An Interview with Jesse Dufton

When I was preparing for this interview I watched a video of you climbing a lightning  shaped-route near Heptonstall, and at the start you and your wife Molly were running through the climb. Can you talk me through how you plan a route and what goes into a climb, before you actually start climbing?

There are a couple of things that feed into that. Firstly, it’s got to be safe—not all climbing routes are safe—but I will pick the ones that are. And that might mean that they are more physically challenging, but the consequence of falling off isn't as dire.

And then it’s got to follow a really obvious feature—on that climb you can’t get lost on the route because you follow the crack—but on some routes there might be a nearly-blank slab of rock with a sequence of tiny little edges. If you can see, you can look at the sequence of tiny little edges and you can plan where you’re going to go, but if you can't see them, you can't do that process—you might go off the route and find yourself in this no-man's land. Picking which climbs to attempt is a big thing for me.


Would it be fair to say that you’re very calculated about what you do?

I think that if you want to be an old climber, you've got to be very good at assessing risk. Because there is risk—and part of the skill is making the activity as safe as possible. You can never make the risk zero, but you do your very best to minimize it to the best of your ability. Also there's a difference between what's scary and what's dangerous—those two things aren't always the same.

You could have a route where it's really overhanging—maybe you’re above the sea, you can hear the waves churning below you and it’s a long way since your last piece of gear. So if you fall off, you're going to go absolutely miles. It's going to be really scary. But the piece of gear that you're going to be falling onto is absolutely bomb-proof—so the amount of danger you're in isn't really very much, even if it's a pretty intimidating place to be. So that's an example of where it can be scary but safe. But then there are routes where you wouldn't want to fall off because there might be no gear or the gear that's available is just rubbish.


How important is gear to you? How does something like the Next Gen GORE-TEX® Pro Garments help you?

High performance gear is critical. If your gear fails, you die—so you have to be able to trust in your gear. That's a non-negotiable and on the clothing side that’s where GORE-TEX® Clothing comes into it. You’re in some pretty inhospitable environments—so you need to know that the kit you've got is going to protect you from the elements and enable you to perform at your best. When we went to Greenland the daytime maximum temperature was -15°C—so that’s a pretty inhospitable environment without good kit. The consequences can be pretty serious.

You need your kit to be as good as it can possibly be—and then you just need to trust it and forget about it and think about the things you need to do for that particular climb.


What’s going through your head when you’re climbing? Are you thinking, or are you in a kind of flow state where you don’t even need to think anymore?

It's really hard to describe. At the same time you’re both super focused and not thinking about anything, which is really weird. You’re thinking about the minutiae of making the moves—so you might be feeling the tiny little edge that you're pulling on, and you feel your fingers contract and pull in on those holds—so you're hyper focused on the minutiae, but at the same time, you're not thinking about things like the drop below and what might happen if it all goes wrong. Those thoughts are shut out and locked away.

Sometimes there’s a blank spot in my memory—where my body is almost on autopilot and I don’t really remember the climb. You need to be in that state because if you are trying to run the show without relying on your subconscious, you'll never be able to focus on everything. You can't multitask well enough to do everything.


When you climb your wife Molly talks you through the route with a two-way radio. How did you develop this team-based approach?

That evolved very organically and slowly. I lost my sight over a period of 10 years or so—it gradually faded away. And because we had that gentle fade out of my sight, we had a gentle fade in of Molly helping to guide me.

Neither of us wanted to stop climbing because I'd lost my sight. And she gradually helped to support me—a little to begin with, then more, then more, then more, until the point where I'd lost all my useful sight and I'm totally reliant on her guidance to find the holds.


How does that work in practice? Has she kind assessed the climb beforehand or is she just observing as it goes.

Yeah, most of the time she doesn't have any extra information on the route. She's never climbed it before herself—she’s just going off what she can see from the ground. And obviously what you can see from the ground is pretty limited. If the route's a 50-meter pitch or something, how easy is it for you just to see a 20-millimeter edge when you're 48 meters away?

And also, she can't necessarily tell what that tiny little black smudge that is 46 meters away is—is it a hole or is it just a dark streak on the rock from some water or lichen? So she will do her best to work out where the route goes, describe that to me, and where any holes that she can see, but probably more importantly, any cracks that she thinks might be opportunities to place gear.

