Dave Roberts - Is Climbing Worth The Risk?

Kendal Mountain Film Festival is fast fading into the blur of 2006, but we still have a few relics from the book festival tucked up our sleeves.

Back in drizzly November, we cornered American climber Dave Roberts looking at some Lakeland paintings in Kendal library, and had a chat with him about his latest book, 'On the Ridge Between Life and Death'. It's raised a bit of a furore in the climbing world as it reveals Dave's second take on the question of whether climbing is worth the risk. Aged twenty-two, after three fatal climbing accidents, his answer to that question was 'yes, it is'. Now, that's all changed...

First of all, you said in your book that when you started climbing, the sport wasn't considered trendy or sexy like it is now. So what made you start climbing?

Yes, when I started climbing in Colorado it was considered very nerdy - there were only about six of us at my high school involved in it. Skiing was much more social and girls went skiing, but no girls climbed.

I only got seriously into climbing when I moved from Colorado to Massachusetts, to go to Harvard. I thought it would be the other way round because Colorado is mountainous and Massachusetts is much flatter. I didn't think the Harvard climbing club would be very serious but it turned out to be the most serious undergraduate climbing club in the country.

And you had several serious accidents in your first few years?

Yes, my memoir is about why I kept climbing after being involved in three fatal accidents by the age of 22, the first of which took place after only four months of climbing, with my first climbing partner. We were 18 - we'd just graduated from high school. It was quite traumatic of course and I'd pretty much decided to quit, but then I drifted into the first climbing club meeting at Harvard. There were guys there who were just a few years older than me and who'd done really serious climbs in places like the coastal range in British Columbia. It was just too impressive to ignore.

Your thinking on that has changed now? At the time you decided that it was worth the risk - you wrote an essay on it.

I wrote 'Moments of Doubt' for Outside magazine - the leading outdoor magazine in the US - in 1989. It was essentially a rationale for climbing despite tragedy. I'd put as my title, 'Worth the Risk'. That was my conclusion, that the joy and the accomplishment made it all worthwhile. It took me until years afterwards to realise that that's a completely self-centred analysis.

The most important thing that changed my mind was a visit to the family of my first climbing partner. His father had died in a car accident just weeks after he and I started climbing so he was orphaned at the age of 17 with a younger brother and sister to raise. The first time I saw him after that I told him 'I'm so sorry to hear about your father' and he just said 'that's OK, when can we go climbing again?'

I'd been the better climber over the previous months but immediately he began to scale much harder things. I just thought, 'wow, he's got really good', and it took years of retrospect to realise there was actually a kind of desperation driving him.

I'm not saying he was reckless - that wasn't what caused the accident that killed him. We weren't climbing very hard - the angle was low - but all we had for protection were pitons, and there weren't many cracks, so the runout was long. My friend was leading a long traverse and the rope drooped and got stuck under an angular downward pointing prong - a very weird feature. The more we pulled on it, the more it got jammed. I couldn't climb over to it; it was absolutely sheer.

We tried all these stupid things to get it loose and couldn't. I even unroped and threw the rope, hoping to snap it at least, but it was still stuck. Finally we were sitting there thinking 'what should we do?' This is where I think his personal loss came in. What we should really have done was call for help, but he said 'I think I can climb down to it', so I said 'great'. He climbed down to it successfully but as he was climbing back up he slipped and fell 300 feet.

I don't even remember going to his funeral service. I must have repressed it. But 37 years later, when I was starting to write this book, I realised that I'd never spoken to his brother and sister since that day. I tracked them down and visited them; his sister was still absolutely furious with me.

They blamed you?

They didn't understand what had happened, even though I wrote about it in 'Moments of Doubt'. It's such a complicated thing - you almost need a diagram to explain it, and they didn't understand climbing. I spent an exhausting day with his sister, going through everything that had happened in 37 years, and finally realised that the act of climbing has profound moral consequences for the people left behind when someone dies. It seemed to me that other climbers hadn't addressed this at all. Part of the drive for my latest book was that I was so disappointed in other climbing memoirs, which didn't touch on this question.

Did that accident affect your choices about what you were prepared to climb?

No, it didn't. I had further serious accidents; the third was on Hamilton in Alaska, which is still the best climb I've ever done. I was still only 22 and after that, again, I thought I'd quit climbing. But I didn't; I carried on climbing seriously for another 15 years, mostly in Alaska. Somehow I managed to submerge all my doubts and guilt and it was really only since the day I met my friend's sister that I've stopped climbing seriously. I try to climb for fun now rather than for all-out desperate achievements.

You said in your book that climbing is often seen as a very positive activity, morally, whereas you think it's actually completely amoral. Has this had a backlash in the way you're received by other climbers?

Yes, a lot of people were pretty pissed off. Most climbers have argued that climbing's character building but I've taught for Outward Bound and I ended up disenchanted. I started looking into the intellectual premises of Kurt Hahn's philosophy and decided they were false. Whatever Outward Bound teaches, it doesn't translate into your regular life. That's the theory they've sold - 'come on a course and transform your life'. But it doesn't work very easily. I had a great time with Outward Bound but it didn't back up the theory.

I'm a sceptic by nature and I have to look into any easy, cheap, received ideas.

On the positive side, you carried on climbing through several great tragedies. What were the highlights that made you feel it was worth the risk?

The route on Hamilton is the best route I ever did. The greatest moments of joy in my life have come from climbing and I'm proud of those achievements ... but that pride and joy aren't the ultimate criteria in life. Moral reponsibility is more important.

Having said that, when I tailed off from serious climbing I wanted to find something else as intense and exciting to replace it, but I've never found anything.

I made a bunch of first ascents in Alaska with friends from Harvard Climbing Club, including a first ascent of the largest precipice in North America - 14,000ft to the top - which has still never been repeated.

Are you still in touch with those people?

They're my only friends from that period. That's the other thing that I do feel very positive about, the friendships you build when you climb - not just camaraderie, but lasting friendship. Climbing's really about buddies getting together and climbing and drinking and hugging and having fun.

'On the Ridge Between Life and Death' hasn't been released yet in the UK but it will be out later this year. Watch this space. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts about risk, and how much of it is justifiable, tell us about them in the forum.