From climbing up mountains to jumping off them
Over 5 years ago my parents gifted me a guidebook for the Isle of Skye. It’s so remote I never thought I would get the opportunity to visit. I looked through the book and a tick list of places to visit grew but stayed un-ticked. Until The North Face gave me the opportunity to visit these iconic places.
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Every year we would fly to Munich and then drive to the small town of Galtür for our family ski holiday. My parents have been going to the same place for over 30 years. The year 1999 was different though. Read more
You don’t know until you know. I recited this in my head as we walked in the rain and then later as we bivvy’d in the howling wind. At 7am Nick lead the first pitch and the conditions were the best we could have hoped for. The rock quality was superior. The conditions were not going to be an excuse to bail. I knew we were going to complete the route.
Light in the mountains provokes various thoughts and considerations. Natural lights, stars and the moon promise a settled night, ideal for an unplanned bivi halfway up a route, while the lights of a mountain refuge can give you assurance after several long days on a route. Sometimes the lights from bedrooms, street lamps and porches give me entirely different thoughts:
 
Deep water soloing makes me push myself harder than any of the other climbing disciplines. The fear of the fall motivates and gives me the appetite to finish the route. The cold British waters, jellyfish, wet shoes or a redraw back are enough to put me off falling at all. And these are always in the back of my mind, but once I’m focused on the rock and have set aside these fears, I can climb freely and in relative safety without ropes. Though this mindset can sometimes be hard to achieve. The water is a fine line between being a safety net that urges you to climb higher, and at the same time makes you dread falling, as you realize it could mean hitting the water uncontrollably onto your back from 10m. Winded underwater, then coming up spluttering and gasping for air.
The Eiger is an extreme playground that I’ll keep on returning to. From the history of the North face, hard rock climbs, steep skiing and BASE jumping, it has it all. Over time people have pushed the boundaries of these sports on the Eiger, and throughout their history the mountain has also changed. The original ascent was done at the height of summer, while now spring is your best chance to climb the north face. Even now prime conditions can be hard to find. When we reached the summit from the 1938 route we had been on the face with 7 other teams all making the most of the rare, opportune conditions.
Access
Traveling from Stanley to MPA at around mile 22 a prominent crag can be seen on the right.
Description
The quarzite rock is of good quality, lots of top anchors and mostly good protection, tho the routes will probably need cleaning. There is a lot more chance for development in the area the north side of Mount Harriet has some long slab crack climbs, and the south face has some steep climbs with small roofs that could make for some hard routes.
When we first had a chance to climb in the Falklands I did a lot of research and contacted people to see if there any any routes had been recorded, apparently a scrapbook of routes does exist in the Gyms office on the camp, though no-one knows of it now, so for that reason I believe that some of these climbs might have been climbed before, but here is the first record of it online:
James and I went to school together, where I remember the first time I found out he climbed and I asked if my trainers where good enough to climb in. 10 years later having never climbed a single route together, we are bivied out at the base of the North Face about to attempt the infamous Heckmair route.
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It felt out of place, leaving the pub car park with axes and crampons. My B3 boots hit the pebbles on the beach, slipped on the seaweed and got sprayed by the seawater, it was a weird place for mountaineering gear to be.
