The blind climber scaling new heights

Tru­ly effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion tran­scends mere words. It’s how you choose to com­mu­ni­cate, with whom you com­mu­ni­cate, and the trust that under­pins it all. Mar­ried climb­ing part­ners, Jesse and Mol­ly Dufton have this down to a fine art, enabling them to con­quer icon­ic climb­ing routes as they com­mu­ni­cate through a radio mic. Their com­mu­ni­ca­tion is extra impor­tant because Jesse can­not see – he can only dis­tin­guish between light and dark in an extreme­ly restrict­ed field of view. Born with the genet­ic con­di­tion, rod-cone dys­tro­phy, Jesse had only 20% sight, and his vision has dete­ri­o­rat­ed over time, mak­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Mol­ly even more impor­tant in a sport where trust between part­ners is already vital. Togeth­er they have climbed dif­fi­cult ascents, while Jesse has built a rep­u­ta­tion for being one of the world’s lead­ing blind climbers – both indoors and out­doors. He has been recog­nised by Guin­ness World Records for being the first blind per­son to lead climb the Orkney’s famous Old Man of Hoy – where he was also the sub­ject of a BBC doc­u­men­tary Climb­ing Blind. We spoke to him about how he and Mol­ly work so well together.

We’re here to talk about The Pow­er of Words, but before we get onto that, how would you describe yourself?

A climber – that’s the easy bit! Pri­mar­i­ly a trad climber. Because I can’t see, I’m very sta­t­ic, slow and con­trolled. Endurance is one of my strengths – it has to be because I’m on the routes for so much longer than every­one else. I’ve got a pret­ty good head. That’s impor­tant for trad climb­ing. You find your­self in some pret­ty scary and some­times dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions, and the abil­i­ty to focus on the task at hand is real­ly critical.

Often peo­ple ask me whether I would describe myself as a climber or a par­a­climber. I’m both, but I pre­fer to just call myself a climber.

How would you describe Molly? 

Well, awe­some, obvi­ous­ly! She’s very shy and very mod­est. I find it hilar­i­ous when peo­ple ask her about her climb­ing, ​“Oh, do you climb too?” I’m there gig­gling like, ​“she’s a far bet­ter climber than me”. She’ll nev­er admit it, but she is.

It feels like your rela­tion­ship pow­ers your climbing.

It’s a huge part of our climb­ing. There are sev­er­al things that make Mol­ly amaz­ing as a sight guide. She’s a good climber. She looks at the route, reads it, then adjusts the plan to tai­lor it to me. I’m six foot one: she’s five foot six. I climb very dif­fer­ent­ly from her – I can’t dyno, but I can hang on for­ev­er. She must adjust the plan of how she would climb it to enable it for me. 

Then she’s got to com­mu­ni­cate in the min­i­mum pos­si­ble time. I can hang on for a long time, but it’s not infi­nite. Then there’s the non­ver­bal – the read­ing of each other’s emo­tion­al states. She can tell when I’m get­ting stressed and close to falling off. And, con­verse­ly, I can tell through her instruc­tions when she’s stressed and wor­ried about me falling off, or the dan­ger. She tries to mask it as much as she can, but you can nev­er hide things com­plete­ly from some­one who knows you well.

Tell me about your com­mu­ni­ca­tion system.

It is very cut back. We strip out every­thing we can because time is so important. 

Indoors, it’s obvi­ous where the holds are most of the time. We use a code to direct me to the next hold based on a clock face. For exam­ple, ​‘ten’ and then you’ll give a dis­tance. Out­side, Mol­ly must look at the rock, work out where the holds are, then direct me to where they are in rela­tion to my body. 

Some blind climbers want to know what hold is com­ing next. That’s unnec­es­sary infor­ma­tion for me. With­in mil­lisec­onds of touch­ing it, I’ll have worked out how to hold it. The only thing I want to know is if I need to hold it in a dif­fer­ent way to what I might expect. 

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is crit­i­cal for me, as I don’t rehearse routes before I climb them. This is the way that I choose to climb. I could make it eas­i­er by rehears­ing, but I choose not to because it would be destroy­ing the game. I want to be judged on the same lev­el as an able-bod­ied climber. I don’t want unnec­es­sary adjust­ments to be put in place for me. I want the min­i­mum lev­el of help.

Is there any­thing that you don’t want to hear from Mol­ly when you’re climbing? 

