Interview: Dave MacLeod, Britain's best climber

Published on Sunday 22 August 2010 14:10

Despite the fact that he is virtually unknown outside extreme-sport circles, climber Dave MacLeod is a world-class athlete in his field. But one wrong move could be his last

• Dave MacLeod - the hands of a world class climber

GLEN Chliostair in the north-west of Harris is one of Scotland's wild and lonely places. A narrow valley enclosed by huge, steep-sided hills, its cloistered, claustrophobic air feels oppressive as you stumble down a rocky stalker's path in the face of a 50mph wind that whips spray high into the air from the surface of the loch.

The OS map shows this area as a tagliatelle tangle of contour lines, and high on the crags there are stags — watchful and silent. Up there, too, on a cliff face called Srn Uladail, getting too high to see with the naked eye, is a man who, at the age of 32, is Britain's best climber.

His name is Dave MacLeod and he is out of sight.

MacLeod is a Glaswegian now living near Fort William. He has been climbing for more than half his life, beginning on Dumbarton Rock and going on to pioneer the hardest climbs in the world.

He is in the curious position of being a world-class athlete who is more or less unknown outwith the small, insular, jargonised climbing scene. Those in a position to make such comparisons say he is the equivalent, in terms of ability, of Cristiano Ronaldo or Chris Hoy.

He is, however, gradually edging towards the mainstream. Echo Wall, a film of his first ascent of a life-threatening route on the north face of Ben Nevis, was made in 2008 by his wife Claire and won a Scottish Bafta.

Now he is preparing to make a live televised ascent of a new route on the steepest part of Srn Uladail. He will be partnered by the extreme sports athlete Tim Emmett and their attempt will be broadcast by the BBC this Saturday.

"More Britons have got to the summit of Everest than have successfully climbed Srn Uladail," says Richard Else, executive producer of Triple Echo, the company making the film for the BBC.

"Worldwide, the amount of climbers who could attempt this route you could count on the fingers of two hands. If it were an Olympic sport, Scotland would be getting a gold medal."

Though the climb is not as risky as some MacLeod has attempted, it is still extremely tough — an E9, he estimates, a grade that indicates an "extremely severe" route, one of the hardest in the country.

The cliff is 700ft of mica schist and gneiss rock. Created by glacial shearing, it is sharp to the touch. MacLeod gashed one of his hands just glancing against it, and is concerned it could snap his ropes — "A horrendously dangerous situation to be in." On a day of bad weather, with clouds speeding over its lip, Srn Uladail appears dark and brooding, Mordor-like.

The top overhangs the base by 150ft, which is pleasant for the sheep and deer that shelter in its rain-shadow, but a chilling challenge for climbers who must therefore hang by their toes and finger-tips with a vast drop behind them.

Even standing at the base, it's hard to comprehend just how big the cliff is until you notice MacLeod near the top, trying to identify a climbable route. His rope appears flimsy as floss and he himself is not even a figure, just a white dot against black.

"It's like being in another world up there," is how MacLeod describes it. "You're 600ft above the valley with just space below you, and the whole world is turned upside down because of the overhang. It feels like a completely surreal place to be. And to have a camera showing that will be amazing."

On the ground, seated across a table in a hotel dining room in Tarbert, the island's largest settlement, MacLeod is rather more tangible, but remains a surprisingly slight figure. He is 5ft 8in and weighs less than ten stone, 21 pounds lighter than he was aged 16, with soulful blue eyes set in a face shaped like an inverted pear. His arms are muscular, but not freakishly so.

His fingers are remarkable — considerably thicker at the tips than the middle joint. Though he has a tendency to play down his own strength, he is able to pull up his entire body weight using the fingers of just one hand.

The most striking thing about him, however, is not his physical ability, but rather his psychology. He has reached a point where he is completely at ease with the idea of his own death and discusses the prospect of being killed during a climb with a flatness that, given his predilection for peaks, is ironic.

