Higher Education: A Big Wall Manual: The Complete Big wall manual

‘I haven’t climbed Everest, skied to the poles, or sailed single-handed around the world. The goals I set out to accomplish aren’t easily measured or quantified by world records or ‘firsts.’ The reasons I climb, and the climbs do, are about more than distance or altitude, they are about breaking barriers within myself.’

Andy Kirkpatrick was born and raised on a council estate in Hull, one of the UK’s flattest cities, and suffered from severe dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until he was 19. Thriving on this apparent adversity, Andy transformed himself into one of the world’s most driven and accomplished climbers, and an award- winning writer.

The US magazine Climbing once described Andy as a climber with a ‘strange penchant for the long, the cold and the difficult,’ with a reputation 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.’

Andy’s specialty is big wall climbing and winter expeditions, which involves pitting himself against a vertical climbs of over one thousand metres (almost three times as high as the Empire State Building), often in temperatures as low as minus 30C. Andy has scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan – one of the most difficult rock walls in America – over ten times, including two solo ascents. One of these ascents was

a 12-day solo of the Reticent Wall, viewed at the time as perhaps the hardest climb of its type in the world. In 2002 he undertook one of the hardest climbs in Europe: a 15-day winter ascent of the West face of the Dru. This one thousand metre pillar pushed him and his partner to their limits and was featured in the award-winning film Cold Haul.

Andy has also taken part in three winter expeditions to Patagonia. The stories that Andy h