Player One: Your Life, Your Game, Your Victory

Joe Simpson was a mountaineer who went on to climb Siuala Grande in the Peruvian Andes back in 1985 with his climbing partner Simon Yates. 

They climbed the largest mountain in the southern hemisphere, which is over 21,000 feet tall. They were the first ones to do it (from the western side) and they were on their way back when things took a wrong turn. 

Mountaineering accidents in most cases happen when going down the mountain. And that’s exactly what happened to Joe on June 8, 1985. Exhausted, he slipped and broke his leg. A severe injury with the shin bone: shattering and protruding through the kneecap and up the femur. 

Combining this with the impossibility of any rescue teams going up that high to provide assistance only meant one thing: Joe was bound to die on the mountain. 

But they had a different plan. 

Simon tied Joe up, attached Joe to himself, and started lowering Joe down the mountainside. Suddenly, the weather went from bad to worse and Simon lost sight of Joe. The snowstorm struck hard and Joe suddenly slid from the mountain, almost pulling down Simon with him in the descent. 

A couple of minutes later, Simon had to do the one thing no mountaineer ever wanted to do: he had to cut the rope to save his own life. 

Joe started falling down, a height the equivalent of a “fifteen-story building.“ Miraculously, he fell into a pile of snow in the crevasse and survived. But now, Simon thought that Joe was dead; and Joe knew it. 

It was up to Joe to either make it or break it. 

Frostbitten, he went the only way he could: down the crevasse. And soon enough, he was shocked to find sunlight. There was a small crack right which led directly out of the crevasse. But the problem was that it was on a slope 45 degrees and 130 feet up, and he had a destroyed leg. 

So he turned it into a game: