Andy Kirkpatrick

‘I haven’t climbed Everest, skied to the Poles or sailed single-handed around the world. The goals I set myself aren’t measured in world records or “firsts”. The reasons I climb, and the climbs I choose, are about more than distance or altitude: they’re about breaking barriers within myself.’

Andy Kirkpatrick grew up on a council estate in Hull, one of the flattest cities in Britain. Severe dyslexia went undiagnosed until he was nineteen. Against those odds, he became one of the world’s most driven and accomplished climbers, and an award-winning writer whose books have been translated into a dozen languages.

The American magazine Climbing once described him as a climber with a ‘strange penchant for the long, the cold and the difficult’, known for ‘seeking out routes where the danger is real, and the return is questionable, pushing himself on some of the hardest walls and faces in the Alps and beyond, sometimes with partners and sometimes alone.’

His speciality is big-wall and winter climbing: vertical faces more than a thousand metres high, over twice the height of the Empire State Building, often in temperatures as low as −30°C.

He has climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan, one of America’s hardest rock walls, more than thirty times, including five solo ascents. One was a twelve-day solo of the Reticent Wall, then regarded as perhaps the hardest climb of its kind in the world. In 2002 he and a partner spent fifteen days on a winter ascent of the West Face of the Dru, one of the hardest climbs in Europe, an ordeal captured in the award-winning film Cold Haul.

He has also climbed in Patagonia, Greenland, Alaska, Antarctica, Africa and Arabia. The stories he has brought back have become modern classics of climbing literature, giving new meaning to the words ‘epic’ and ‘cold’.