Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

by Jon Krakauer

  Twenty-five minutes later, finally inside, it's standing room only. Elvis Costello is thundering over the sound system with sufficient wattage to rattle the beer glasses, and it's impossible to see from one end of the bar to the other through the blue fog of smoldering Gitanes. The youthful clientele possesses a cocky, self-absorbed allure that brings to mind Shakespeare's line about "the confident and over-lusty French," but there is no dancing; surprisingly few people appear to be on the prowl; hardly anyone is even engaged in conversation. The patrons of Choucas, I deduce soon enough, come strictly for the videos: Every face in the joint is glued to the club's half-dozen giant television screens, transfixed by the flicker of the cathode rays.

  The video presently mesmerizing the crowd depicts a popular French activity called "bungee jumping." A tall, striking blonde named Isabelle Patissier has ascended several thousand feet above the countryside in a hot air balloon. One end of a hundred-foot rubber band is knotted around the Frenchwoman's ankles, the other end is attached to the basket of the balloon. Patissier-one of the world's best rock climbers, and no shrinking violet-calmly executes a swan dive from the lip of the basket and into the void. She accelerates earthward at an alarming clip, but the rubber band breaks the fall successfully, bringing her to a spectacular, highbouncing stop; Patissier, however, is unable to shinny back up the bungee cord to the security of the balloon, and is left dangling upside down in the breeze. To rectify the situation, the pilot of the balloon attempts an emergency landing, but in so doing he entangles the bungee cord in a high-voltage power line, nearly electrocuting Patissier, who is still hanging helplessly by her feet at the business end of the rubber band, which has by now caught fire.

  Patissier is ultimately snatched from the jaws of death, but before anyone in the bar can take a deep breath the screen cuts to another, equally gripping video, this one about a local hero, Christophe Profit, solo-climbing the Walker Spur, the Eigerwand, and the North Face of the Matterhorn, all in the space of a single winter's day. The entertainment continues in this vein until closing time, with tapes of wing-walking, nude sky diving, big-wave surfing, high-speed mono-skiing down a slope of pumice, Evel-Knievel-like motorcycle stunts. The common thread running through all the videos is mortal risk; the grimmer things get, the more rapt the crowd becomes. Indeed, the most popular tape of all is a forty-fiveminute compilation of fatal Grand Prix automobile crashes, a grisly smorgasbord of drivers and spectators being crushed, dismembered, and burned alive-the lot of it enhanced for our viewing pleasure with full-frame close-ups and replays in super slo-mo.

  At one point in the evening there is some sort of snafu with the video machine, the screens go blank, and I find myself chatting with a young Frenchman from the nearby city of Annecy. Patrick is attired in calf-length floral-print beach trousers, an oversize Batman sweatshirt, and-never mind that the sun set some six hours ago and we are in a dimly lit bar besides-a pair of pink-framed glacier glasses. He allows with characteristic Gallic modesty that he is both an expert parapente pilot and a "superbe" rock climber. I respond that I, too, happen to be a climber, and that I've been quite pleased with the quality of the routes I've completed in Chamonix thus far; seizing the opportunity to do some chest-thumping of my own, I go on to tell Patrick that I especially enjoyed the route I'd done just the day before, a classic test piece-rated ex- tremement dcile in the Vallot guidebook-on a slender, improbably steep spire called the Grand Capucin.

  "The Capucin?" replies Patrick, clearly impressed. "That must have been a very difficult summit to launch the parapente from, yes?" No, no, I quickly interject-I simply climbed the peak; I didn't mean to suggest that I'd also flown off it. "Non?" says Patrick, momentarily taken aback. "Well, to solo the Capucin, that is a worthwhile undertaking all the same." Actually, I sheepishly explain, I hadn't soloed the peak, either: I'd done it with a partner and a rope. "You did not solo and you did not fly?" asks the Frenchman, incredulous. "Did you not find the experience a little-how you say in English-banal?"

