Fearless rock climber Johnny Dawes explains what triggered his desire for danger, why taking risks is one way of finding out who you really are, and why, despite the dangers, climbing should be a source of enjoyment
Look online and you'll find a series of remarkable films of Johnny Dawes rock climbing. In one he is climbing one-handed up a steep edge of rock. There are no proper footholds, so each time his hand comes off to move it up he is left poised precariously. Next he is tackling a climb without any hands at all, bounding up the steep slope of rock before leaping off a little edge – arms by his side – to flop on his belly like a grounded salmon. I find another film shot in the slate quarries above Llanberis in north Wales in an industrial landscape of disused workings, cut into a mountainside, where the past activity of man has created soaring cliffs with a texture smooth as satin. This time Dawes is on a climb called the Quarryman, a route first climbed by him in the 1980s that, in its hardest section, ascends a slab of grey rock, off-vertical but slick as an ice rink.
You watch as he makes progress by squeezing himself into a steep corner to one side of the main slab, like the corner of a room where two walls meet. It seems improbable enough. Then, high up, he is forced into what seems an impossible position, his feet placed on the left-hand wall of the corner with both hands on the far edge of the other wall, leaving his body stretched horizontal to the ground as if about to do a press-up in the empty space. His feet keep moving. Now they are above the level of his head. A fall here would be a face-first dive but he does not fall and he makes it look easy. He swings a leg across from this position and places a foot by his hands, supple as a dancer.
All activities have their own histories and cultures, and individuals who loom large in them. For British climbing, Johnny Dawes, now 47, remains a defining figure. His climbs were rated among the very hardest in the world, test pieces of both balance and nerve, some with a reputation for terrible danger. These days although he complains he isn't fit, he still climbs at a level most could never aspire to.
Here, a brief explanation is required. If you climb you are confronted by a choice. You can climb largely safely on what are called "sport" routes, clipping your rope into bolts that have been drilled into the rock at regular intervals, a style of climbing popularised in Europe. On these kinds of routes you can fall off hard moves repeatedly until, in theory, you can get it right. But there is another kind of climbing, sometimes called "traditional" or "adventure" climbing, long popular in the UK, where for decades bolts were frowned upon. On these climbs the equipment to make them safe is carried on the harness into which the rope is tied, little removable wedges of metal and other devices, to be placed in holes and cracks into which the rope is clipped with carabiners. The safety of such climbs is defined by multiple factors: the rock's solidity and the presence or absence of fissures in which to slot equipment for protection to clip the rope into. Such climbs require more than the physical ability to simply make the moves required to get up them. They require self-knowledge, confidence and judgment. And on crackless, or largely crackless, climbs where there is little or no possibility of placing protection – on "bold" climbs, as they are known using the same language the Victorian pioneers once used – the acceptance of a very high degree of risk is necessary.
Dawes's most famous climb, conceived and climbed 25 years ago last autumn on one of Snowdon's cliffs, was one such "bold" climb, with failure on the hardest moves high up likely to result in a fatal ground fall. In the tradition where the person to make the first ascent names his or her new route, Dawes called it the Indian Face for features he thought visible in the cliff in a certain light. It was then Britain's first climb to be graded E9 on an open-ended scale of "extreme difficulty", a climb whose reputation has barely diminished over the years, still attracting the description, after only a fourth climber managed an ascent in 2010, as a "desperate and deadly challenge".
A measure of the enduring difficulty of Dawes's routes is how few of his hardest climbs have been attempted "on sight" – the purest style of making a climb, done without pre-practice, pre-inspection of the route or prior knowledge of the moves or possibilities for protection. Indeed, it took almost 20 years for a climber – an American, Alex Honnold – to try his Peak District test-piece, Gaia (a grade easier than the Indian Face) and climb it from the bottom to the top on his first attempt.
When Dawes comes to meet me at the Castle climbing centre in north London, he is still recognisably the young man from the videos, heavier but still compact with large shoulders. He empties a red vinyl duffel bag on to the floor looking for his rock shoes, the tight slippers, soled with the soft, high-friction rubber used in the tyres of racing cars, which make it easier for feet to gain a purchase where footholds are lacking.
A tangle of weather-faded slings and rotten, broken bits of metal spills out, retrieved from one of his climbs on a north Wales sea cliff, which Dawes reclimbed recently for the first time in almost two decades. He picks up a small flake of broken rock, palm-sized and thick as a pencil, that he pulled off during that ascent. He shows it to the Observer's photographer, breaking the brittle fragment with a chop of his hand. "The consistency's like dark chocolate," Dawes explains. "There's rock like cheddar. Even parmesan. When it's soft like this you need to know how to use it. How to put your weight on it."
