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Deep Play: A Climber's Odyssey from Llanberis to the Big Walls
The height of Great Britain's unemployment crisis in the early 1980s spawned a disillusioned crop of climbers who lived on the dole, surviving on cold beans and white bread in snacks and caves, focusing only on climbing.
With a unique voice that tests the boundaries of the adventure narrative genre, Paul Pritchard emerges as the epitome of this generation. A series of stories creates a portrait of the author as he moves from climbing the crags of the local quarry to major expeditions and first ascents In South America and Antarctica. While recognizing that he is perceived as something of a rebel in society, Pritchard hopes that he has given something to climbing by "offering steep, mind-testing challenges for climbers to test themselves out".
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 25, 2023
Four stories up, by Mr. Wooley’s physics classroom, a young Paul Pritchard looked down well-like spiral stairwell, and dropped down. He saw a classmate that passed too quickly to shout to, and recognized the school’s heat radiators as he flew, and the red tiles at the bottom by the pool before he blacked out. Pritchard woke up in the hospital. No one dared him. He wanted to see if he could do it.
Pritchard was the climber many people, possibly even my parents, had in mind when they thought of a rock climber: A risk taker that wakes up after “accidents” in the hospital, if he wakes up at all. He fell, went unconscious, and woke up in the hospital at least three times, including the flight from Mr. Wooley’s classroom, in his 1997 book Deep Play: A Climber’s Odyssey from Llanberis to the Big Walls. This was before his horrible and life changing fall on Totem Pole in Tasmnia. He suffered from a severe head injury that has impaired his use of his body’s right side.
I put Pritchard’s book on my Short Long List because it interested me and I wondered whether it could be a climbing classic. Part of this was that Prichard had climbed on many amazing climbs I read about when I just started reading about climbing. These routes were the big wall climbs of my daydreams: Mount Asgard, Paine’s Central Tower, Trango Tower, and Meru’s Shark’s Fin, and Pritchard tells his story of these routes in his book.
Deep Play is a memoir told through a series of essays told chronologically. He starts at the beginning of his life and I adore the first sentence: “I was born on top of the quarry.” There he and his friends played with explosives, found a dynamic climbing rope, and learned to climb with some real climbers. From there, he and friends developed routes along the sea wall cliffs of England, which appears to earn him invitations to bigger climbs. Later, he says, the Garwhal Himalaya was the “coolest” place he had ever been.
Pritchard was always poor. He lived off unemployment and relied on friends to help him out. His caring character and mischievous spirit earned him his adventurous friends, who were quite loyal. Scrounging and dealing for food, gear, and transportation was a perpetual theme.
What I don’t like is not knowing what actually happened at times. His writing is mesmerizing and kept me interested throughout the book. My favorite chapter was On The Big Stone; he retells one of his early climbing road trips in snippets and clues. It resonated with me and felt like the carefree and sometimes frantic qualities of an adventure with friends. But, there were a lot of details that I wanted to know that went unaddressed. For example, upon leaving, he says he forgot his pack with his gear, but it appears that they kept going, but they might have turned around and got the bag. Yet, they were low on gas. Does that mean they kept going and Pritchard used someone else’s shoes? Did he need shoes or was he climbing in his everyday sneakers? I don’t know and Pritchard doesn’t say.
David Stevenson addresses this in his review of Deep Play in the 1998 American Alpine Journal:
When I say “one gathers,” I mean it literally—it’s hard sometimes to tell exactly what happens. Pritchard quite consistently abandons the literal for the figurative, imaginative, impressionistic. The reader can’t always tell exactly what happens, but nonetheless has arrived (if he’s patient) at a sense of what has happened that’s somehow larger than the literal.
David Stevenson, 1998 American Alpine Journal
Stevenson was harsher than I want to be. He wondered whether we would be complicitous with Pritchard’s next great accident if we consider to praise him. I don’t think that would be the case. As read in Deep Play, Pritchard has been both daring and reckless since arriving at the quarry. Still, it was an ominous question as Pritchard had his life-changing fall on Totem Pole the year Stevenson’s review was published.
