At age sixteen, Andy Cave followed in his father's and his grandfather's footsteps and became a miner -- one of the last recruits into a dying world.
Every day he would descend 3,500 feet into the Grimethorpe pit. But at weekends, Andy inhabited a very different world -- thousands of feet above the pitheads of the colliery. Introduced to his local mountaineering club while a miner, he soon learned to cherish this newfound freedom. Living through the coalminer's strikes of the mid-eighties -- the guilt, the broken friendships, the poverty -- Andy continued to indulge his passion, and in...