But she might look up from the bottom and see that there's a ledge, but from there you can't tell whether or not it's really sloped and difficult to hold or really easy—so that'll be down to me to find the good bit.

Is there an element of mentally visualising the climb?

You can kind of visualize the shape of the cliff sometimes. So, if it's a corner or a chimney, you can visualize those larger scale features of the rock—and that could be either because Molly's described it to me or because of the way the sound bounces around. Sometimes you're up high and you can feel the wind blowing up from underneath your feet because it's hitting the wall lower down and then getting deflected up—so there are little clues that you get for how exposed you are when you know that there's nothing underneath your feet.

You might have just climbed over an overhang, for example and because the wind swirls up from underneath you, you know that if you were to go straight down, there's nothing there. Your brain almost creates this image of where you are, even though you can't see it.


That makes sense—it’s kind of an accumulation of all these different things coming together. What makes the perfect climb for you?

It's got to tick multiple boxes, I think. So it's got to be somewhere out in nature. If you're climbing and there's a constant drone from the motorway at the bottom of the cliff, that's a big negative—you don't want to be able to hear the sounds of humanity while you're climbing. And then it's got to be a clean piece of rock—you don't want it covered in brambles. So it's got to be a good setting, with good rock and good people—and it's got to be at the right kind of difficulty level for you—not too hard, not too easy.


So it kind of needs to be a challenge?

I think for me it's about finding out what you're made of. You find out what really makes you tick when you put yourself in these really difficult and challenging situations. Are you mentally and physically strong enough to stand up to this test that's been set, or are you going to crumble?

I think one of the most rewarding things is having to do the problem-solving under duress—you're physically tired, you're stressed, you don't really want to fall off, and then you've got to unpick this puzzle with your mind of how to unlock the sequence of the climb at the same time as applying yourself physically to it.

You want something that will push you, but is possible. If I went and tried something that was really, really too hard for me, I just wouldn't be able to do it—it wouldn't be very enjoyable because it was just way beyond my level. And then the same is true if you went too easy—you'd float to the top of it—you wouldn't really be forced to concentrate.

It's almost like an exam in some ways. You can't stand there and say, “Oh, I reckon if I did A-level economics I'd get an A.” You can only find out what grade you’d get when you actually sit the exam. But it’s more than an academic exam because you're testing at least three different distinct things. You're testing the physical side, the technical side and you’re also testing the psychological side—it’s all three of them combined.


It’s the perfect test. Is that what kept you climbing as you were losing your sight? Was there ever a question of stopping climbing?

I never thought that I would give up climbing completely, but I did question whether or not I was going to lead. But one of the things that played into the decision to carry on was that I didn't want to stop something I love because fate ruined my eyes—I didn't want to kind of give in to that disability, if that makes sense.

And I've shown there is a way around the limitations imposed by my eyes—I'm still climbing. Interestingly on Forked Lightning Crack—that climb you mentioned before—that was a hugely significant thing for me because it was harder than anything I climbed when I was able to see a little bit. I can't overstate how psychologically important it was to climb harder with no sight than I ever did when I could see. My blindness might have imposed a ceiling on my climbing ability, but actually I'm nowhere near it. If I'm prepared to put in the hard work and get stronger—I can still improve my climbing.


Yeah—it’s not a compromise—you’re still progressing.

It was also really important to me to not let my disability change the rules of the game more than was absolutely necessary. I didn't want to use my disability as a crutch to say, “Oh, I'm not going to lead anymore.”

I'm sure that when I lost my sight if I’d said I wasn’t going to lead anymore—no one would have questioned it—but it wouldn't have satisfied me. And I’ve proved that there’s no actual reason.

why my disability would prevent me from leading—because I've done it. If I had chosen to stop leading, that would have been a choice and I would have been hiding behind my disability—and I'm not prepared to do that.


Is there satisfaction in that too?

There’s definitely satisfaction in giving fate the middle finger. I'm flipping the finger at the idea that your life runs on train tracks and that you don't have a choice—because you definitely do have a choice.

I had the choice about whether or not I was going to stop climbing—fate put a roadblock in the way to stop me doing the thing I love, so every time I go out there’s a bit of me that's like my inner-teenager thinking, “You said I couldn’t do it.”

You've got to have the reminder that actually we as individuals do have the ability to control where we go and control our destiny through the choices that we make. We might think that the universe is conspiring to set us on a particular path—but in reality, if you want it and you're prepared to make the choices, then you can do it.