Will Stanhope's Ground Fall Accident on Parthian Shot

Parthian Shot is an iconic gritstone route; a bulging nose of perfect rock that forges forth in to the Burbage Valley like the prow of a huge, storm-battered ship. This is not a tiny one-move-wonder, on the contrary, Parthian Shot is a mighty route - steep, powerful and, well, perfect. Except for one thing... the gear. 

Protected solely by tiny wires delicately teased behind a frighteningly hollow flake, the hard and tenuous climbing of Parthian Shot is both a physical and mental challenge. An on-form John Dunne made the first ascent back in 1989, grading the route HXS 7a and suggesting the flake was too poor to hold. As far as we know he remains the only person to date to have climbed the route without taking 'the' fall.

In 2011, Will Stanhope fell, a flake broke and he hit the ground. He wrote this on his now-gone blog: "Two months ago I ripped off the flake on Parthian Shot, at Burbage South in the Peak District. Tim Emmett, trusted friend and well-known British climber, belayed me, and eventually piggy-backed me down the trail...

...Tim and I fooled around on the line all afternoon, dialing in the nuances and getting a feel for it. I one falled it on toprope. At that point I decided I would try to lead it. My friends Alex Honnold, Matt Segal and Kevin Jorgenson all took multiple wingers onto the flake. While I knew it wasn't 100 percent bomber, I thought it was more or less okay...

...As I climbed higher I got a deep pit-in-my-stomach feel that something wasn't right. The superstitious feeling came too late, though- I was way above the flake without a hope of downclimbing. The next thing I knew I was on the ground, spitting blood, struggling to breathe. I tried to weight my left foot, but I immediately knew it was broken. It felt like the bones were swimming..."

Explore magazine article 2012: March 7, 2011, was Will Stanhope’s day, or it wasn’t, depending on how you look at it through life’s pattern of light and shadows.

“I was a bit surprised, actually, when he said he was going for the lead,” says Tim Emmett, who was “on belay”—holding the rope—for Stanhope that day on Parthian Shot. Emmett, who has his own reputation for bold climbing, was struck by the fact that Stanhope did not wait until he had completed the route without a fall from the safety of a top-rope before committing to climb from the ground up. On the other hand, Stanhope knew that the notorious flake had held big falls in the past, and taking that kind of risk often gives a climber the necessary mojo to push through the hardest moves.

Stanhope remembers climbing to the flake and spending too long wiggling into place the gear that would catch his fall. Exhausted, he eased his weight onto the rope and took a hanging rest. The gear—and the flake—held. He decided to try for the top.

High on the wall, he realized he probably didn’t have the strength to make the next move. “I kind of half-assed reached and thought, ‘We’ll see what happens,’” he says. All he remembers thinking as he dropped through the air was, OK, when’s the rope going to catch me? He hit the ground on a patch of grass between two boulders, a broken chunk of flake the size of a laptop computer thudding down beside him.

“I thought he was pretty screwed up, to be honest,” says Emmett. “It was a hard landing—it was a really hard landing. The gear didn’t take any of his weight at all.”

For the first minute, Emmett says, Stanhope struggled to get air into his lungs. When he was finally able to breathe, he said, “I’m all right, I’m all right, it’s cool.” It was clear to both of them, though, that Stanhope’s lower leg was broken. Not long after that he started coughing up blood.

“I actually thought, I could die here—as soon as I started pissing blood and coughing up blood,” says Stanhope. “Hitting the ground is just gnarly.” He shakes his head in something like disbelief. “Gnarly.”

Emmett piggybacked Stanhope to a main path, where a photo from that night shows Stanhope strapped to a stretcher in a pylon-orange blanket, the Edale Mountain Rescue team wearing headlamps as they prepare to whisk him to a Sheffield hospital. Five days later, soothed by a non-medically approved blend of painkillers and Scotch whisky, he flew home to Canada.

“I broke myself,” is how he puts it today. More exactly, he broke his right talus, a large bone that forms the lower part of the ankle, and also snapped off a spinous process—one of the bony protrusions you feel if you run a thumb down your spine—in his neck. “Everyone always said that if you rip the flake you’ll probably die, so you could say I got lucky,” he says.

When Stanhope arrived at the Vancouver airport, his younger sister Emily was there to pick him up. She remembers watching the arriving passengers on a video screen. “There was this kid, he looked like he was about 12, limping along with a neck brace and crutches, and I instantly thought of Tiny Tim,” she says.

She breaks into tears at the memory, the same way she did that day when she realized the “kid” was her world-class rock-climber brother.

“I think it’s changed him totally,” Emily says of the accident in England. “He’s more grounded, he’s humbled, he knows the value of his own body. I think it was absolutely the best thing for him.”

