‘I’m freezing Jerry. We gotta go down. We’re too low and when this wall starts warming up I don’t want to be in the firing line." Calum wasn’t scared, just frustrated and impatient. He might only have been 21 years old but he had the wisdom of Gandalf and a similar level of magic when it came to floating up steep bits of rock or ice.

“Watch me Chris, got no energy….can’t hold on. Feel sooo tired!”
“Get some pro in fast!” Parkin shouted support from below, as I just managed to wiggle in a No. 2 nut, and then collapsed. I am experiencing a hypo and nothing is working; Hypoglycaemia is a condition that occurs when your blood sugar (glucose) is too low, so getting one half way up Yellow Edge (a classic E3 5c at Avon) is really not a great idea. I simply did not have the strength to continue. As a newly diagnosed Type 1 Diabetic my learning curve had just gone upside down. How could I survive my demanding marketing world, look after a young family, and continue with my climbing passion when I was so quickly reduced to a sweaty, jibbering idiot on an easy climb I had done many times before?

“Think it was pepper spray. It was dark, just walking back from the Tsara Be, head full of banging tunes and silver stars. This guy just came out of no-where. Dark, no light. Anne was worst hit – got it in her eyes and it stings like mad. The bloke just ran off. He took NOTHING!”

We regularly read such amazing headlines about the huge rise in climbing standards across the Alps. Yet other changes, arguably with greater impact, have been taking place in the western Alps for almost a decade now. The first of these is the fact that our summers have been getting warmer for many years now making traditional alpine mixed routes unsafe in the summer months of June, July and August.

Big Walls are vertical sheets of rock – 500 meters or more in height – and represent the extreme end of the mountaineering game. You live, eat and pooh in a vertical wilderness where sleep walking is strictly forbidden, and words like “exposure” take on a whole different meaning. Everything has to manhandled up a vertical to overhanging sheer wall of rock and ice. An ideal environment for those suffering from vertigo and obesity – NOT!

April 1998 Arctic Canada – A spotter plane in an immense white sky throttles back for one last low pass, its pilot keeping a concerned eye on the frozen edge of its wings. The single passenger pressed his nose hard against the window. The tension was palpable. Lower, lower, until the relief of the fjords begins to rise out of the whiteness. “Oh my god….”. muttered the owner of the first-ever non-Inuit eyes to behold The Citadel. He clicked his SLR to auto, the endless shutter clicks resembling the death rattle of a high-velocity machine gun.

“Last call for Mister Jerry Gore! Would he please proceed to Gate No. 23 immediately, his flight is ready for departure.” The voice on the tannoy rang loudly in my ears, increasing my sense of frustration and anger. I looked at Jackie, and I saw behind all her common sense self, tears of fear building inside. We had been married less than two years and I knew, despite her tough, practical exterior, she was hurting badly inside.

Nevado Cayesh (5,721m.), a pinnacle in the Peruvian Andes, derives its name from a Quechua Indian word “Caye” meaning “to call”, and indeed for me it did just that. I became captivated and decided to make it the basis of a climbing documentary for the BBC’s “Mick Burke Award”…