Lou en peru

"After a heroic and unstable three-day ascent to the summit, everything started to unravel when Simpson fell and broke his leg.
Yates was faced with the first of two terrible decisions: should he abandon his friend - whom they both knew was as good as dead - or try to get him down the mountain? Yates chose the second option. Over the course of a long, stormy day he single-handedly lowered Joe down the face. The storm was worsening, but Yates almost had Simpson to the bottom of the mountain by the time it grew dark.

Then he discovered that he had lowered his friend over an overhang. He didn't have enough rope to let Simpson down any further, but neither did he have the strength to pull him up again to look for another way down. Stalemate. Yates hung on for several hours. He was sitting in loose powder snow on a steep slope and there was no way he could anchor himself to the mountain. In fact, he was slowly being dragged down himself. He was faced with a second terrible decision: to die with his partner or to break the biggest taboo in climbing by cutting the rope on his partner. He cut the rope.

Simpson fell about 100ft to the glacier below and another 80ft into an enormous crevasse. He came to in a dark, icy cavern deep within the glacier and knew that, with his broken leg, there was no way he could climb out. "

Oscar-winning documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald, November 2003