Deep Play was short-listed for the Boardman Tasker Mountain Literature Award with Against The Wall by Simon Yates, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Icefields by Thomas Wharton, Spirits Of Place by Jim Perrin, and Dark Shadows Falling by Joe Simpson. These are well-respected writers, even if people (like me,) disapprove of some of the stories they told (which is a tale for another time.) Pritchard’s writing was not comparable and it is a little surprising it surpassed these works.
However, Pritchard’s climbing resume, told in Deep Play, has a gravitas, and his disjointed writing is still understandable to the reader even if details (which aren’t always critical for the wonderfully mesmerizing tale anyway) are discarded with abandon. It’s a passionate, authentic, and whirlwind of an adventure that you feel much more than you see. You enter Pritchard’s dream-like memories of the climbs, and road trips, and late nights at the disco between adventures.
I recommend it to meet Paul Pritchard and feel the mountain through his writing alone.
THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT SuburburanMountaineer.com. CHECK IT OUT.
Pritchard was the climber many people, possibly even my parents, had in mind when they thought of a rock climber: A risk taker that wakes up after “accidents” in the hospital, if he wakes up at all. He fell, went unconscious, and woke up in the hospital at least three times, including the flight from Mr. Wooley’s classroom, in his 1997 book Deep Play: A Climber’s Odyssey from Llanberis to the Big Walls. This was before his horrible and life changing fall on Totem Pole in Tasmnia. He suffered from a severe head injury that has impaired his use of his body’s right side.
I put Pritchard’s book on my Short Long List because it interested me and I wondered whether it could be a climbing classic. Part of this was that Prichard had climbed on many amazing climbs I read about when I just started reading about climbing. These routes were the big wall climbs of my daydreams: Mount Asgard, Paine’s Central Tower, Trango Tower, and Meru’s Shark’s Fin, and Pritchard tells his story of these routes in his book.
Deep Play is a memoir told through a series of essays told chronologically. He starts at the beginning of his life and I adore the first sentence: “I was born on top of the quarry.” There he and his friends played with explosives, found a dynamic climbing rope, and learned to climb with some real climbers. From there, he and friends developed routes along the sea wall cliffs of England, which appears to earn him invitations to bigger climbs. Later, he says, the Garwhal Himalaya was the “coolest” place he had ever been.
Pritchard was always poor. He lived off unemployment and relied on friends to help him out. His caring character and mischievous spirit earned him his adventurous friends, who were quite loyal. Scrounging and dealing for food, gear, and transportation was a perpetual theme.
What I don’t like is not knowing what actually happened at times. His writing is mesmerizing and kept me interested throughout the book. My favorite chapter was On The Big Stone; he retells one of his early climbing road trips in snippets and clues. It resonated with me and felt like the carefree and sometimes frantic qualities of an adventure with friends. But, there were a lot of details that I wanted to know that went unaddressed. For example, upon leaving, he says he forgot his pack with his gear, but it appears that they kept going, but they might have turned around and got the bag. Yet, they were low on gas. Does that mean they kept going and Pritchard used someone else’s shoes? Did he need shoes or was he climbing in his everyday sneakers? I don’t know and Pritchard doesn’t say.
David Stevenson addresses this in his review of Deep Play in the 1998 American Alpine Journal:
When I say “one gathers,” I mean it literally—it’s hard sometimes to tell exactly what happens. Pritchard quite consistently abandons the literal for the figurative, imaginative, impressionistic. The reader can’t always tell exactly what happens, but nonetheless has arrived (if he’s patient) at a sense of what has happened that’s somehow larger than the literal.
David Stevenson, 1998 American Alpine Journal
Stevenson was harsher than I want to be. He wondered whether we would be complicitous with Pritchard’s next great accident if we consider to praise him. I don’t think that would be the case. As read in Deep Play, Pritchard has been both daring and reckless since arriving at the quarry. Still, it was an ominous question as Pritchard had his life-changing fall on Totem Pole the year Stevenson’s review was published.
Deep Play was short-listed for the Boardman Tasker Mountain Literature Award with Against The Wall by Simon Yates, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Icefields by Thomas Wharton, Spirits Of Place by Jim Perrin, and Dark Shadows Falling by Joe Simpson. These are well-respected writers, even if people (like me,) disapprove of some of the stories they told (which is a tale for another time.) Pritchard’s writing was not comparable and it is a little surprising it surpassed these works.
