Driven

A technical manual on how to place and remove pegs for rock climbers, alpinists and big wall climbing

Who’s this book for?  Well anyone who may need to place, use or remove a peg, meaning big wall climbers, winter climbers and alpinists.

Someone once asked me how you went about placing a peg when climbing a big wall, to which I replied ‘just hammer it in until it doesn’t come out’. This may have seemed like a pithy answer, but at the time I thought that this was simply how you did it, after all, it wasn’t rocket science and that’s how I’d always approached the art of pegging.

But in writing this book I’ve come to the conclusion that in fact pegging is far more complex then just hammering away on a lump of steel, especially if you’re going to do it safety and without too much impact on the rock. Driven draws together the entire contents of my brain - well the bits that touch on pegs anyway - and aims to pass on a bit more knowledge than my pithy answer. It is by no means a definitive text on the subject, as the more you know, the more you know you don’t know

Preview

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Andy Kirkpatrick

The US magazine Climbing once described Andy as a climber with a “strange penchant for the long, the cold and the difficult”, with a reputation “for seeking out routes where the danger is real, and the return is questionable, pushing himself on some of the hardest walls and faces in the Alps and beyond, sometimes with partners and sometimes alone.”

More succinctly, Metro magazine claims that he “makes Ray Mears look like Paris Hilton”

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El Cap with Phil Packer

In 2009 I helped Major Phil Packer climbed El Cap, helping him to hit his target of one million pounds for Help for Heroes.

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