"You absolutely must be prepared for the possibility of dying on a climb," he says. If you're not, he reasons, you will panic and the chances of falling will increase dramatically.

More than that, though, for MacLeod the possibility of death enriches the experience of climbing. "It adds to it because it's absolutely real," he says.

"There's nothing more real than your life. It's just high stakes, isn't it? You never get more out of yourself other than when you absolutely must get that next hold or you're going to die."

So, it's not just about adrenaline then? "No. Though the rush is part of it, it's definitely more than that. It's hard to describe. Risk brings out the best in all aspects of your performance. You move better, you climb better, you make stronger decisions under that psychological pressure. And you can't create that pressure in any other way. There's no substitute for mortal risk."

How does he reconcile himself to it, though? How does he reach the point where he can stand at the bottom of a rock face and think it's okay if he dies climbing this?

"I don't find it that hard," he shrugs. "You're happy that you're doing something you really enjoy and are using your skills and life to live out that experience. So the risk of an accident becomes less important than the risk of not doing something that's so important to you."

I wonder, though. The risk is not taking the risk. That sounds a bit like something people say when they don't really understand what death means. Do you have any personal experience of bereavement, I ask. Do you understand what it's like when someone close to you dies?

"Not someone close to me," he replies.

"My first climbing friend died. He came home to his flat on a Friday night. He'd had a few beers. Slipped, fell down the stairs, hit his head and died. Forty years old with a ten-year-old kid."

And how did that affect you? "I was quite young. In my early twenties. It showed me in a really basic way that your life can be affected or cut short by all kinds of things. So the message is to carry on doing things right now that you're gonna wish you had done."

Of course, MacLeod would not be the only one to suffer if he took a serious or fatal fall. His wife Claire accompanies him on many of his climbs, often filming his ascents or even holding his ropes. In the DVD of To Hell and Back, a film of his 2007 ascent of a crag in the Cairngorms known as Hell's Lum, she is in tears as she looks up and watches him climb.

Before starting, he had instructed her that if he fell she should jump down a gully, holding the rope, so as to prevent him from hitting the ground. She might break a leg, she reasoned, but it would be worth it to save her husband's life.

I can understand how it is that MacLeod has reconciled himself to the possibility of his own death, but how has Claire come to terms with being married to a man who risks his life for sport? "Well, he wouldn't be the person I'm with if he wasn't like that," she says. "And I wouldn't like being the person that stopped somebody doing something they love. So I accept it."

They travel together all over Britain — a week in the Hebrides here, a week in Wales there, then back home to the Great Glen. Claire explains that in addition to her practical roles, she also provides emotional support and functions as a sounding board — listening to MacLeod as he talks through possible routes and weighs up risk.

Though she is right there as her husband climbs, and would be right there, possibly with camera in hand, as he fell, Claire feels much happier with the balance in the relationship than she did when she worked full-time on her own career.

"I am not in the dark about anything now," she says. "When I was working in shops, I'd be clock-watching and thinking, 'Why hasn't he phoned? Has he had an accident?' At least now I'm there, the nervous anticipation is taken out of it."

She also has the pleasure of watching MacLeod climb. He is extraordinary to watch. So much fluidity and grace. He makes it look easy, even when he's hanging upside-down by a knee jammed into a crack high on Ben Nevis in order to give his arms a rest.

He has a fascinating technique. Climbing is often regarded as the preserve of musclemen and adrenaline junkies, but MacLeod's approach is cool and cerebral. He thinks his way up a rock long before he climbs it.

Abseiling down from the top, he gets to know every possible hold and works out the correct sequence in which to put them. It's a sort of code-breaking. This brings with it an appreciation of geological beauty.

"The more dangerous the rock climb," he once blogged, "the more we have to understand the rock so we can stay alive."