  In stumbling upon Choucas, I was later informed, I'd inadvertently discovered the hippest bistro in Chamonix. Which was saying something, because Chamonix, though populated by fewer than eleven thousand year-round residents, has for two centuries been the hippest mountain community on the Continent, maybe the entire planet, and not merely in the minds of those who live there. Chamonix, understand, is considerably more than the Aspen of the Alps; it's the very birthplace of haute chic. It's no accident that when Yvon Chouinard wanted to establish a maximally visible retail beachhead on the far side of the Atlantic, the first Patagonia store he opened in Europe was in downtown Chamonix.

  Chamonix proper is overbuilt and not particularly handsome by European architectural standards. There are too many tourist traps, too many megalithic concrete eyesores, far too many cars and nowhere at all to put them. All the same, enough Old World remains in the town's twisting cobbled streets and ancient, thick-walled chalets to make even the most appealing American ski towns seem pseudo-Bavarian theme parks by comparison. Jammed into the cramped, claustrophobically narrow valley of the River Arve, just eight miles from the point where Italy, Switzerland, and France share a common frontier, the community is hemmed in hard to the north by the 9,000-foot peaks of the Aiguilles Rouges and even harder to the south by the 15,771-foot mass of Mont Blanc. The highest point in western Europe, it towers so near at hand that paragliders routinely touch down in the village center after taking off from the mountain's summit.

  The popularity of Choucas's eclectic video fare isn't surprising: the lifeblood of the entire town, after all, is high-risk recreation and the marketing thereof. As American alpinist Marc Twight- who has been living here intermittently for the past five yearssays with great affection and tongue only partially in cheek, Chamonix is nothing less than the "death sport capital of the world." The huge billboard that greets visitors as they motor into Chamonix on the main highway from Italy claims only that they have arrived in the "Capitale Mondiale du Ski et Alpinisme"-the World Capital of Skiing and Climbing. And lo, the sign does not exaggerate, for Chamonix and Chamoniards are at the cutting edge of international climbing, perhaps now more than ever before. But in the frenetic, adrenaline-besotted climate of the past decade, Twight's sobriquet has come to seem the more accurate of the two. The impeccably creased knickers and classic guides' sweaters of old have been sup planted by neon-hued Lycra and Gore-tex, and traditional mountaineering has mutated here into a host of alpine thrill sports that Dr. Paccard would be hard put to recognize.

  Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard, you'll recall, invented the sport of mountain climbing on August 8, 1786, by making the first ascent of Mont Blanc, in the company of a local chamois hunter named Jacques Balmat. Following the ordeal, Balmat reported, "my eyes were red, my face black and my lips blue. Everytime I laughed or yawned the blood spouted from my lips and cheeks, and, in addition, I was half-blind." For their inestimable contribution to the future economic base of the community, the two original alpinists received a cash prize of what amounted to sixty U. S. dollars, the village center was designated Place Balmat, and the town's main drag was christened the Rue du Dr. Paccard-along which, two centuries later, you will find not only Choucas and the spiffy new Patagonia store, but merchants selling everything from paragliders, Parisian lingerie, and postcards of climbing stars jean-Marc Boivin and Catherine Destivelle, to graphite-shafted ice axes, titanium pitons, and state-of-the-art snowboards embossed with likenesses of the Manhattan skyline.

  In the decades following the Paccard-Balmat climb, as accounts of that deed and subsequent ascents circulated across the Continent, Chamonix became an exceedingly fashionable destination for the rich and famous, and rapidly developed into the world's first mountain resort (previously, as New Yorker writer Jeremy Bernstein has pointed out, mountains were generally regarded as "terrifying, ugly, and an obstacle to travel and commerce, and anyone living in or near them as subhuman"). Goethe, Byron, Ruskin, Percy Shelley, the Prince of Wales, and ex-Empre
ss Josephine all sojourned there. By 1876, 795 men and women had reached the top of Mont Blanc, among them an Englishman named Albert Smith who passed out drunk on the summit after he and his companions put away ninety-six bottles of wine, champagne, and cognac in the course of their ascent.

  As the heavy traffic on Mont Blanc began to rob the climb of its cachet (by its easiest routes, the 15,771-foot peak is not technically demanding or even very steep), ambitious alpinists turned their attention to the hundreds of sheer-walled satellite peaks-the fabled Chamonix Aiguilles-that stud the ridges of the massif like the spines of a stegosaur. In 1881, when Albert Mummery, Alexander Burgener, and Benedict Venetz bagged the fearsome-looking Aiguille du Grepon, it was lauded as a superhuman feat. Nevertheless, in a prescient moment following the climb, Mummery predicted that it would only be a matter of time before the Grepon lost its reputation as "the most difficult ascent in the Alps" and came to be regarded as "an easy day for a lady."

