Paul Pritchard

Paul Pritchard (born 1967) is a rock climber and mountaineer who was one of the foremost British climbers of the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Bolton, he began climbing at sixteen in Lancashire and in 1986 moved to Llanberis in North Wales, where he climbed hard, poorly protected routes such as Super Calabrese at Gogarth. From 1990 he turned to big wall mountaineering, with a new route on the East Face of Central Tower of Paine, the first ascent of the West Face of Mount Asgard and attempts on the Shark's Fin of Meru. In 1998 a falling boulder struck him on the Totem Pole sea stack in Tasmania, leaving him with hemiplegia. He recovered, climbed the Totem Pole in 2016, wrote award-winning mountain books and now works as a disability educator.