Solar Eclipse

Opening a new route sounds slightly mad to anyone who doesn’t climb. What does it actually involve when there is quite literally no route to follow?

Opening a new route is a very creative process. You are essentially looking at a huge piece of rock and trying to find a line through it that nobody has climbed before. You have to imagine where the climbing might go, where the rock might be good, where you might be able to protect yourself and whether the whole thing will actually come together.

Thirteen nights on the North Face is a long time. What does “home” look like up there, and what starts to feel weirdly normal?

Home becomes a tiny portaledge suspended in the middle of this enormous wall.

You wake up every morning to one of the most beautiful views in the world and go to sleep under the stars. It is incredibly peaceful, but there is also a strange loneliness to being so far away from everything. Somehow, that isolation becomes comforting.

Even making coffee becomes exciting. Once you’ve finished it, you have to leave this little place where you feel safe and go back onto the wall, with absolutely no idea what the day is going to bring.

The portaledge becomes a little world. If I get out of bed, Roger feels it. If he moves, I feel it. Going to the toilet becomes something you have to plan. Everything has to be organised carefully so the things you need are accessible, while still leaving enough room to sleep.

What surprised me most was that afterwards, I missed it. I missed the silence. I missed waking up with nothing around me except rock, sky and the person beside me. The world seemed to disappear, and somehow that felt incredibly freeing.

Let’s talk food. What do you eat for 13 days on the side of a mountain, and what were you dreaming about eating by the end?

A lot of dried food and whatever we chose to carry.

I love chocolate, so that was definitely a good part of it! Roger is Swiss German, so he had brought Emmentaler cheese and cervelat sausage, which he kindly shared with me.

But after a while I started craving something completely different: green vegetables. Broccoli. Salad. Anything fresh and full of vitamins.

We were getting enough calories, protein and sugar to keep going, but I felt like my body was asking for something more nourishing. By the time I came down, I didn’t really want another chocolate bar. I wanted a huge plate of fresh, healthy food. It was a funny reminder that your body knows what it needs, especially when you have pushed it that far.

There’s something wonderfully creative about looking at a wall and seeing a route that doesn’t yet exist. How much of opening one is physical ability, and how much is imagination and instinct?

I’d say it’s about 50/50.

It starts with creativity. You have to look at the rock and imagine something that doesn’t exist yet. But eventually that idea has to meet your physical ability.

The technical side goes much deeper than simply being able to climb a certain grade. It comes from years of experience: reading rock, knowing what is solid and what is loose, knowing what makes a beautiful climbing line and understanding where protection will actually hold.

There is a whole language you develop with the rock. You start to see things instinctively: a crack that might take a piece of protection, rock that looks beautiful but isn’t trustworthy, or a movement that might unlock an entire pitch.

Strength matters. Technique matters. But so does imagination. You need to be able to see something before it exists.

You and Roger spent nearly two weeks together on a wall with very few distractions. What on earth do you talk about for 13 days, and did you come away knowing each other differently?

We talked about the route almost all the time. What we’d climbed that day, where we should go tomorrow, how we should approach the next pitch, the style we wanted to climb it in and what grade we thought the pitches might be.

But we also had more intimate conversations about our lives and careers as athletes, and what it means to dedicate so much of yourself to a sport.

Roger grew up in the mountains and has been an athlete for much longer. I grew up in England, playing football in the fields with my brother. The mountains weren’t in my backyard and I came to climbing much later.

And yet somehow we had arrived at the same place. That was one of the things I valued most, realising that two people can come from completely different beginnings and still find the same passion, obsession and love for something.

After 13 days of working towards the top, what does finally getting there actually feel like? Is there a huge moment of celebration, or does your brain immediately move on to what comes next?

When we reached the top, I was almost immediately thinking about the route again.

I was thinking about how we could improve it, clean it and leave it in the best possible condition for the people who might climb it after us. I wanted to feel proud not only of having opened it, but of what I’d left behind.

I like the idea that years from now, other climbers will come back to the Eiger, climb the line we created and have their own experience on it. That is a different kind of legacy.

It wasn’t until I came home and was surrounded by my family and friends that I really understood what we’d done. They made me stop and take it in. They reminded me that I didn’t have to immediately think about the next challenge or how I could make it better. I could simply be proud of myself.