  A hundred years after Mummery's heyday, new techniques, better equipment, and a population explosion on the heights have brought about just the sort of devaluation Mummery feared, not only of the Grepon, but of most of the other "last great problems" that followed: the Walker Spur, the Freney Pillar, the North Face of Les Droites, the Dru Couloir, to name but a few.

  Although Mont Blanc is a mountain of genuinely Himalayan proportions, boasting an uninterrupted vertical rise of nearly thirteen thousand feet from base to summit, it also happens to sit squarely in the teeming lap of western Europe, and therein lies the rub. It's this unlikely juxtaposition of radical topography and rarefied Continental culture that, for better and worse, begat modern Chamonix.

  On a nice summer day, the streets will be peopled with a mix you'd expect to find in any French tourist town: mink-wrapped matrons, tourists from Cincinnati and Milan, frail old men in wool berets, leggy shop girls in black hose and miniskirts. What's different about Cham-as the village is termed in the local patois-is that fully half the people walking past will be clomping along in climbing boots and have a coil of 8.8-millimeter perlon slung over a shoulder. And if you watch long enough, sooner or later you might see Boivin, or Profit, or Marc Batard stroll past, heros de la Republique all, whose exploits are regularly reported in the pages of large-circulation magazines like Paris-Match. Last year Boivin became the first man to fly a paraglider from the summit of Everest, his rival Batard became the first to ascend the same mountain in less than a day, and, in a coup that many French consider most impressive of all, Profit climbed the long, savage knife-edge of Mont Blanc's Peuterey Ridge, alone and in winter, in nineteen hours flat.

  When Profit or, say, world champion mono-skier Eric Saerens is spotted in a Chamonix restaurant, it sets the place abuzz in the same way that the presence of Mattingly or Magic Johnson would in the States. The French, it goes without saying, are far too urbane to fawn over their luminaries in public like we do. But there are exceptions: When rock climbing superstar Patrick Edlinger comes to town, says Twight, "everybody slobbers over him shamelessly. Two winters ago I went to a party at Choucas where Edlinger was in attendance, and it was like he was holding court. People were practically fighting each other for the chance to get to his table and pay homage."

  Not that all the alpinists in Chain are stars. Mont Blanc is now climbed by nearly six thousand people every year, and tens of thousands of others swarm over the adjacent Aiguilles. A million thrill chasers of one kind or another pass through Chamonix annually. The massif is encircled with hotels, peppered with multistory "huts," crisscrossed by fifty-seven chair lifts and aerial trams, and pierced by a seven-mile tunnel through which runs a major European highway. At the apogee of climbing season the Vallee Blanche-the high glacial plateau that feeds the Mer de Glace-is crowded with so many alpinists that from the air it bears an uncanny resemblance to an ant colony. The number of new climbing routes documented in the record books of the Office de Haute Montagne is mind-addling; there's scarcely a square meter of rock or ice left in the entire range that hasn't been ascended by somebody.

  One might conclude that every last ounce of challenge has long since been wrung from the mountains above Chamonix, but one would be wrong. The French, being a proud and creative people with a gift for self-dramatization, have had little trouble finding novel forms of alpine stimulation. In addition to the obvious variations-speed climbing, extreme solo climbing, extreme skiing-they have fervently embraced such activities as bungee jumping, le surf extrem (extreme snowboarding), le ski sur herbe (using wheeled skis to rocket down grassy summer slopes), ballule rolling (careering downhill inside giant inflatable balls), and-the most popular new game of all-flying off mountaintops with paragliders, which the French call parapentes.