We are meeting because Dawes has recently published a long-awaited memoir, Full of Myself. It describes not only his hardest climbs but also the context of his climbing – what drove him to take the risks he did and the consequences of a life spent chasing danger. It is extraordinary not simply as a record of his climbs but because Dawes tries – and often succeeds – in something equally remarkable, communicating the experience of difficult and dangerous climbing in a way few others have attempted.
Simon Beaufoy, who wrote the screenplays for The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire, describes it as, "a beautiful book about an extraordinary person. William Blake with sticky boots." His ambition, he says, was to put the reader – like the John Cusack character in Being John Malkovich – inside his head looking out. When he falls on a first ascent on the huge cliffs of Scotland's Strone Ulladale, shredding his ropes, you fall with him. When he makes a mistake on the hardest section of the Indian Face, with a fatal ground fall from 100 feet a possible consequence, he finds a typically arresting image, describing the motion as "startling me like a car unexpectedly in gear in a crowded parking lot".
Dawes has written of such climbs as having been a "form of self-expression… dangerous but necessary" to him. What I would like to know is why they were necessary? His answer is complex. For Dawes, born into a wealthy family whose parents were involved in the flamboyant motor racing scene in the 1960s, climbing was an escape from public school at Uppingham, an experience he hated.
"I think school was just a world of panic to me," he says. "My take on life was not the take on life of my contemporaries. I just wanted to be somewhere else. That really wasn't an option. I found climbing, thank heavens. Which meant I could enjoy doing something separate. It seemed to be about making jokes. If something wasn't a joke…" He pauses: "I was probably quite a serious person."
That earnestness, Dawes admits, coincided with other characteristics: a feeling of being isolated and often understimulated. He did not recognise it as a young man but he was also prone to periods of depression. "I felt invisible for quite a long time at school and also pretty pissed off. I thought: you haven't understood me at all, so check this out. And in a way I was saying this to the whole world because I thought so many things sucked."
The personality that Dawes outlines is described in psychoanalysis as the "type T" personality – requiring constant stimulation and risk-taking. "I was in a shut-off state, to a certain extent. When I was doing something dangerous it would wake me up. I mean, probably the most stupid risky thing I have ever done was on a deserted motorway. I got out of one side of the car and, with a brick on the accelerator, went across the bonnet and in the other window… I found the world was incredibly boring. Being ground into a sort of a mush."
He admits he did not tell his parents exactly what some of his hardest climbs involved. He alludes, too, to the fact that as a younger man he sometimes felt it difficult to form attachments.
Climbing for Dawes felt a genuine experience, a word that comes up several times during our conversation. He describes his need to climb as an "authentic desire" – a phrase he had heard used by artist and climber John Redhead, who had also attempted the Indian Face.
"The cliffs [are] real. The rock will show you in exactly what way you are being you."
I think I understand what Dawes means from my own climbing. Routes with any risk of injury involved require an honesty about ability and why you want to do a climb; a balancing of ambition, adventure and ego.
Dawes is still looking for new challenges. He describes a climb he has discovered and has been trying, on one of a collection of short sandstone boulders in the grounds of a hotel in East Sussex. While he is anxious to get back into climbing full-time after five years spent sequestered in north Wales writing his book, Dawes finds some of the seriousness of current climbing – with its emphasis on sports science, regimes and training programmes – "tight-lipped" and lacking in the sense of play that inspired him.
"It's funny. In the 80s, climbers started to train in places associated with the work ethic. There was a place called the Foundry. There was the School, another institution. People would talk about 'working' routes that they were trying. Physicality has got a place, but it is not where the meat is in the whole thing. It's in enjoying it and doing something impossible. It doesn't matter whether it is harder. Harder is always going to be boring. It's got to be fun to me… it's only a personal peccadillo – it's no more than that. But I know that having fun is the most powerful performance component really.
"And if you're just trying to climb on smaller holds on steeper bits of rock then the exploration has boiled down to: how do I get stronger? That's quite interesting," Dawes concedes, without sounding as if he really means it. "And getting fully into training, I can understand. But [where] is the drama of the whole thing?"
Read more about Johnny Dawes, including his account of the first ascent of the Indian Face, at johnnydawes.com