Simon Yates of Touching the Void – Pleasure and Pain

‘Touching the Void’ mountaineer Simon Yates is a veteran of over eighty expeditions to high and remote mountains around the globe. Now in his sixties, he is showing no signs of slowing down!

This is his story of the last decade, of new adventures and climbs in the far north and south, along with summits in South America, Central Asia and the Himalayas.

In 2023, Simon travelled with legendary British mountaineer Mick Fowler to attempt the unclimbed north face of Patkhor in Tajikistan. Their trip ran smoothly until the first evening on the mountain when they both contracted food poisoning from their freeze-dried food. After some debate, they continued, but this was just the beginning of a series of events that would see them run out of food, retreat below the summit in a storm, and Simon taking a bone-breaking 100m fall during the descent. After two days of lying on the glacier waiting for a helicopter, rescuers finally arrived but were unable to carry Simon down. Somehow, he would need to summon the energy for the painful three-day walk to safety.