Alex Macintyre

Alex MacIntyre was one of the legendary early-1970s Leeds University climbers noted for their big hair, Lycra tights and habit of calling one another 'youth'. A popular climber, he was a leading figure in alpine climbing's 'front-point revolution' in the 1970s, when a group of British climbers pushed standards dramatically higher, climbing hard and difficult routes in a light and fast alpine style. With a glittering record of firsts in the Alps and Andes, MacIntyre was a great supporter of...See more

Alex MacIntyre was one of the legendary early-1970s Leeds University climbers noted for their big hair, Lycra tights and habit of calling one another 'youth'. A popular climber, he was a leading figure in alpine climbing's 'front-point revolution' in the 1970s, when a group of British climbers pushed standards dramatically higher, climbing hard and difficult routes in a light and fast alpine style. With a glittering record of firsts in the Alps and Andes, MacIntyre was a great supporter of alpine-style ethics, pushing the style into the Himalaya, where he made ascents and attempts on major objectives - such as Shishapangma - and hard new routes on giants like Dhaulagiri and Changabang. MacIntyre died on Annapurna in 1982 aged only twenty-eight years old. He and René Ghilini were retreating from an attempt on the south face when a solitary falling stone struck him square on the head and knocked him down 800 feet. A memorial stone at Annapurna Base Camp reads: 'Better to live one day as a tiger than to live for a thousand years as a sheep.' John Porter's award-winning book One Day as a Tiger (Vertebrate Publishing, 2014) is both a memoir of Alex, and of this golden period of British alpinism. See less