One of the Most Incredible Stories of Survival

I wanted to briefly share an incredible story of survival and highlight one of the most powerful aspects that we can all try and emulate in our own life. For the full account of this story check out the book and documentary Touching the Void. 

In 1985 mountaineer Joe Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates were climbing a 21,000 foot mountain in the Peruvian Andes. They reached the summit and on the descent Simpson fell and broke his leg. Yates worked for hours lowering his friend down the mountain, but when Simpson was lowered over an ice ledge, Yates could not lower him further, or pull him back up. Finally moments before Yates was pulled off the face of the mountain, he cut the rope sending Simpson plummeting into a crevasse. 

Sure that his friend was dead, Yates made his way back to their basecamp. However, Joe Simpson was not dead, and over the next 3 days he miraculously climbed out of the crevasse and then crawled back to camp with no food or water and a broken leg! 

Simpson, who authored the book, continually mentions this voice in his head as he was crawling towards camp. The voice became an almost separate entity from his own consciousness and it demanded that he kept going. It would continue to set goals for him, to try to reach a certain rock in the next hour or only allow him to rest for 30 minutes. By the time he reached camp after 3 days and nights, he was hallucinating due to the dehydration and exhaustion but it was this voice in his head that had led him back to safety. 

So what is this voice? Is it some combination of our will to live and our conscience? Is it a higher power? Whatever it is, it is so important that we harness it. When things are tough, when feeling overwhelmed whether in the backcountry or anywhere in life, try and sort through the noise and find that voice that will guide us to do what we need to do.