Last Wednesday, in a small ceremony in the French mountain town of Briançon, Yorkshire-born climber Paul Ramsden received his fifth Piolet d’Or, or golden ice axe — the Academy Award of mountaineering. With this latest accolade, 54-year-old Ramsden became the most decorated mountaineer in the awards’ history, though it’s a distinction he is keen to shrug off when I speak to him. “It’s a good job these things don’t go to my head,” he says.
If his name is unfamiliar to the public at large, that should hardly come as a surprise. Ramsden is practically allergic to self-promotion. Unlike many younger mountaineers, he has no social media presence and, in contrast to many of the Instagram-ready “adventurers” who pay to be guided to the top of famous peaks, he has not sought to parlay his summits into a lucrative career on the speaking circuit.
“I have no interest in it,” he laughs. “Social media is just something I don’t do, and for years because of that people didn’t really know I existed.” Nor does he court high-paying endorsement deals: according to Summit magazine, when outdoor equipment maker Rab approached him to offer support, Ramdsen replied: “As long as I don’t have to do anything in return!”
Sponsorship is limited to a handful of brands that provide the equipment he needs when out in the mountains. Well, not quite all of his equipment. Some items, such as the snow hammock he uses to build sleeping ledges on vertiginous mountain faces, are sewn for him by his mother-in-law.
He is not even a professional sportsman, instead making time to climb around his day job as an occupational hygienist (monitoring workplaces for health and safety hazards). Ramsden’s approach may seem eccentric, even to experienced mountaineers, but it is also undeniably effective. He has an enviable success rate and safety record in the high mountains.
He won his first Piolet d’Or in 2003 for a climb he completed on the north face of Mount Siguniang in China with his frequent collaborator Mick Fowler. Two decades on, the latest is for the first ascent of a Nepalese peak called Jugal Spire (also known as Dorje Lhakpa II) which Ramsden spotted on Google Earth during the Covid lockdown and climbed with Tim Miller in April 2022.
The climb followed a single white slash of ice and snow across the otherwise bare rock of the mountain’s north face. When Ramsden and Miller began the ascent, they had no way of knowing if this feature would continue unbroken to the top. If the ice and snow were to peter out or the rock become blank, retreat would be extremely challenging.
This is the style of ascent that the Piolets d’Or reward — small teams climbing without supplemental oxygen, fixed ropes or Sherpa support. Not only is it the correct ethical approach in Ramsden’s eyes, but it also connects him to the “wild places and real adventure” that continue to drive him. Of the growing number of mountain tourists who pay expedition companies to help them tackle the 8,000m peaks, he has a simple assessment: “They aren’t climbing the mountain. They’re climbing a rope that’s been fixed for them by someone else.”
While he may value the Piolets d’Or recognition — they are decided by a jury of leading climbers — his awards do not adorn the walls of his Leicestershire home. Instead, they are piled behind the door of his office, where the only person who sees them is the cleaner. “She complains that they’re a bit of a dust trap,” he smiles, “but I’ve just never got round to putting them up.”
One suspects there may be a deeper explanation for why Ramsden has not made a show of his prizes, but given how often he’s away from home, he may simply lack the time. Since 1990, alongside travel for work, he has undertaken an expedition almost every year, usually squeezing it into a month’s holiday. To have managed this relentless schedule requires two things, he explains: “You need to be self-employed and you need to have a very patient wife.”
Beyond this light-hearted summation, there is a recognition of the deeper cost involved in such monomaniacal dedication. “Everybody has to help so that I can go away. I couldn’t do it without my family. But you also have to be pretty bloody-minded to keep insisting on going away every year when you know you’re causing massive inconvenience to people. You have to be quite thick-skinned.”
It may not be the most selfless approach but it is, in his view, a necessary one in terms of his development as a mountaineer: “People are obsessed with shortcuts these days. Everything’s about ‘hacks’. And, in mountaineering, there aren’t any. You just need to put in the time and learn the trade.”
Ramsden speaks from hard-won experience. By his own admission, his first trip to the Himalayas in 1990 was “a complete disaster”. In the years that followed, after initially swearing off expedition climbing entirely, he tried it again, first in Alaska and then in Patagonia — smaller ranges with lower altitudes that allowed him to find his cramponed feet.
Ramsden’s success and longevity are attributable in part to this long, fierce apprenticeship but also to his constant awareness of risk. His first climbing partner and mentor died when Ramsden was still a teenager.
Roger Sutcliffe was walking alone in Scotland when he slipped and fell while crossing a snowy col. “It was a silly mistake,” Ramsden recalls. “He chose not to take his ice axe off his pack. When he slipped, he had nothing to stop the slide and he fell into a gully.” When Sutcliffe’s body was recovered, the ice axe was still strapped to his backpack.
“It seems a strange thing,” says Ramsden “but his death is what’s kept me alive all these years. It instilled in me, from the age of 17, that I was playing a very serious game.”
We share a moment of silence.
“It wasn’t enough to stop me climbing, though,” he adds.
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