RETURNS TO PEAK WHERE HE NEARLY DIED ‘I lost half my blood...clear liquid seeped from my skull’
BRAVE Paul Pritchard has conquered the climb that almost killed him.
The Brit scaled the 213ft sea stack using just one arm, 18 years after suffering horrific injuries trying to reach the top.
Paul had been one of the UK’s leading climbers when he first tackled the Totem Pole in Tasmania in 1998.
On that occasion, a falling rock split open his skull, leaving him paralysed down one side.
He spent 10 hours hanging from a ledge 100ft above the waves while his then girlfriend desperately raced to get help.
Celia Bull, who was just nine stone, made a superhuman effort to haul 11-stone Paul to safety.
She then ran six miles through the dense Tasmanian bush to the nearest phone.
Paul said: “She gave me a hug, then told me she was going to have JOE HINTON to leave me and get help. I was terrified it was the last time I was going to see her.”
Eventually, a helicopter came to the rescue and medic Neale Smith, himself a seasoned climber, descended from the top of the stack to reach him.
Paul needed a string of major operations but still has no use of his right arm. He also walks with a limp and has slowed speech.
Despite his injuries he always vowed to revisit the scene and finally scale the stone tower.
Paul experimented with various rope ascending systems but joked they were too complicated for his “literally half a brain”. He finally settled on a simple pulley for his return bid. He was able to use the immense strength in his good arm to haul himself up inch by inch. The ascent involved doing 126 left arm pull-ups over an exhausting eight hours. Paul said afterwards: “Anything more than that and I would have been really struggling. “I wanted to prove disabled climbers are not unable.” Paul, now a dad, from Bolton, added: “I actually caressed the hole where the stone that hit me on the head fell from. I stood there and stroked it. It was huge. “It was really moving to be back there. “I expected to die on that ledge when I had my accident. I lost half my blood, there was clear fluid coming out of my head. It was a shocking thing. I was there for 10 hours and was hypothermic. “It was important for me to go back to that place.” Paul said of Celia’s heroism: “She was the real hero in this story. She performed possibly the most incredible feat of mountain rescue by a woman in the history of mountaineering.” He needed six hours of brain surgery after the helicopter took him to an Australian hospital, but that was just the beginning of a long ordeal. Paul spent the best part of a year in hospital and nine months in a wheelchair. His relationship with Celia ended under the intolerable strain. Paul said: “The first year was incredibly hard. I just didn’t know what to do. “I got really depressed and sold all my climbing gear, thinking I’ll never go climbing again.” But he ended up marrying and having two children with Jane Boucher, one of the Tasmanian nurses who cared for him. Doing It Scared, a short film showcasing Paul’s incredible feat, is one of the adventure stories being shown for the first time on the 2017 Banff Mountain Film Festival UK tour. See banff-uk.com for details.