However, Pritchard’s climbing resume, told in Deep Play, has a gravitas, and his disjointed writing is still understandable to the reader even if details (which aren’t always critical for the wonderfully mesmerizing tale anyway) are discarded with abandon. It’s a passionate, authentic, and whirlwind of an adventure that you feel much more than you see. You enter Pritchard’s dream-like memories of the climbs, and road trips, and late nights at the disco between adventures.
I recommend it to meet Paul Pritchard and feel the mountain through his writing alone.
THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT SuburburanMountaineer.com. CHECK IT OUT.
January 19, 2026
Started this on a hike with my friend Flavie in the Dolomites, perfect for the long hut evenings. Didn’t finish it until 4 months later. Always a pleasure to read a british classic, obviously enjoyed specially the two chapters on Central Tower and North Tower of Paine, specially after comparing it with Yate’s version. Made me want to visit Bariloche and Frey. Another chapters I remember very well are their climb of the scoop in Harris, they were eating sheep shit!?!?!?!? and Lol at Silvo Karo in Scotland “I’ve seen enough bad weather in my life. I think we should go and drink coffee”.
“I am definitely a climber who writes”
“The nooks and crannies of adventure had been demolished”
“My need to get stronger, to use all my time struggling towards my dreams, even though I had no private wealth, is what some found disagreeable”
“We slid over the edge from a world of coach tours and ice=creams back into the tilted desert. Two opposite universes separated by a right angle”
“That same feeling as when I first went to the Verdon at 16. The space, the updraught, the freedom. This is why I go climbing. Its easy to lose sight when you get fuelled by ambition”
“A place where climbers lived who cared for it, and knew it well enough to say that the yellow rock was more brittle than the red, or that there are hidden holds inside that crack (...) the boulder in the next valley gives good shelter, or at what time exactly does the sun shine on that face in the mountain. Simple shared knowledge. That which we have of our home rocks.”
“I’ve just finished my morning stretches, they take about an hour”
“I am definitely a climber who writes”
“The nooks and crannies of adventure had been demolished”
“My need to get stronger, to use all my time struggling towards my dreams, even though I had no private wealth, is what some found disagreeable”
“We slid over the edge from a world of coach tours and ice=creams back into the tilted desert. Two opposite universes separated by a right angle”
“That same feeling as when I first went to the Verdon at 16. The space, the updraught, the freedom. This is why I go climbing. Its easy to lose sight when you get fuelled by ambition”
“A place where climbers lived who cared for it, and knew it well enough to say that the yellow rock was more brittle than the red, or that there are hidden holds inside that crack (...) the boulder in the next valley gives good shelter, or at what time exactly does the sun shine on that face in the mountain. Simple shared knowledge. That which we have of our home rocks.”
“I’ve just finished my morning stretches, they take about an hour”
December 27, 2024
Paul Pritchard has led an astonishing life with an inflection point none of us ever want to live through - a telly-sized rock to the top of his head while climbing that rendered him a disabled person. His survival is the stuff of legend but speaks to perseverance on a superheroic scale. Deep Play is the calm before the storm (if there was ever calm in Pritch's life!) and is his origin story.
Add to this the sequels of Deep Play: the Totem Pole (where he suffered the accident) and The Longest Climb (where he sought to return to the mountains on Mt. Kenya) and The Mountain Path (which queries spiritual and philosophical aspects of climbing). Pritchard has taken the hero's journey, fought the dragons and returned to tell the stories.
In many ways, he's the conscience of the climbing community; here to remind us that disabled isn't unable.
Add to this the sequels of Deep Play: the Totem Pole (where he suffered the accident) and The Longest Climb (where he sought to return to the mountains on Mt. Kenya) and The Mountain Path (which queries spiritual and philosophical aspects of climbing). Pritchard has taken the hero's journey, fought the dragons and returned to tell the stories.
In many ways, he's the conscience of the climbing community; here to remind us that disabled isn't unable.
July 16, 2023
Entertaining and interesting short stories from another of the type of hard-man climber that Britain's industrial areas churned out for so many years. Good reading, but it all starts feeling a bit cliched - I'm looking forward to reading climbing stories from the post-Thatcher generation next.
April 13, 2013
I will never become a fan of these collections of short-stories as they easily become fragmented reads. On an individual basis the short-stories in this book are exiting and very well written.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews