Climbing Quote of the Week: Johnny Dawes

In the 1980s British climber Johnny Dawes, born in 1964, was simply one of the world’s best and most singular rock climbers. Dawes climbed with boldness, a compact dynamism, and a sure strength. His best medium was gritstone—a solid, fine-grained sandstone that forms short cliff edges in central England’s Peak District. To climb extreme gritstone routes requires an innate sense of balance, the precision of a gymnast, and an understanding of the nuances and subtleties of the rock itself. Dawes had all these qualities.

British climbing writer Jim Perrin calls Johnny Dawes one of the “four great gritstone climbers,” along with rock legends Joe Brown, Don Whillans, and John Allen. Dawes climbed ahead of his time, putting up heady 5.12 gritstone routes like Gaia at Black Rocks and End of the Affair at Curbar Edge. Johnny Dawes was also the subject of the 1987 film Stone Monkey, which still ranks as one of the finest climbing movies ever made.

This quote comes from a 1987 article about Dawes entitled “Playpower and The Cosmic Rascal” in the British magazine Climber by Jim Perrin, who himself was a leading Brit climber in the sixties and seventies as well as an astute observer of the climbing scene. Perrin also wrote some excellent climbing books, including Yes, To Dance from which this quote comes, On and Off the Rocks, Menlove, and the recent absorbing biography The Villain: The Life of Don Whillans. Dawe’s quote is about the climbing god that occasionally enters you and elevates this sometimes banal irrelevant activity to the sphere of creativity and art.

“It’s…the Roman idea that the gods are not creatures out there in space, they actually come into people and the people become gods—gods of love, gods of war. There’s definitely a climbing god which comes into you in the Roman sense. You don’t know why you’re climbing so well—it’s nothing physical, you could have been porking away for two or three weeks and suddenly you’re climbing brilliantly. It’s not mental, it’s soul, it runs deep. That’s why on-sight climbing is so much more compelling and important than any other climbing. If you want to produce a piece of climbing art, you’ve got to bleed to produce it."

More About Johnny Dawes:
Johnny Dawes website
Clip from Stone Monkey

Buy books by Jim Perrin:
The Villain: The Life of Don Whillans A superb intimate biography of the great British climber.
On and Off the Rocks A collection of climbing stories.
The Climbing Essays A collection of the best of Perrin's climbing essays.

Photo Above: Johnny Dawes on his runout masterpiece “Gaia.”
Photo courtesy johnnydawes.com