‘For me, climbing blind is safer than crossing a road’
Jesse Dufton wants other disabled people to copy his dreams – Boudicca Fox- Leonard follows his lead up a daunting Peak District ascent
Stanage Edge, the Peak District, on a grey and windswept Sunday. Jesse Dufton is climbing ‘Flying Buttress Direct’, a classic climbing route on this gritstone crag. A delicate slab soon gives way to an intimidating overhanging roof. I’ve been here on sunny days and watched people give up on it.
A dog walker stops to watch. “Do you know who that is?” I ask. “Yeah, he’s amazing,” comes the reply. “I follow him on Instagram.”
We both stand pensively as Dufton makes his way up the face towards the overhang. Dufton looks relaxed, keeping his cool even when the rope gets tangled round his foot as he pulls himself up on to the tiny ledge above. If he fell now he’d plummet five metres with a swing. His confidence is unsurprising given that he’s been climbing since he was two. What is utterly remarkable is that Dufton is blind.
Born with 20 per cent central vision, at the age of four he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa: a rare genetic disease that breaks down the retina’s cells. His parents were told he would never learn to read or write.
In reality, he only stopped reading in the first year of his chemistry PhD. “I’ve written a doctorate, but never read it,” Dufton joked earlier as we prepared for the climb.
Aged 33, all he has now is a little light perception. “If I hold my hand against the horizon, I can see it’s dark but I can’t see my hand or count my fingers. I can’t see anything unless it’s against a light background.”
And now he’s 10m up in the air, facing a dark piece of rock. Even as a climber myself, the mind boggles. Below, his fiancée and sight guide, Molly Thompson, 35, is belaying him; operating the rope and brake device which will support Dufton if he falls. She whispers into a radio headset describing what she can see of the route. But that’s not much from down here. The rest, Dufton is doing by feel alone. His powers of proprioception are remarkable; his foot able to directly locate tiny holds that his hand was on moments before. Looking down to check isn’t an option.
Climbing is having a moment. Inclusion in the 2020 Olympics and films such as Free Solo, about Alex Honnold’s ropeless ascent of 900m Yosemite monolith El Capitan, have brought it to the mainstream. Bouldering walls are popping up everywhere, and filling up just as quick.
Against that backdrop Dufton has been quietly climbing his whole life; his father took him to the Idwal Slabs in Snowdonia when he was a toddler and he was hooked. Part of the GB Paraclimbing Team, at the World Championships in July he came fourth in his category, the men’s B1 – the most blind. But what makes Dufton unusual is his love of traditional climbing outdoors.
“Trad” climbing is where climbers place all the gear required to protect themselves against falls. Metal protections such as nuts, cams and hexes are placed in cracks in the rock and the rope clipped through them to provide security against a fall. A belay station is then built at the top of a pitch, and the second climber removes the protection as they climb up. It’s a mental as well as a physical challenge for the lead (first) climber; falling on a piece of gear means it could be ripped out by your weight, unlike the drilled-in bolts the rope is clipped into in sport climbing.
No other blind climbers are climbing trad as hard in the grade (Flying Buttress Direct has a grade of E1 5b), which means everything Dufton does is pretty much a first.
If you’re thinking: “Maniac, he’s going to kill himself!”, Dufton suggests you consider that: “This is definitely not the most dangerous thing I do on a daily basis. Crossing the road on the way to work is much, much more dangerous than going climbing.”
His day job is as a patent engineer in a technology company and it’s in the evenings that he and Thompson, also an engineer, train at their local climbing wall in Loughborough. Watching him dangle from one arm as he finds the right-sized piece of gear on his harness to place in the rock, it’s clear Dufton has strength to burn.
In February this year he became the first blind climber to “onsight” (complete on the first try) the Old Man Of Hoy in the Orkney Islands. Or as Dufton jokes, “on sight. None sight.”
This was an epic undertaking. The 137m red sandstone tower was first climbed in 1966 by Chris Bonington, Tom Patey and Rusty Baillie. Dufton’s ascent has been turned into 60-minute documentary, Climbing Blind, and is the main feature of this year’s Brit Rock Film Tour, which begins in Sheffield on Oct 24 before touring the country.
It was in Buxton during last year’s tour that Dufton approached director Alastair Lee and asked if he fancied filming “a blind guy leading trad”? One can imagine it was an intriguing proposition. Although Dufton is so at home on the rock, that when Lee first filmed him climbing he told him it didn’t look that different to a sighted person. “People usually only realise I’m blind when they see Molly leading me down from a climb,” he says.
Still, the six pitches of the awesome Old Man of Hoy proved to be the project that satisfied both climber and film-maker. Due to windy conditions and drone filming, they didn’t start until 3pm. By the fourth pitch he was around a corner and out of Thompson’s sight. “Al said you could really tell then that I can’t see. I was really feeling everything,” says Dufton.
By 10.10pm they were both at the summit. It must have been an immense feeling? “It was a bit muted,” he admits. “I still had to get back down!” Three massive abseils and a scramble later, he and Thompson were back at their tent by 2.45am, elated and exhausted.
This story wouldn’t be the same without her. Since meeting at the University of Bath in 2007 they’ve done 1,300 routes together. Theirs is an easy-going rapport that makes no concessions to Dufton’s disability. “She’s a better climber than I am,” he says. “Only because I can see what I’m doing,” she quips.
Dufton admits to being annoyed when he hears people say, “Why would you go climbing with him? It must be quite dangerous.” “They’re making an assumption that I can’t do something that I’ve been doing for over 20 years.”
I certainly have no fears about seconding him up Flying Buttress Direct, taking out the solid protection he’s placed in cracks along the way. Muscling myself inelegantly past the overhang, I finally reach the top, where Dufton is sitting, belaying me from a station he has built, bare feet dangling over the cliff.
When I tell him about the Instagram follower who has been watching him from below, he smiles modestly. Thompson does the Instagram work and it clearly feels strange for him to be a social media figure.
He hasn’t done the film in order to become famous. Rather, he says: “I realised it was important to tell my story so that the parents of blind, or other disabled people, realise it’s totally possible for them to go out and do stuff. It’s an attitude thing. If you believe something is impossible, it will be.”
He’s not limiting his own horizons, which involve plenty more climbing, ice climbing and skiing (he’s an accomplished skier)... oh, and getting married.
Paraclimbing isn’t in the 2020 Olympics, as not enough countries are yet able to field competitors. “Maybe 2028. That might not be too late for me.” There are more international competitions next year, but Dufton really seems most interested in testing his own physical limits. “I’d like to climb even more challenging routes in trad,” he says. “Longer term, doing some freestanding ice towers would be wicked.”
And why not? “In life you’re never going to eliminate risk. An aeroplane could fall out of the sky or you could drop down with a heart attack. But if you didn’t do anything because of it, you’d never do anything.”
‘It was important to tell my story so the parents of blind people realise it’s totally possible’
‘I’d like to climb even more challenging routes. Ice towers would be wicked’
The Brit Rock Film Tour starts at Sheffield Hallam University on Oct 24; britrockfilmtour.com