The Totem Pole: Surviving the ultimate adventure

Mountain climbing defined Paul Pritchard’s existence and signposted his horizons. One of the leading climbers of the 1980s and 1990s, his adventures took him from his Snowdonia base to the Himalaya, from the Karakoram to Patagonia, from Baffin Island to the Pamirs. Winning the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature in 1997 with his book Deep Play allowed him a life dedicated to climbing. Paul spent the prize money on a round-the-world climbing tour, which eventually found him in Tasmania attempting the most slender sea stack on the planet, the Totem Pole. On Friday 13 February 1998, Paul’s life was changed irrevocably by a TV-sized boulder which fell from this sea stack and struck him on the head. He spent the next years fighting the hemiplegia which paralysed the right side of his body, and caused such a terrible brain injury that doctors thought he might never walk or speak again. Over the following year, Paul began to collect his experiences – from the panic of the ten-hour rescue to the triumph of regaining abilities previously thought lost – and, using only one finger, he punched them into his computer, one letter at a time. The result is The Totem Pole. The first book to win both the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize, The Totem Pole is a sobering and painful story which embodies the resilience that has characterised Paul’s life, but it is also funny and ultimately uplifting – a must-read for climbers and non-climbers alike.