In early 1978, an extraordinary new invention for rock climbers was
featured on the BBC television science show Tomorrow's World. It
was called the 'Friend', and it not only made the sport safer, it
helped push the limits of the possible. The company that made them
was called Wild Country, the brainchild of Mark Vallance. Within
six months, Vallance was selling Friends in sixteen countries. Wild
Country would go on to develop much of the gear that transformed
climbing in the 1980s. Mark Vallance's influence on the outdoor
world extends far beyond the company he founded. He owned and
opened the influential retailer Outside in the Peak District and
was part of the team that built The Foundry, Sheffield's premier
climbing wall - the first modern climbing gym in Britain. He worked
for the Peak District National Park and served on its board. He
even found time to climb eight-thousand-metre peaks and the Nose on
El Capitan. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in his mid fifties
and robbed of his plans for retirement, Vallance found a new sense
of purpose as a reforming president of the British Mountaineering
Council. In Wild Country, Vallance traces his story, from childhood
influences like Robin Hodgkin and Sir Jack Longland, to two years
in Antarctica, where he was base commander of the UK's largest and
most southerly scientific station at Halley Bay, before his fateful
meeting with Ray Jardine, the man who invented Friends, in
Yosemite. Trenchant, provocative and challenging, Wild Country is a
remarkable personal story and a fresh perspective on the role of
the outdoors in British life and the development of climbing in its
most revolutionary phase. Mark Vallance (1945-2018), the man who
made Friends.
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