Mountain climber's fall - 'HOW I'VE REDISCOVERED MY JOY'

The adventurer-turned-author gets his kicks from mental risks

- Fleur Guthrie

For a long time after his catastrophic accident, elite mountain climber David Vass avoided looking out the windows of his Wanaka home.

Seeing the mountain scenery of Otago - the backdrop of where he'd spent much of his life climbing was too much of a "continual slap in the face".

As a way of coping, wheelchair-bound David moved away from the mountains to Christchurch. It's here he came to terms with a completely different existence of life, found healing in writing and new ways of relating with nature.

"The mountains were my tūrangawaewae [places we feel connected]," shares the 61-year-old, who had never considered a life of immobility before.

"But now they seem less or differently - meaningful.

My life is no longer shaped around them. I spend my time more engaging my mind and taking mental risks rather than physical ones now."

It was in January 2015, while returning from the Darran Mountains in a gathering storm, that a minor slip left him with incomplete tetraplegia.

He and three friends were only an hour's tramp from the car park when a little tree root broke from underneath his foot, causing David to trip and fall down a two-metre bank.

"To me, it felt like I had fallen down this huge cliff," he recalls. "I landed really heavily, straight on my head. There was a huge crunch and I just knew I had broken my neck."