Climbing is also a creative act, he believes, comparable with the arts. He talks about "seeing an elegant line" on a cliff; creating a new route out of different moves means that he is using his imagination, then his hands and entire body in the act of composition. Code-breaking, then, but also choreography.

It's possible to regard MacLeod's steady establishment of new routes on Scotland's mountains as a growing ouevre. Certainly, he has no hesitation in describing climbing as "my life's work". There is a sense of authorship about it all.

When a climber establishes a new route, they earn the right to give it a grade and a name. All over Scotland and beyond, there is a secret topography in which forbidding faces of mountains and cliffs have been assigned unofficial titles by those who first scaled them. These names, unknown to most of us, inspire awe and sometimes dread among the cragnoscenti.

So the world's first E11, which MacLeod put up on Dumbarton Rock in 2006, he decided to call Rhapsody. An even more difficult route, on Ben Nevis in 2008, is titled Echo Wall. Rather controversially, he declined to assign it a grade, arguing: "To have a moment like this in your life is so much more important than the number attached to the climb."

MacLeod spent around two years apiece attempting Rhapsody and Echo Wall. They were, in every sense, massive challenges and full of personal meaning. Obstinacy, he says, a basic refusal to give up, is key to his success. His current project on a similar scale is St John's Head on Hoy in Orkney, which at 1,128ft is the highest vertical sea cliff in the UK.

"It will take about 14 hours to climb, and the last part is as hard as Rhapsody. It would be like doing two marathons in a row then trying to run a personal best 400m at the end. "

"So you've to do all that climbing without getting tired, then there's the psychological challenge of investing that effort then getting to the hard part and not being overwhelmed by the situation. If you start to think, 'Oh my God, am I going to blow it?' then you will."

MacLeod discusses his climbs as if they were being attempted by other people. He often says "you" rather than "I". A lack of ego seems to be part of his psychological armoury, a way of holding thoughts of danger at arm's length. He says that on a climb, at the moment of greatest risk, "you should feel absolutely nothing and be in a bubble of concentration".

He is not immune to fear and panic, but has the ability to cast these feelings beyond his mental periphery. He can't say for sure whether this skill is innate or learned, but acknowledges he is, by nature, reserved and emotionally steady. "He's very calm all the time," says Claire.

"It's hard to have a fight with David. Frustratingly so."

At school, Boclair Academy in Bearsden, he was quiet, not a great mixer. He had long hair then, which he'd dye different colours, Claire remembers. He found school very demotivating and eventually stopped going more or less altogether.

"In school sport the focus on competition was very strong," he recalls. "Competitive sports are good fun and reaffirming for people who are already quite confident. But I was really, really unconfident and it was always a bad experience. There was a hierarchy, and if you weren't good at sport, you were looked down upon."

His family had moved to Bearsden from Charing Cross. His mother is a health visitor, his father a silversmith. Suddenly, MacLeod found himself living on the western edge of Glasgow. He could see all these hills. He started cycling into them and the climbing began during these solitary, exploratory excursions.

Everything about it made sense to him — the adventure, the individual rather than team challenge, the feeling of the stone beneath his fingers. It became something he craved, a physical and psychological need. He'd play truant and spend the day on the crags. He'd been climbing for a year or so when he met Claire. He was 16 and she was 15. The two relationships — with climbing and his wife — have fused together. She, too, is his rock.

In the days after I interview him on Harris, MacLeod continues to prepare for the climb of Srn Uladail. He's blown around dangerously by the wind and soaked by the rain, and he drinks a lochan of tea while waiting for the weather to improve, but he never, not once, loses focus.

The last time I saw him he was growing fainter by the second, disappearing above the flightpath of eagles and beyond the human capacity to see or even imagine. "Everything has to work out absolutely just right on the day. Our chances of doing the route first try, without any falls, are not that high," he had told me. "I really can't wait."

The Great Climb will be on BBC2 Scotland, Saturday, 1:35pm-7pm and on BBC HD, 5pm-7pm

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, 22 August, 2010