Simon Yates of Touching Void - Pleasure and Pain
Simon Yates of Touching Void - Pleasure and Pain at Arlington Arts, Newbury
About the show
Simon Yates of Touching the Void returns to Arlington Arts with his new talk ‘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.
Featuring - Simon Yates
Mountaineer Simon Yates is best known for being the man who cut the rope holding him to Joe Simpson, memorably documented Joe's book (and now film), Touching The Void. Simon has nearly two decades of climbing experience all over the world, and has scaled some of the world's most stunning peaks.