Any­thing that’s unnec­es­sary. The fun­ni­est is when I’m on routes that are some of the hard­est I’ve ever done, and when she can’t see me she’s start­ed telling me about the wildlife. Like on The Old Man of Hoy (East Face Route, E1 5b), it was a seal. On Inter­na­tionale (E3, Isle of Skye), which is my hard­est route, she spot­ted a pod of dol­phins. She’s telling me about this while I’m hang­ing on for dear life. I was like, ​“not now, Mol­ly”. She’s got a wicked sense of humour.

Has there been a moment when you felt your com­mu­ni­ca­tion come togeth­er in a pow­er­ful way?

There’s a route in Pem­broke called Kin­vig. It’s E1 [Extreme], quite obscure. It’s not one of the hard­er things I’ve climbed but, for me, it was real­ly hard because of the style of the climb­ing – it’s all in where you place your feet. Find­ing footholds is one of the hard­est things when you can’t see. And, to com­ple­ment that, the gear (pro­tec­tion you place as you climb) is rub­bish. I didn’t have con­fi­dence that it would hold a fall. Mol­ly is there below, look­ing up, doing her very best to spot where the holds are.

That was a real­ly good exam­ple of two things. One, it showed Molly’s abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate with me under stress, and her abil­i­ty to be a rock-read­ing genius and direct me to things that must be tiny from the ground. And two, my abil­i­ty to real­ly give every­thing, because I thought that I was going to drop every sin­gle move on that route. While it’s grad­ed E1, often the grade that a route gets giv­en doesn’t tell the whole sto­ry. It does­n’t tell the expe­ri­ence that you had on that route.

How long did it take to build the trust in your climb­ing partnership?

I don’t think there’s a clear line between no trust and trust. It grad­u­al­ly builds up over years. Mol­ly and I start­ed climb­ing togeth­er in about 2008. At that point, I could still see a lit­tle, so there was a grad­ual tran­si­tion between climb­ing as two climb­ing part­ners, into Mol­ly begin­ning to guide me.

The big things are the trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ences that you go through and come out the oth­er side. I was a more expe­ri­enced Alpine climber than Mol­ly, and I took her to do her first Alpine route. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a climber from anoth­er par­ty fell and died, and we had to call in the res­cue heli­copter and try to get down to the body. We had anoth­er expe­ri­ence when we were in Green­land – an anchor fail­ure – and it would have been very easy for some of our friends to die then, but we did­n’t panic.

Some­times peo­ple change under stress. It’s only when you have been through some of those sit­u­a­tions, and you know they don’t react bad­ly, that you find out what their per­son­al­i­ty is like on the inside and you can real­ly trust them.

I heard that you don’t tend to prep before you climb. Is that true?

The most ​‘pure’ type of ascent is what they call ​‘onsight’, where you don’t have any infor­ma­tion about the route before­hand. You turn up at the crag, you look at it. Then you climb it, first go, no falls. Out­side, I climb most­ly onsight – and I am ful­ly aware of the irony of that descrip­tion. So, in that sense, I do no prep.

I cut down the amount that we talk about the route on the ground. When climb­ing out­side, the main thing is get­ting the first gear in (using climb­ing equip­ment to secure the rope in case of a fall). Where’s that going to go? What size gear am I going to need? We won’t walk through all the moves because Mol­ly can’t tell from the ground which holds are use­ful. A lot more of the deci­sion-mak­ing process out­doors on what holds to use and what gear to place is down to me.

On indoor routes, we only focus on things that will be hard to describe on the fly. If you do a rose move (a spe­cialised cross­ing tech­nique), that’s quite hard with the com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem that we have. Or maybe you’ll be mov­ing the same hand twice – that doesn’t fit into our sys­tem either. You try and get those nailed on the ground before you set off.

Is there some­thing that you feel like is a mis­con­cep­tion in paraclimbing?

All the par­a­climb­ing com­pe­ti­tions use a top rope. I would hate to think that there is an assump­tion that par­a­climbers can’t lead climb. The vast major­i­ty of my climb­ing is on lead, and I’d pre­fer it if the com­pe­ti­tions were on lead too rather than top rope.

What are you most proud of in your climb­ing career?

It’s the times when I’ve pushed myself, both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly. Kin­vig (men­tioned above) was a good exam­ple of men­tal for­ti­tude as much as any­thing else.

Forked Light­ning Crack (E2, York­shire) was real­ly sig­nif­i­cant because that was the first route that I had ever done with no sight that was hard­er than any­thing I could have climbed when I could see a lit­tle bit. That was a big thresh­old for me.

This piece appeared in Huck #80. Get your copy here.

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