  It's a luminous fall afternoon in downtown Cham, and I'm sitting on the terrace of the Brasserie L'M, loitering over a strawberry crepe and a cafe au lait, wondering whether I might, given my limited talents, ever rise above the life of the terminally banal. Overhead, a nonstop parade of paragliders is floating across the sky, en route from one or another of the surrounding alps to a meadow a few blocks away that serves as the town landing field. When I finally get tired of the waiter inquiring every few minutes if I'll be having anything else ("Or will monsieur be leaving now?"), I get up and walk to the meadow, which lies at the base of the Brevent ski lift, to catch a little flying action at close range.

  In all of the United States, there are at most four hundred paraglider pilots, a number that reflects the sport's reputation for being insanely dangerous. (Evincing a firm commitment to truth in advertising, the leading U. S. manufacturer of paragliders-Feral, Inc.-has for its corporate logo a skull and crossbones.) Neither mortal risk nor fear of litigation, however, has slowed the proliferation of paragliding in the Alps: At last count there were an estimated twelve thousand parapilots at large in France. And the zeal with which the French have taken up paragliding has nothing to do with some Gallic knack for avoiding accidents: Parapilots in Chamonix are forever crashing onto rooftops and busy highways, being blown into ski lifts, and dropping out of the sky like flies. Indeed, within half an hour of my arrival at the Chamonix landing field, I witness two paragliders overshoot the tiny meadow and plow into the trees, and see a third slam face-first into the secondstory wall of an apartment building.

  The swelling tally of paragliding mishaps, however, is unlikely to move the French to ban the sport from their ski resorts (as Americans have), nor is the annual carnage from climbing ever likely to lead to the curtailment of that activity. This despite the fact that between forty and sixty people come to unpleasant ends in the mountains above Chamonix in a typical year, and that the overall body count on Mont Blanc now totals more than two thousand, making it far and away the deadliest mountain on earth.

  Interestingly enough, routine, lift-served skiing-an activity that few American practitioners think of as life-threatening-contributes to approximately half the annual death toll. There are eight ski areas in the Chamonix Valley, and their slopes include many runs that are no more challenging than the tamest trails at Stowe or Park City, but there is also a vast amount of lift-served terrain that blurs the line between ordinary skiing and hard-core mountaineering. Take a wrong turn, for instance, when you get off the lift on the Grands Montets or the Aiguille du Midi-two of the most popular places to ski-and you could easily wind up in the bottom of a crevasse, or buried under avalanching seracs, or skidding off a thousand-foot cliff. In the United States, skiers take it for granted that natural hazards, if they exist at all, will be carefully fenced off, marked with signs, or otherwise rendered idiot-proof. In Chamonix personal safety is rightly seen as the responsibility of the skier, not the ski area, and idiots don't last long.

  The French, when it comes right down to it, look at risky sports-and sports in general-in a fundamentally different way than Americans do. We go in for team sports like baseball and football, and the athletic heroes we hold up for our kids to emulate tend to be cast in the squeaky-clean Orel Hers
hiser mold. The French, in marked contrast, are notorious individualists with a fondness for the sensational deed, the stylish twist, the dramatic solitary act; their athletic role models tend to chain-smoke Gitanes, drive irresponsibly fast, and excel at activities like long-distance windsurfing or soloing 5.12 rock climbs.

  And so, Chamoniards may not be happy about all the bloodshed that occurs in their backyard, but they are adept at shrugging it off. "In Chamonix," a wiry thirty-year-old gendarme named Luc Bellon explained to me, "there is a special mind. Maybe you are not a guide or a climber-maybe you are a butcher or own a souvenir shop-it makes no difference, the mountains still put food on your table. Like fishermen with the sea, we have learned to accept the danger and the tragedies as a fact of life here."

  Although Luc Bellon works as a gendarme-a French cop-it should not be inferred that he spends his days arresting pickpockets or directing traffic in a silly pillbox cap. Bellon, rather, belongs to an elite arm of the state police called the Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute Montagne, PGHM for short, whose job it is to bail out those hapless adventurers who find more excitement than they reckoned on. The Thwock! Thwock! Tbwock! of a squat blue PGHM helicopter, speeding off toward the Aiguilles to retrieve another broken body from the heights, is as common over Chamonix as is the sound of police sirens in the Bronx: In July and August, when the glaciers and Aiguilles are mobbed with incautious alpinists from around the world, Bellon and his cohorts are frequently called on to perform ten or fifteen rescues or body recoveries a day.