Hanging On – A life inside British climbing’s golden age

«I kicked off my shoes and prepared to climb in stocking feet, aware of an
enormous sense of occasion as I laid hands on the rock and stepped up on the
first rounded hold. It was not a hard climb but that was unimportant. I felt
instinctively at home and at the finish experienced such a surge of happy
elation that I knew then I was committed to climbing.»

Martin Boysen’s passion for crags and mountains springs from his deep love of
nature and a strong sense of adventure. From his early days on rock as a Kent
schoolboy after the war, he was soon among the most gifted climbers of his or
any generation, famed for his silky technique.

Boysen made a huge contribution to British rock climbing, especially in North
Wales; he discovered Gogarth in the 1960s and climbed some of the best new
routes of his era: Nexus on Dinas Mot, The Skull on Cyrn Las and the
magisterial Capital Punishment on Ogwen’s Suicide Wall.

For more than two decades, Boysen was also one of Britain’s leading
mountaineers. A crucial member of Sir Chris Bonington’s team that climbed the
South Face of Annapurna in 1970, Boysen was also part of Bonington’s second
summit team on the South West face of Everest. In 1976 he made the first
ascent of Trango Tower with Joe Brown.

Along the way, Boysen climbed with some of the most important figures in the
history of the sport, not just stars like Bonington and Brown, but those who
make climbing so rich and intriguing, like Nea Morin and the brilliant but
doomed Gary Hemming. He joined Hamish MacInnes hunting gold in Ecuador,
doubled for Clint Eastwood on the North Face of the Eiger and worked on
director Fred Zinnemann’s last movie.

Wry, laconic and self-deprecating, Martin Boysen’s Hanging On is an insider’s
account of British climbing’s golden age.

Paperback edition