A shock loading ensues which, despite the stretch of the rope, is capable of breaking it or the victim’s back. This risk has however been considerably lessened of recent years by the introduction of nylon rope, which is both stronger and more elastic than hemp; and there have been many cases of men falling sixty, a hundred and twenty, and even get-ting on for two hundred feet without serious injury. Some unusually daring climbers have even jumped for it deliberately in certain circumstances. I know a famous Belgian climber who has had more than forty falls in his still short career, and a well-known Englishman who has fallen more than sixty feet (sometimes over a hundred) on some fifteen occasions without hurting himself. For all that, falls are still to be avoided like the plague, because even the best ropes can get cut over a flake of rock, and even the most solid looking pitons can perfectly well be pulled out.
Personally, in about twenty years of really intensive climbing, I have had eleven or so ‘peels’ ranging from twelve to sixty feet, which is a fairly high number: but only one of them was nearly fatal. This happened in 1942, shortly after the ascent of the Col du Caiman. Having harvested all the potatoes and stacked the firewood, I had a few days to spare before the arrival of winter. Leaving my wife in charge of the farm, I went off with Gaston to the only training crags normally in good condition at this time of year, the Calanques, close to Marseilles. As I have already had occasion to mention, this is Rébuffat’s home town, and we were able to stay with his mother. We set out every morning to climb one or another of the imposing sea cliffs, with their elegant white ridges, which rise close to the town and offer short but extremely difficult ascents. This had been going on for three days when we decided to try a route called the ‘Boufigue’. I was leading nearly two hundred feet up on the vertical face when the piton I was holding on to came out, and I found myself head-first in space before I knew what was happening. A second piton fifteen feet below was torn out without even slowing me down. As the earth continued to rush towards me, I came to the conclusion that both my ropes had broken and that I would be killed at the foot of the face. My mind worked at fantastic speed, and in a few fractions of a second I had time to think of my mother, my wife, and a great many other things. There was no sensation of fear whatever. The idea that I was going to die a moment later did not worry me, and my personality was involved in the fall more as a spectator than as an actor. But suddenly I felt a violent shock around my ribs. I could scarcely believe the evidence of my senses: I was not dead but dangling in space below an overhang.
The return to living seemed a trying business. There was a violent pain in the small of my back, and the rope was strangling me. The whole weight of existence descended on me at once, with all its problems, even the most banal. How was I going to get myself out of this? Was I badly hurt? Would I be able to ski that winter? And would I ever hear the end of it from my wife? It was only later I realised I had no right to be alive. One of my two hemp ropes had broken, and the karabiner had almost opened out completely. If the intact rope had not caught in the karabiner’s gate catch I would have been dead.
Although I have only once come so close to death in falling off myself, I have almost been killed by falling stones or ice on at least nine occasions. These, together with snow avalanches and falling cornices, are in fact the greatest dangers of the high mountain climbing which has been my speciality. In the Alps stone falls are very frequent, especially during dry summers. They may be caused by climbers who knock them off by accident in the course of climbing, to the risk of those below, or, more often, by the action of frost eroding the mountain. In certain types of climbing such as the ascent of vertical rock needles the risk of falling stones is negligible, but it may be very high in mixed climbing where bands of snow and rock succeed each other. An experienced mountaineer can reduce the danger by crossing exposed places at a time of day when the stones are frozen in place, or by making long detours to avoid them, but he can never escape them completely. Speaking for myself, I owe my escape from pulverisation on several occasions to some stroke of luck.
The first of these terrifying experiences happened in June 1943. I had gone to spend a few days at Grenoble seeing family and friends, and took advantage of my proximity to the Oisans to do a climb there. I set out with three companions, my late and regretted friend Pierre Brun, my cousin Michel Chevallier, and a Parisian climber called Roger Endewell with whom I had already climbed, and who because of his size is best known by his nickname of ‘Micro’.
It was early in the season, so there was still a lot of snow around. It seemed that rock climbing might be awkward for this reason, and that it would be wiser to try an ice climb – I have always had a certain leaning towards this laborious, and nowadays not too popular, branch of mountaineering. As all three of my companions were hardened all-round mountaineers we chose the northern gully of the Col du Diable, a long, sustained and steep ice route, but without any exceptional difficulties.
The delicate tints of dawn were in the sky by the time we crossed the rimaye.[11] The sky was clear, but the night had been so warm that nothing had frozen. Strictly according to the rules we should therefore have abandoned our project, owing to the risk of falling stones … but who takes any notice of the rules at the age of twenty? Anyway there seemed to be so much snow in the gully that the danger of stones didn’t appear too great. Retreat was not considered for a single moment. After a few hundred feet up easy slopes the angle steepened to around forty-five degrees, and our crampons began to grit on hard ice under a thin layer of soft snow.
