Take The Vertical Limit and put it in a real life situation and you have Touching The Void. In Void, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates recount their experience climbing Siula Grande in Peru in 1985. Joe and Simon, climbing with only each other, cheat death multiple times on the way up the mountain, but disaster strikes on the way down. Joe breaks his leg and Simon is faced with the challenge of getting himself and a helpless Joe downhill.

It’s amazing they made it out alive. Simon managed to make it down the mountain weaving his way through deep crevices in the snow and Joe…Joes’s a miracle. After falling over a hundred feet into the mouth of a deep crevice, He climbs an impossible distance on a broken leg, with no food or water in the freezing cold.

It’s interesting that at one point Joe comments that he doesn’t believe in God and in the midst of the experience he realized he really didn’t believe in God, and yet the entire experience seems to cry of a miraculous hand. Joe even speaks of hearing a voice – that seemed to be apart from himself – urging him to move onwards down the mountain. Not to mention the strange fact that Simon choose to stay put at the bottom of the mountain for four days after he believed Joe was dead. This is all in addition to the fact that Joe simply ought to have died in the freezing snow many times over.

Perhaps the exclusion of God in the equation is intentional though, to emphasize the super-human possibilities in humanity. Joe’s strength, endurance, will and resolve to keep going are absolutely astounding. Narrating the story, Joe does his best to explain things as they were, but inevitably understates the gravity and staggeringly difficult feat which he managed.

We get a sense for the reality and difficulty of the situation through a dramatic reenactment of the proceedings with Brenden Mackey playing Joe and Nicholas Aaron playing Simon. We get a view of the hazardous cliffs, sense the danger in every move and feel the cold on their frostbitten bodies. It truly is enlightening to see the courage in others and realize that the limits of our capabilities stretch much further than we believe them to be.

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