Mountaineer’s Mareel talk

RENOWNED mountaineer Simon Yates is to set to give a talk in Shetland later this year.

The explorer, whose near-fatal climb in Peru in 1985 inspired the film Touching The Void, will take to the stage at Mareel in Lerwick on 17 November.

Yates will recount decades of mountaineering across every corner of the world, with attention-grabbing images set to complement the talk.

Expected to feature heavily is a trip he and his mountaineering partner Joe Simpson took to Siula Grande in Peru.

Yates was slowly being pulled off a mountain face by an injured Simpson who was dangling 50 metres below him, and thinking there was no hope for either of them, he decided cut the rope.

Simpson managed to survive the fall before spending days crawling back to camp with a broken leg and frostbite, despite Yates thinking his partner had died.