WHEN Simon Yates and his climbing buddy Joe Simpson conquered the West face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, they were breaking new ground.

The 6356 metre peak had never been scaled before. They had beaten the odds and exceeded their expectations.

However, the celebration soon turned to tragedy.

Near exhaustion and frostbite forced the intrepid duo to make a quick descent. A zero-visibility storm made conditions difficult, and progress was agonisingly slow. The next day, whilst making their way down the North Ridge, disaster struck.

Joe, who was some distance ahead of Simon, stumbled, fell, and broke his leg. Aware beforehand that if anything went wrong on such a hardcore route, a mountain rescue party was unlikely to turn up, Joe thought, “I’m dead.”

Not willing to leave his friend to die a lonely death on the mountain, Simon improvised. Anchoring himself in a snow seat, he began to manually lower his crippled companion down the mountain on a 90 metre rope in the fading daylight.

It was a risky business for both of them, but it was a testament to their mountaineering skills that they managed to descend 3,000ft in both darkness and appalling conditions.

Yet their search for shelter ended badly when Simon inadvertently lowered Joe over an overhang.

With no means to communicate his predicament or to support his own weight, Joe hung suspended in space.

Not knowing if his climbing partner was alive or dead, Simon dug in deep and took the strain of the rope which connected him to his friend.

For nearly 60 minutes in biting conditions, he held fast, but with every second which passed, he felt himself being dragged inch by inch, closer to the void which would kill them both.

On that bitterly cold and desolate mountainside, the 22-year-old, relatively inexperienced mountaineer was forced to make a terrible decision that most of us will never have to make.

If he continued to support the strain, both he and Joe would be dragged to a certain death, but if he cut the rope, he would live, but Joe would in all probability die.

With no time to think and moments to spare, Simon chose life. And life for both Simon and Joe would never be the same again.

In a state of shock and exhaustion, Simon returned to base camp. And three days later, flying in the face of a certain fate, so too did Joe.

With a shattered leg, where the lower bone had forced its way through the kneecap, the injured mountaineer had crawled his way out of the massive crevasse he had fallen into.

Over a course of four days without food and water, Joe had dragged himself back to base camp. He arrived just as a grieving Simon was preparing to leave.

The year was 1985, and news of the pair’s adventure spread like wildfire.

Years later Joe Simpson documented the bestseller in his bestseller 'Touching the Void' and Simon's part in the story is is just one of the many, the man hailed as one of the most accomplished exploratory mountaineers of all time, will be telling when he visits the Savoy Theatre in Monmouth on Wednesday, February 4 at 7.30pm for a talk entitled, "My Mountain Life."

Contact the theatre for more details.