be expected to bring about a profound spiritual change in an individual.

But although Joe was spurred on through the grim days of his descent by what he describes as The Voice, it was not the voice of God. It was, he says, his own rational side fighting against the panic and defeatism that constantly threatened to undermine his determination to survive.

"I was brought up a Catholic, but at 16 I realised that I didn't really believe any more," he admits. "Nothing happened on that mountain to change my mind."

What did change his outlook, and his life, was the success of the book, which he wrote a year after the accident from notes jotted down in his diary while he was recovering in hospital in Lima.

"I changed from being an anarchic climber to being a writer, with a mortgage and responsibilities," he says.

Writing the book over a mere seven weeks was, he admits, a very upsetting experience. He hasn't read it since. Lots of other people have, though - 70 per cent of them non-climbers fascinated by the idea of someone being left for dead and winning through against all the odds.

"I've lost a lot of friends in accidents over the year," says Joe. "They just didn't get the breaks that I did."

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