Psychovertical
Raw, award-winning memoir of Andy Kirkpatrick's solo Reticent Wall ascent on El Cap. Brutally honest, darkly funny insights into fear, obsession, and the climber's psyche.
Details
ISBN-10: 0099519526
Publication date:20 November 2010
Publisher: Arrow (UK) The Mountaineers (US) Versante Sud (Italy) As Verlag (Germany)
Print length: 288 pages
Buy on Amazon"Psychovertical is a powerful if intensely personal book, well written, sometimes brilliantly so. It charts Kirkpatrick’s fractured upbringing and subsequent escape to a life of extreme climbing and close calls… He is a clear, spare writer, and a highly visual one. The descriptions of climbing are among the best I’ve ever read… Kirkpatrick chooses words with the same care that he chooses a wire."
Boardman-Tasker
Psychovertical is a raw, gripping, and award-winning memoir that stands as one of the most acclaimed works in modern mountaineering literature. First published in 2008 (US edition by Mountaineers Books in 2012), the book won the prestigious Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 2008.
The narrative is framed around Kirkpatrick's grueling 13–14 day solo ascent of the Reticent Wall (VI 5.9 A5) on El Capitan in Yosemite—one of the hardest and most committing big-wall routes ever soloed by a British climber. As he inches up the wall day after day, the story intercuts with vivid flashbacks to his life: a tough childhood on a grim inner-city housing estate in Hull, struggles with undiagnosed dyslexia, low self-confidence, poverty, and a relentless drive to escape through extreme climbing.
Kirkpatrick weaves personal autobiography with high-stakes adventure—tales of epic winter ascents in the Alps and Patagonia, near-death experiences, family strains, and the psychological paradoxes of risking everything for climbs that "make no sense." His writing is direct, self-deprecating, darkly humorous, and gut-wrenchingly candid, blending laugh-out-loud moments with profound reflections on fear, obsession, impostor syndrome, and what drives someone to court death on vertical stone.
It's not just about the routes; it's about the inner vertical journey.
If you're drawn to books like Touching the Void or Into Thin Air but want something more introspective, psychologically sharp, and brutally funny, Psychovertical is a modern classic that reveals the man behind the mad ascents.
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