Conquistadors of the Useless

by Roberts, David, Terray, Lionel, Sutton, Geoffrey

  Ferlet therefore asked each member of the team to make a large personal contribution, Magnone immediately turned in the old jalopy which represented his worldly wealth, and I devoted the majority of my savings to the cause. Unfortunately some of us, like Jacques Poincenot, had hardly two beans to rub together, and we were still far from achieving our target. We had almost begun to despair when the Languedocian climber Dr Azéma offered to make up the balance on condition that he could join the party. By running up a few debts here and there it was now possible for us to go.

  This new adventure proved both tougher and more thrilling than I expected. The Argentine people greeted us with an enthusiasm and a touching kindness no longer to be met with in our ageing Europe. General Péron received us in person and made no object of upsetting several ministers of state in order to help us. It was rather like living in a fairy tale. Despite our shortage of cash our journey into Patagonia was transformed into a millionaire’s holiday.

  For all that, difficulties appeared even before we reached the base of the mountain. Floods and the malignity of an old gaucho kept us waiting around for our pack ponies for over a week. The Fitzroy is less than a hundred and twenty-five miles north of Cape Horn, so notorious for its storms, and the climate is as rigorous as that of arctic Norway. Great ice caps descend right down to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The summer is short and offers few periods of fine weather. We were not particularly early, and every day lost, therefore, might cost us the victory. In order to compensate as far as possible for the wasted time Jacques Poincenot and I set off on a reconnaissance. We were light-heartedly crossing a swollen torrent when he was swept away and drowned. He was a perfect companion and a prodigious climber, and his sudden disappearance dealt us a cruel blow. For forty-eight hours, indeed, we debated seriously whether to pack up and go home. After a few days we recovered our spirits and carried on, seriously weakened, however, by the loss of one of our best members.

  For three weeks we exhausted ourselves battering our way forward against hurricanes of over a hundred and twenty-five miles per hour. Camp One was torn to shreds by the violence of the gusts, and we were obliged to dig ice caves in the glacier in order to find shelter. Every day we had to renew the trail from camp to camp, sinking into the snow over our knees at every step. Despite all this we were able, by dint of desperate efforts, to set up three camps and considerable dumps of food and equipment.

  The route, though long, was not too difficult as far as Camp Two, but the thousand feet before Camp Three were another matter. This stretch turned out: to be a wall of mixed rock and ice worthy of an Alpine north face. In order to get up and down it safely with heavy loads we had to equip the whole section with fixed ropes.

  Nobody lived in this region but a few sheep farmers, so porters were unobtainable. We were therefore forced to hump more than a ton of necessities on our own backs, a third of it to the top camp. There was never any respite from the wind, whose gusts were sometimes strong enough to knock us off our feet and bowl us along helplessly for several yards, and this, combined with the cold, the snow, and the discomfort of living constantly in damp grottos in the ice, made the experience the most exhausting I have ever known.

  Nor did the psychological climate make our task any easier. We had been warned all about the atmospheric conditions we were likely to meet in lower Patagonia, but the reality surpassed even our worst imaginings. Never had we known circumstances so unfavourable to the idea of climbing. Hope had almost disappeared under the continual assault of weather infinitely worse than anything we had ever known in the Alps. ‘Hope springs eternal’ says the old proverb, and without it our struggles and sacrifices were extremely hard to bear.

  To tell the truth I never quite knew just how deeply my companions were afflicted by loss of faith in our ultimate success, but the general debility of some and the occasional bouts of discouragement which assailed even the best left room for little doubt that morale was dangerously low. As for myself I fought on without much hope, more for the principle of the thing than anything else, in order to have no regrets; and also, doubtless, for the pure joy of giving myself in action without other justification than itself.

