Some History...

Pritchard was born in Bolton, Lancashire, in 1967 and, at age 16 began a life of climbing. After a couple of years trawling the Lancashire quarries he soon moved to North Wales and that Mecca of rock climbing, Llanberis. By 1986 Paul was climbing the top grade of the day. He began a life of mountaineering that would take him to the Indian Himalaya, the Pakistani Karakorum, Patagonia, Baffin Island, The Pamirs, the European Alps and the American Rockies.

When he won the Boardman/Tasker Award for mountain literature in 1997, with Deep Play, he spent the prize money on a world climbing tour that found him in Tasmania climbing a slender sea stack known as The Totem Pole. It was here that all that he had known before was turned on its head.

On Friday the 13th of February 1998 a TV-sized boulder falling from 25 meters inflicted such terrible head injuries that doctors thought he might never walk or even speak again. Pritchard has spent his time since that accident fighting the hemiplegia which has robbed his right side of movement and played cruel tricks with his speech and memory.
However, he is making a remarkable recovery and re-directing his life in continually inspiring and rewarding ways.

He has since married and moved to Tasmania, the place that did him so much harm, and is raising a family.

Looking to the future Paul hopes to give the message to other people that life doesn't have to stop with the trauma of head injury.

A résumé of Paul's climbing career can be read in his abridged list of achievements: A Climber's Life

Pritchard on his specially adapted Trice close to his Llanberis home.