The aftermath

It’s late afternoon in a forest outside of Squamish, and Stanhope and I are standing at the base of a crack that curves across a wall of white-and-gold granite. The route, officially named Gunslinger but known informally as “the arch,” has never been free climbed. It’s a typical modern climb: overhanging more than 10 degrees beyond the vertical, with holds that are often mere wrinkles on the glacier-polished stone. The climb is graded about 5.13 or 5.14, but as with many Stanhope projects, that’s not where the real excitement lies. To successfully lead the route, a climber would have to place a last lonely piece of protection under an overlap about two-thirds of the way up, then pull through a series of tiny, sharp edges—what climbers call “crimps”—to the top of the wall. Stanhope and a friend used a bag of rocks tied into a climbing rope to mimic the potential fall a person could take. The bag “gently kissed the ground,” as Stanhope puts it.

“It’s hard to believe this climb even exists,” says Stanhope. “If even one of the crimps on the upper wall were missing, it wouldn’t be possible. At least, it wouldn’t be possible for me,” he says. Then up he goes, his fingers touching down on the minuscule holds with what seems like a magnetic certainty. Only at the hardest move does he finally seem to strain. And then he falls.

He’s not on the lead today, though; the top-rope takes his weight and he pendulums out into space.

“That’s it for me,” he says. “I’m blown out.” It’s his third try of the afternoon.

Since his ground fall last winter, Stanhope has done pretty much everything people do whose world view has suffered a seismic slip: gone on a solo road trip, wandered the darker chambers of the mind, sought wisdom from mentors, spent some late nights with “the counsellor” (his term for an eight-pack of Kokanee beer).

His neck has healed. The broken talus doesn’t seem to be slowing him down any more. He’s planned a trip to the Bugaboos, B.C.’s finest alpine climbing area, where his project list includes both hard individual routes and link-ups of multiple mountains. He has considered a return to Parthian Shot, which has yet to be re-climbed since losing its mythic flake. This fall, he’ll be back in Yosemite Valley, where he and Sonnie Trotter will work on the second ascent of The Prophet, a route up 3,000-foot El Capitan that defines the current standard for big-wall free climbing. The Prophet would require Stanhope to be in the best shape of his life. Physically, that’s manageable. But mentally?

“Who knows how my head’ll even be for that shit—it’s pretty hairball,” says Stanhope.

Today, slumped at the base of Gunslinger, he knows his head isn’t in it just yet. “There’s something to be said for the little sixth senses, the omens,” he says. “I think it’s really important not to ignore those little senses and say, ‘Oh, I’m just making excuses.’ Sometimes you are just making excuses, but a lot of the time, you need to be heeding the signs.”

And there were, he says quietly, certain signs on the day that he fell on Parthian Shot. A fine balance was in play. On the one hand, a climber like Stanhope needs to tamp down the ordinary caution and fear that would otherwise send him home to a hot bath; on the other, he needs to be tuned in to the inner voice of sober second thought. Also in the mix are all the pressures, from the need to mark milestones for his sponsors to the climber’s own private and personal ambitions. (“I hesitate to say it’s a completely egoless thing,” Stanhope says.)

Then there is life, in general. Several people close to Stanhope pointed out that the first serious relationship of his life, with British climber Hazel Findlay, was falling apart at the time of the accident. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that Stanhope was acting out the self-destructive urges of a heartbroken young man, but that would be unfair: The route is typical of what he would have had his sights on in England. An inner voice, though, can be hard to hear over any kind of static.

As he started up into the danger zone that day, Stanhope felt a pit-of-the-stomach sensation that told him, too late, that he had been missing the signals—that the immunity that had delivered him for so long was about to become black magic. Here’s my own best crack at what can’t really be put into words: You only see how important your intuition is to you when it finally lets you down. The trouble is, awareness changes the nature of intuition. It’s like a switch from hearing to listening, and then you need a whole new relationship with the unknowable. These days, Stanhope’s favourite saying is an old Muslim maxim, adapted for the secular West: “Trust in the cosmos, but tie your horse.”

But enough—the moment has grown too serious. The old Will Stanhope, the one who had never yet hit the ground, the one with the talismanic faith in himself and the cockeyed smile, is slowly getting back to his feet. He looks up at the arch, then mentions that Tim Emmett, the man who had the honour of uselessly holding the rope while Stanhope cratered into the moors of England, is now living part-time near Squamish. When it comes time to risk the big fall on Gunslinger, Stanhope says, he’ll be sure to give Emmett a call.

“Hey, Tim, you wanna give me a belay on the arch? Remember the last time we went climbing together? That was fun—wasn’t it?”