Going 'Beyond the Void' with Simon Yates

At age 22, British alpine climber Simon Yates made a life-altering decision. To save his own life while descending Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, he cut the climbing rope that connected him to his injured climbing partner Joe Simpson.

When Yates cut the rope, Simpson fell into a crevasse and Yates thought Simpson had died.

"I was convinced in my mind Joe was dead in the bottom of the crevasse," Simpson said.

Several days later, after crawling out of the crevasse, down a glacier and over the moraines, Simpson arrived at the base camp at 2 a.m., the night before Yates was planning to leave base camp.

"It was pretty good timing on his part," Yates said about Simpson's arrival.

Yates' and Simpson's story recently made it to movie theaters as a docudrama called "Touching the Void." Now at age 41, Yates is still alpine-style climbing, ascending a mountain with a light amount of gear and doing the climb in a single push.

Wednesday night, Yates presented "Beyond the Void" at the Wildcat Theater at Weber State University. "Beyond the Void" is a humorous lecture and slide show about his life climbing that Yates has been presenting around the world.

"I thought it was a great presentation of a great mountaineer and what climbing can take you to do," said WSU student Mathew Witherspoon. "It was very interesting and quite hilarious also."

Yates, who has visited every continent and climbed the Alps, Himalayas, Andes and other mountain ranges, spoke briefly about the accident on Siula Grande. He spent most of his time speaking about his other adventures.

He talked about spending a summer climbing in Chamonix, France. While on the trip, his car was broken into, the oil gauge light never turned off and his car caught fire in a friend of a friend's driveway.

"I was very sad until I remembered the insurance policy covered fire and theft," Yates said.

He also spoke about traveling around Thailand on a Honda 125 motorcycle, following a map that showed roads that had not been built yet and hitchhiking across Australia with a truck driver who constantly fell asleep at the wheel.

The majority of the presentation was about his first ascents of many 6,000-meter peaks in the Himalayan mountain range. A member of the audience asked Yates how many first ascents of mountain peaks he has.

"I do not know, but it is a lot," Yates said.

Three to four years of Yates' life has been spent mountaineering and alpine climbing in Pakistan alone. At one point in his life, he guided climbing in Scotland in the winter and spend all summer in Pakistan.

While visiting WSU on Wednesday, Yates taught a writing workshop to a group of creative writing students.

"He talked to them on how to turn experience into text," said Mikel Vause, WSU english professor. "It was really quite good; he spent about two hours this afternoon with about a dozen students."

While Vause was editing the expedition journals of Chris Bonnington, he met Yates and invited him to come to Utah. Vause and the English department, along with the Wilderness Recreation Center, helped bring Yates to WSU.

Before he leaves Utah, Yates plans to do a little ice climbing, and he will be the keynote speaker for the Weber Pathways fundraiser dinner at the Timbermine restaurant on Friday night. After speaking in Utah, Yates is headed back to England for a week of lecturing, and then he and his family are going to New Zealand.