Extreme Horizons – The Climbing and Adventure Essays
- Friday 17th May 2024
By David Pickford
Monograph Media £29.95
Review by Mark Cobb
David Pickford is widely recognised as one of our leading adventure sport writers and in this beautifully written collection of essays and articles, his love of adventure clearly shines through. Much of this book has been previously published in magazines and online but when brought together here they transport the reader across the globe, bringing excitement and profound thoughts.
The essays are in sections: climbing, journeys, voyages and perspectives. Each section though is suffused with the search for adventure with half an eye on the meaning behind it all.
The climbing section includes climbs stretching from Swanage to Sweden, from Gogarth to Japan. The reader is transported to each climbing venue by the wonderfully descriptive language. David colours his already extraordinary climbs with the most poetic and thoughtful descriptions. In describing the cliffs in Cornwall, he writes, ‘huge parabolic boulders rest on the summit of Bosigran Head like slumbering sea monsters. Dawn and dusk seem to animate them back to life’. The reader is right there, the images sent straight into one’s thoughts, such that one can feel all David’s senses, what he can see, hear, smell and feel.
Much of the climbing in this book is on sea cliffs, often as Deep Water Soloing with the occasional foray into mountaineering or big wall, multi-pitch climbing. Consequently, every essay reminds the reader of the essence of David’s climbing. He is always searching for something new, a new route or a new adventure. His passions often coalesce. Climbing and the sea is the obvious connection but the intersection of climbing and fast cars, through high risk and high reward is also apparent.
There are some extraordinary climbs in Pembroke, one such essay about Huntsman’s Leap combines the magical beauty of the climbing with the magic of the place itself, ‘somewhere to find inspiration and potential at any stage of your life’. In another essay, he describes seeking out new routes in Madagascar, which left the writer exhausted from the ‘physical and psychological strain’. He even coins a name for a new type of climbing, ‘aqua-alpinism’. He climbed the traverse from Lynmouth to Combe Martin in a day, with Grant Farquhar, suggesting that this link of climbing to coasteering was a challenge ‘beyond the scope of either activity alone’.
The climbing always seems exciting, almost extreme and always something new. The author also goes further and really questions the significance of climbing and indeed adventuring. He is at pains to try to describe the experience and not just the climb itself. Early in the book, he is ‘reminded of that far greater gift than climbing: simply being here at all’.
He ponders the nature of social media’s position in relation to climbing, as well as the impact of photography and filming, particularly the growth of digital photography. This also extends to his thoughts on the future of guidebooks; the digital app versus the printed page.
Towards the end of this section, the author describes his traverse of the Cuillin Ridge on the Isle of Skye, reflecting that completing it in ‘one single push had been by far the best thing I’d ever done in the British mountains’. His descriptions are accompanied each time by a deeper analysis of the how and the why, how climbing fits in with life and whether it has any value or significance. An essay about the value of climbing from 2022, ‘A Flare In The Dark’, ends by describing climbing as belonging to the ‘universe of infinite games’.
This adventurous, questioning thread runs equally through the rest of the book. In the ‘Journeys’ section, where the author describes his motorcycle travels through South East Asia, there are brushes with riding at night without lights, eating deep fried tarantula and being hounded for having no vehicle passport. At one point, he is almost wiped out by a timber truck. There is a beautiful description of Patagonia that sums up the author’s apparent outlook, ‘For a few intoxicating minutes, I’m swept away by the wild that surrounds me’.
There is a further section on ‘Voyages’, as the author steers his stand-up paddleboard around a variety of British coastlines. On one such voyage, he encountered a fisherman, who told him, ‘I think you’re bloody mad mate’.
David goes on to write ‘out here I seek another reality from the one I shall find ashore’.
The final section, ‘Perspectives’, looks at adventuring and climbing with regard to art, spirituality, psychological factors, goals and their relative value, personal risk, which harks back to an earlier essay on the growth of ‘safetyism’ and where this fits in with the seeking of adventures. The author pursues the balance between risk aversion and adventure sports, with the latter being an opportunity to escape the former. Another essay investigates the value of adventure, with how much we are prepared to go against the acceptable by moving towards more radical adventure sports.
This collection of far-reaching essays provides a thought-provoking, beautifully written book, which attempts to go beyond the written word. By searching out the unclimbed or the unspoken, David Pickford has written a book that takes the reader on their own journey, their own adventure and declares ‘real adventure isn’t just about a route across a map, but also a quest for what lies at the heart of your own life’.