The Style that Counts

Andy Parkin and a Creative Life in the Mountains 

“It was the final bit, in this massively exposed position,” he remembers. The ice looked funky — thin, brittle, dicey — and British ex-pat Andy Parkin paused to read the moves. Parkin, as has proven his habit over the years, was opening a route onsight and solo, on the north wall of the Grandes Jorasses, above Chamonix, France. All-in and fully committed, nearly 2200 feet off the Leschaux Glacier, he went for it. 

“I was above a Camalot and a half-driven ice screw and sure enough, the ice ripped. I fell onto slings. I just hung there, I couldn’t believe it. I even took a photo to remind myself I was alive,” Parkin recounts. 

Parkin collected himself, finished the route, and named it La Belle Helene (V, 5+, A1 M-Hard 90° 750m), adding the route to a climbing resume that now spans four decades of cutting-edge alpinism practiced from the Karakoram to Tierra del Fuego, on everything from gritstone in his native England to the aerated summit mushrooms of Patagonia. Piolet d’Or winner, avowed minimalist, and accomplished all-‘rounder, Andy Parkin might’ve been a standard bearer for pared-down full-adventure alpinism…that is, if he’d ever reduced himself to marketing his climbs and publicizing his achievements. 

Parkin recalls his parents soon grew “tired of seeing us go off with crappy pieces of string”, so they helped him get a rope and a little gear. On a school trip to Scotland, he and his mates hid their cord and hopeless rack in a sack and snuck off, finding a cliff nearby. Parkin, or another brave member of the gang, would trail the rope to the top of a crag and then, he says, “The question was whether we could find a belay!” 

Soon the boys discovered there were indeed other men and women out there climbing — “the big game was freeing rock routes,” he remembers. Climbers like Don Whillans and Joe Brown had begun the game in Britain and by the mid-‘70s, Parkin recollects, “I was pretty much confirmed” as a die-hard climber. Of his self-guided apprenticeship on the runout grit, he says, “You become very bold, climbing like that.” 

Parkin’s adventures began in his hometown of Sheffield, England, and by the time he had survived his first decade on earth he’d expanded his horizons throughout the Peak District. Naturally he and his buddies discovered the gritstone and limestone crags in the countryside and as young boys are wont to do — they climbed. 

“We started by doing new routes. We didn’t know any better. We didn’t know there were proper routes,” Parkin recalls, explaining that, because he and his posse lacked a rope, pins, or nuts, they “soloed from the word ‘go’.” Furthermore, they usually ditched school to climb mid-week and rarely, if ever, happened on others. For all they knew, they were the only crew in England climbing rocks. 

By 1973, at the age of 19, Parkin took his passion to the road. In three days he hitch-hiked to Zermatt, to visit a friend. From there he headed west, through Martigny, and over the Col des Montets to France — to Chamonix. 

“I’ve never forgotten that image of the (Chamonix) Aiguilles. I’d seen the 18^th-century paintings, but I thought the artists had been exaggerating,” he says with equal parts resignation and awe. He wasted no time: “My first thing in Cham was a solo.” 

By ’76 he’d spent three seasons in the Alps, pushing his limits, honing his craft. He traveled to the States and Canada in ’77 — freeing Eldorado Canyon’s Naked Edge (5.11a/b), Yosemite’s Astroman (5.11c), and sending Zodiac (5.7 A2). Meeting some Americans after the Zodiac, they said, “We didn’t know Brits could aid climb.” Parkin responded, “Neither did we!” 

By the early ‘80s Parkin had moved beyond repeating routes. He established the first 8a (5.13b) in France with Thierry Renault in the Verdon Gorge. By 1982 he traveled to Pakistan with Al Rouse and attempted Ogre II, alpine style. In ’83 he and Rouse summitted Broad Peak, again alpine style, and that same year he and Doug Scott turned back merely 100m from the summit of K2. 

“Above all, it was simple,” he says of his minimalist style. “We didn’t know any better!”