Now in those far-off days practically no one practised the delicate art of walking up ice slopes in balance on their crampons. The rule was to start cutting steps as soon as the slope reached about thirty-five degrees, a harrowing and painfully slow proceeding. Personally, I did crampon up reasonably steep angles, but without using my ice axe in the ‘anchor’ position which I later learnt from my master, Armand Charlet. My poor axe position did not allow me to realise the full possibilities of my crampons, and on hard ice forty-five degrees was almost my maximum: so that it was rather precariously that I began to stamp my way up the couloir. My companions, who were less accustomed to this form of exercise, were ready to applaud but not to imitate, so that I had to resign myself to cutting steps for at least half of the time. Our advance was slow, and we had done no more than a quarter of the gully when the rays of the sun reached it.
It was not long before a few isolated stones began to bound down the gully in gracious parabolas. We knew that with a bit of care and a cool head it is usually possible to dodge a stone, and that anyway a human body does not take up much room on a slope two hundred yards wide. It would be rank bad luck if one of these damned projectiles actually hit any of us. We carried on, though a bit disturbed. But very soon the stones began to multiply, and some of them came straight at us. Transformed into alpine toreadors, we dodged them with quick twists of our bodies, but this rather too-frequently repeated exercise began to get on our nerves: acrobatics like this in such a place could not go on indefinitely without leading to disaster, but what were we to do? Go down? In order to gain time we had cut out steps very far apart, and even dispensed with them in places. Cramponning downhill is much more delicate than up, so that we should have to cut for hours, and our chances of getting down in one piece would be slim indeed.
Rather than have recourse to such a desperate solution, I decided to try and gain the shelter of a nearby rock buttress. We were traversing towards it as fast as we could go when from the rocky wall above us came a crash like thunder. We watched, our eyes wide with terror, as three or four boulders the size of wardrobes, surrounded by a hail of smaller shot, descended straight towards us in a series of fantastic bounds. There seemed no chance whatever but that we should be swept away like wisps of straw by the enormous avalanche. Perfectly conscious of the fate which awaited us, we flattened ourselves against the slope and waited for the torrent of stone to strike us. At the very last moment,
when only about a hundred feet away, it divided into two for no apparent reason. Some of the big rocks rumbled past forty feet to our left, others passed to our right, and only a few pebbles actually hit us without doing any harm.
It was by an almost equally miraculous chance that I was spared a second time, a few months later, in the company of René Ferlet. In order to avoid any danger of stone fall, we had attacked the north buttress of the Aiguille du Midi a good two hours before dawn. It was a dark and rather warm night. After some weeks among the boring and sometimes ignoble struggles of earning a living, I was overjoyed at the prospect of a good honest fight among the splendour of the mountains.
Climbing in the dark is unpleasant, even on easy ground, and in order to avoid more of it we hurriedly traversed into the snow couloir on our right. True, it was a channel for falling stones and ice, but it did seem a quick and easy way of getting up the next hundred feet. We had not got half this distance when we heard the sound of a great rock avalanche above our heads. No sooner had I realised what was happening than I felt a blow on the shin and found that I was rolling at ever-increasing speed down the slope. As during the fall in the Calanques, my mind began to work with incredible rapidity and I remembered in a moment all the accidents from which the protagonists had emerged unscathed: Gréloz and Valluet on the Couturier couloir, Boulza and Lambert on the Whymper couloir, Belin and Rouillon on the Rouies, and others. Recalling that we had not climbed more than three hundred feet above the base of this couloir, I felt quite optimistic about the outcome. There was a more brutal shock (‘the rimaye!’ I thought in a flash) and, after rolling another fifty or sixty feet, I fetched up on the avalanche cone. I had lost most of the skin off my hands, but had no serious injuries. Ferlet was staggering to his feet beside me no worse off.
Whatever his skill and natural aptitude, the climber who abandons the beaten track for the profounder and more austere joys of the great alpine walls, or the highest summits in the world, will always have to undergo serious risks. The mineral world into which he forces his way was not made for man, and all its forces seem to unite to reject him. Anyone who dares seek the beauty and sublime grandeur of such places must accept the gage. But as far as the man himself is concerned, careful physical and technical training in the complex arts of surmounting rock and ice can eliminate almost all subjective risk.
However odd it may seem, master rock climbers rarely come to any harm, even among the most extreme difficulties, and this accounts for the way in which a few virtuosos can climb solo for years with complete impunity. Dangers stemming from the forces of nature, called objective dangers, are very much harder to avoid. In doing big climbs on high mountains it is impossible never to pass under a tottering sérac, never to go in places where a stone could fall, or never to set out in any but perfect conditions. He who respects all the wise rules found in the climbing manuals virtually condemns himself to inaction.
Running risks is not the object of the game, but it is part of it. Only a lengthy experience, enabling observations to be stored up both in the memory and the subconscious, endows a few climbers with a sort of instinct not only for detecting danger, but for estimating its seriousness.
Weighing nearly a hundred and seventy-five pounds, with abnormally short arms and heavy muscles, I am ill-designed by nature for extreme rock climbing, and in fact I have never been brilliant at this branch of the sport. Despite all this I have quite often led rock faces of great difficulty, led on by my natural impetuosity and perfectionism – but only at the price of taking occasional risks, whence my relatively numerous falls, distributed throughout my career.
