A sharp edge is what I would feel lost without, be it my penknife I was given by my Grandpa when I was eight, my more expensive bone handle sheath knife or my small thin ultra lightweight Spyderco knife. It is all the same. Over the past 7 years I have been lucky enough to experience numerous adventures that I now tell to friends and family, and it is incredible how many times my knife has been apart of them…

“My rope hung below and was billowing in the wind that was being blown down from the 6000m snow capped giants that towered over us. We were on the first pitch of our new route “El dente de el Esphinge” on the big wall known as the Sphinx in the Cordillera Blanca in Peru. My last bit of gear was out of sight and the run out was beckoning to me. The rope was useless and I now faced a 50m bounce down to the rocks below. I mantled my self onto a cactus and began to frantically search for anything that I could clip to. I tried in vein to bang a peg into a closed up seam. And then stupidly looked for a little crystal to hang a hook from. I then spied a small line of mud partly hidden by the clod of mud and the cactus I was knelt on. I reached for my knife and began to scratch away at the mud I was sat on and to my relief it revealed a seam that took a 0.5 nut. This was placed and backed up with my nut key buried into the “solid” cactus. This gave me some sort of confidence and I climbed another ten meters on to a crack and belay.”

“I opened my eyes and looked out on a clear starry sky with dark towers of granite looming out from the Fjord below and higher snow capped peaks shining in the starlight. Suddenly a bright green light unravelled across the sky and moved and shimmered as if it was sun light filtering down through tropical water. I kicked Max and told him to wake up and look at the Northern lights. He grunted and drifted back to sleep in a series of snores. We were 400m up a new route on the big wall Igdlorssitt Havn in Greenland. I drifted back to sleep only to wake 2 hours later by heavy rainfall. We tried to ignore it and let the water seep into our sleeping bags. The rain was persistent and the drips landing on us had changed in pitch to a drum of a waterfall that was sweeping down the length of the wall. We decided that it was time to get off the wall. Our ropes were fixed off above us, so I began jumaring up them to retrieve them to then start the 12 abseils back down, the rain water now thumping off my helmet. For the 6 hour descent the rain continued to fall leaving us to descend not a mountain but a waterfall, the steady pounding stream crashing down on our heads as we went. ‘Am I going to drown?’ I wondered as, at each belay, I’d remove my trusty knife and blindly cut the abseil tat, my hands almost always submerged beneath the torrent. By 9:00 am wet and bedraggled we reached the base of the wall and had started the hour-long trudge back across the glacier to base camp. Two days later we raced back up to our high point and continued another two days to complete the route.

“It had been seven months since I had left the UK and I had probably had a similar number of showers in that time. My T-shirt was in tatters, my shorts had patches keeping them together and my feet were black from walking around with no shoes. It was during one of the few times I did wash when I began to give my feet a service. I picked and scraped and then I found a large blood blister on the end of one of my toes. Its hard cap meant that I needed to pick the top off with the point of my knife. As the top came off some black looking fluid seeped out and as I wiped this away a white wriggling bottom of a worm was revealed. I tried to pull the worm out but the skin was hooked and it refused to budge. I had to insert the tip of my knife down the hole to pop the worm and then squeeze it out. Leaving the skin behind. I had heard of these pests before, jiggers are notoriously hard to clear as they carry an egg sack on their inner end. I took my penknife out and inserted that weird spike that has no real use apart from taking stones out from horse’s hooves. I was able to push this down a centimetre into the wormhole before I felt any pain. I then jiggled the spike hopefully scrambling any worm eggs – thanks Grandpa.”