Chris Jones, climber who in 1974 scaled a face steeper than the Eiger and higher than El Capitan

‘A sheer black wall of north-facing limestone’, it remains one of the hardest alpine climbs and has never been repeated in its entirety

Chris Jones, who has died aged 84, was a British climber who in the 1960s and 1970s established bold new alpine climbs in Canada, the US and South America, and pushed the limits of “big wall” climbing in Yosemite, California – ascending towering walls of vertical rock over the course of several days.
Among his notable adventures was a six-month road trip to Patagonia in 1968 with Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Dick Dorworth, and Lito Tejada-Flores that captured the counter-culture zeitgeist. The trip became the stuff of legend – the five friends bundled into the back of a white Ford van loaded with climbing gear, skis, surfboards and a 16mm Bolex film camera. Jones took stills on his Pentax 35mm SLR, though he preferred the smaller Rollei 35 for difficult terrain.
They drove 5,000 miles south to Argentina where they climbed a new route on the 3,405m Fitz Roy, summiting the mountain in a 30-hour round trip from Camp II. “Good ice climbing, weather unstable, wind ferocious,” Tompkins noted in the report afterwards.
The ensuing film, Mountain of Storms, became a cult classic for climbers, while Patagonia would be the name Chouinard chose for his climbing and clothing business. (Tompkins would call his The North Face.)
It was in 1974, however, that Jones left his most singular mark in climbing lore. Teaming up with George Lowe, the pair made the first ascent of the 1,500-metre north face of North Twin in the Canadian Rockies. This route remains one of the hardest alpine climbs ever and has never been repeated in its entirety. “It was just off the scale,” one British contemporary recently noted.
The pair had read in the 1966 American Alpine Journal of a “mountain wall which acts like a strong drug on the mind”. The face was over 5,000ft tall: “a sheer black wall of north-facing limestone, steeper than the Eiger, one-and-a-half times the height of El Capitan and the hardest in the Rockies.”
It was also over a day’s travel from any form of civilisation. Wearing leather boots and woollen trousers, they followed crack systems up the face. Rockfall was an ever-present threat.
The weather then broke, turning the wall into a stream. Ledges were too small to carve a spot to bivouac comfortably, instead they spent their nights shivering in wet sleeping bags. One night was spent with Lowe sitting on a block big enough for “half his bottom”.
Cooking was done holding the stove and pot between his knees. After four days of struggle, they were just 100m from the summit. By now they were being pelted by hail and close to exhaustion.
At 3am on the fifth day they ate the last of their meagre rations, assessed their dwindling supply of pitons and other climbing equipment and realised their only hope of survival was to keep going. Lowe led the way, but recorded his admiration for Jones in his report: “The basic toughness in him that is so critical in a climbing companion comes out. We would keep going until we were absolutely stopped. I feel grateful to be with Chris. He probably can’t lead extreme ice but somehow he gets up things, something far more important to me.”
Christopher Alan Giesen Jones was born in Dorking, Surrey on November 24 1939, the only child of a Dutch mother – her maiden name was Giesen – and a father who worked for the Bank of England. He was educated at Marlborough and studied engineering at King’s College, London, before joining IBM, who were then recruiting the brightest engineering graduates.
By this time he was already a passionate climber making notable and difficult ascents in Wales and the Alps. When IBM offered him a position in the California office in 1965 he leapt at the opportunity, but soon dropped out. “I got with the program, quit my job, and moved to Yosemite Valley for the climbing season.”
Initially he moved to Truckee, California, funding his climbing by doing menial work, then in 1967 he moved to Yosemite where he found his calling amid the towering rock faces of El Capitan – immortalised in the recent film Free Solo – and the riotous social scene found in the valley.
He went on to make dozens of ascents in the Canadian Rockies and Alaska, many with Lowe. After suffering a ski accident in the mid-1970s he decided to write a book, Climbing in North America. In the foreword he wrote how as a young climber in Europe he was fascinated by the history of the sport. 
“My pals and I swapped legends and stories for hours on end. When I came to North America, it seemed that climbing had little tradition; it seemed to have begun just a few years ago. The mountains were superb, but they seemed strangely empty.” Published in 1976, his book filled in the blanks and became a classic. “For some Yank climbers (it) might as well be the Book of Revelations,” noted Patagonia in a recent social media post.
In later life Jones worked as a software engineer. He took up cycling, became a passionate birdwatcher and lived in a house overflowing with books. He loved classical music, especially opera. Modest, he never talked about his achievements to anyone.
In 1996 a wildfire destroyed his Californian home and he lost the original slides from the 1968 Patagonia trip. He was delighted some years later when Dorworth revealed he had duplicates in an old storage locker and it resulted in the 2013 book, Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968: Reflections on the Lost Photos of the Third Ascent.
“Looking back, helped by these long-lost photos, I am reminded of walking the final steps to the summit,” Jones reflected. “The crunch of snow underfoot, the bantering with cinematographer Lito to get a move on, the menacing weather, and our sheer excitement and relief. No summit before or since has ever meant as much to me.”
He is survived by his wife Sharon, whom he married in 1980, and two stepchildren.
Chris Jones, born November 24 1939, died September 17 2024