By contrast, the majority of nearly fatal incidents from objective causes which I have been lucky enough to survive occurred during my early years of mountaineering, and this although the actual climbing concerned was both easier and less in amount. It is possible that a chain of coincidences was responsible for the accumulation of dramatic moments, but it seems more likely that inexperience was to blame. Nowadays I would not be surprised if I peeled off a rock climb as a result of pure difficulty, but it seems most unlikely that I should again be involved in misadventures like those of the Col du Diable and the north face of the Aiguille du Midi. As I have already remarked, it is possible to climb hard for twenty or thirty years and still die of old age. The hardest part is to survive the first four or five years.
I learnt a great deal from the various adventures of 1942 and 1943, of which I have only related the most remarkable. During the seasons which followed I showed a lot more care, even to the extent of slightly limiting the technical level of my attempts. Rébuffat, on the contrary, still animated by the wonderful self-confidence which he had shown from the very beginning, seemed to have no fear of finding any climb beyond his resources. Training to perfection by his job as a mountaineering instructor and benefiting from abundant spare time, he succeeded in doing a large number of high-class ascents. Simple, quiet and reserved in his daily life, he showed no backwardness at all when it came to mountains. He reckoned that all he had done up to now was no more than training for bigger things, and that the only thing lacking was a companion able to follow him. Judging me worthy of this role, he literally pestered me to go with him to repeat the exploit of the Italians, who, led by Riccardo Cassin, had in 1938 climbed the north face of the Grandes Jorasses by the Walker spur.
This extraordinary face, consisting equally of rock and ice, is without any doubt the queen of the Mont Blanc massif. Visible from far around, it seems by its inaccessible appearance to throw scorn on climbers and to dwarf otherwise proud mountain walls. No mountaineer worthy of the name could fail to want to climb it. Like Rébuffat, ‘the Walker’ was my greatest dream. It was to me the most grandiose, the purest and most desirable of faces. But I certainly did not think of it as other than a dream. It seemed too formidable, too far above the rest, and I did not believe myself to possess the necessary class. Only supermen like Cassin and Heckmair were able to do this kind of thing, and I was sure that neither Gaston nor I were of this order. I therefore left him to his grandiose projects and followed my more modest path.
Rébuffat, however, succeeded in interesting one of the best mountaineers of the preceding generation, Édouard Frendo. It would seem that they were not yet ready for such an undertaking, because the time they took to climb the first quarter of the wall, at which point they were turned back by bad weather, showed clearly that they did not dominate the situation in the necessary way. But Rébuffat was in no way downhearted. With his invariable tenacity he determined to try again at the first opportunity. Two years later he and Frendo succeeded in doing the second ascent of the Walker after three days of hard climbing and two bivouacs, thus accomplishing the first really great exploit of post-war French mountaineering.
1. Translator’s note. The Whymper Couloir is a gully on the Aiguille Verte notorious for stone falls late in the day.[back]
2. The term ‘Bleausard’ is applied to a habitué of the rocks in the forest of Fontainebleau, the closest climbing to Paris. The rock is a compact sandstone lending itself to the most acrobatic climbing, and the more so because the climbs are rarely so high that one cannot jump for it if in difficulty.[back]
3. Philipp Brooks.[back]
4. Translator’s note. ‘Artificial’ climbing is when the climber progresses by hammering metal spikes, called pitons, into the rock. ‘Free’ climbing is when he climbs the rock by his own unaided forces.[back]
5. Nietzsche.[back]
6. Rock pitches are graded from one to six in ascending order of difficulty.[back]
7. Translator’s note. Chimneying, or back-and-footing, is when the climber moves up by pushing with his back and his feet on opposing walls of rock. It can only be done where the chimney is the right width and the walls are reasonably parallel.[back]
8. Translator’s note. A cornice is an overhang of snow, usually found at the top of gullies and along high ridges.[back]
10. Guido Lammer.[back]
11. Translator’s note. The rimaye, or bergschrund, is the master crevasse separating a glacier from its surrounding mountains.[back]
– Chapter Three –
War in the Alps
During these two years the course of my life was completely changed by the liberation of France and the end of the war. From 1942 onwards the region around Chamonix had been an important centre of resistance. The hills harboured bands of Maquis, and many of the local people belonged to various secret societies. For my own part I contributed to the feeding of these bands, among whose leaders I had a number of friends. Thus I lived in permanent contact with the resistance, and knew what was going on, without actually belonging to any organisation.
Nowadays I wonder why I did not take a more active part in the first phase of the liberation. I can think of lots of reasons, none of them really very good. In the first place I had no need to go underground. As a farmer in charge of a productive unit I was excused compulsory labour service in Germany, and with the exception of an occasional check-up I was never placed under any restriction. Then I had never taken much interest in politics, so that I had no axe of that sort to grind that would have led me to join the Maquis. The plain fact remains that the resistance sought to hinder and eliminate the German invader, and as a Frenchman I ought to have played a more active role in it.
Conquistadors of the Useless Page 9