  Our plan was to make the last camp as comfortable as possible, to stock it full of food, and to wait there for a fine spell. At last all was ready, and a group of three took possession. This consisted of Guido Magnone, a powerfully built Parisian, well-known as a rock climber; Georges Strouvé, our film-photographer; and myself. Strouvé was to remain in camp, taking pictures and keeping an eye on things, while Guido and I went for the summit. No sooner had we settled into our icy residence than an exceptionally violent storm blew up which kept us there for five days. We were just starting to run out of spirit for our cookers when a lull enabled us to flee down to Base. After our sojourn in the upper world, the simplicities of trees, grass, warmth and fresh food gave us a more intense pleasure than anything known to all the potentates of the east combined.

  The storm continued for two days more, the snow coming right down to Base Camp at a mere 2,625 feet. During the afternoon of the third day, however, the sky suddenly cleared and became as radiantly fine as at the height of an Alpine summer. Next morning was just the same, and hope flooded back into us. Despite new snow up to the waist we ploughed upwards so buoyantly, taking turns with the trail-breaking, that we reached Camp Three the same day. When we crept out of the cave at dawn the cold was bitter and the sky threatening, but we attacked none the less. The climbing was extremely difficult from the very beginning, railing for plenty of pitons, and Magnone also forced a very severe free pitch. By seven o’clock in the evening we had climbed no more than four hundred feet out of the wall’s total of two thousand five hundred.

  As planned, we descended to camp for the night, fixing ropes as we came down to speed the next attempt. At dawn there was not a cloud in the sky and the air was utterly still. Fate was with us at last: we must strike and strike hard.

  In order to climb as fast as possible we decided on daring tactics. We packed a large number of pitons in order not to waste valuable minutes taking out the firmest ones, and to make up for the weight of all this ironmongery we cut food and drink to the minimum, carrying only a cape and a down jacket each for the bivouac. Despite the fixed ropes it was four hours before we passed our limit of the previous day, whereupon movement became slower still. The difficulties were extreme, calling for much artificial climbing, and one pitch alone took us over five hours. When darkness fell we had climbed about half the face. The night, which was perforce spent on a narrow, outward-sloping shelflet, was particularly trying for want of adequate nourishment and protection.

  Next day the technical difficulties diminished somewhat, but at the same time the rock was more iced-up and we had to climb in crampons. The route finding was complicated and the weather was starting to look threatening once more. There could be no shadow of doubt that if the storm rose to a climax while we were on the wall our retreat would be cut off, and unless it abated we should be doomed to death from starvation and cold. I was so impressed by the reality of this menace that I lost courage and wanted to turn back while there was time, but Magnone’s iron resolution won me over. I accepted the enormous risk and the ascent continued. We had almost completely run out of pitons when at last the difficulties eased, and at 4 p.m. we reached the summit.

  The clouds which had dappled the sky since morning had thickened and were now drifting around the crags, but by an extraordinary piece of luck the wind was late in rising. Our descent was a rout. Eighteen rappels took us back to the top of the fixed ropes, at which point the storm finally broke. Immediately the snow began to fall, the wind constantly increasing in violence, but fortunately we now had something to hold on to and it did not take us long to reach the foot of the face. At ten o’clock in the evening we fell exhausted into the arms of our friends at Camp Three.

  In 1956, after other experiences of a similar kind, I wrote
in the ‘Annales du G.H.M.’ as follows:

  ‘Of all the climbs I have done, the Fitzroy was the one on which I most nearly approached my physical and moral limits. Technically speaking it is doubtless slightly less extreme than some of the climbs which have been done on granite in the Alps of recent years, but a great ascent is more than the sum of its severe pitches. The remoteness of the Fitzroy from all possibility of help, the almost incessant bad weather, the verglas with which it is plastered, and above all the terrible winds which make climbing on it mortally dangerous, render its ascent more complex, hazardous and exhausting than anything to be found in the Alps.’

  I have still found no reason to make me change my mind, and the ascent of the Cerro Torre, a more difficult neighbour of the Fitzroy, by Toni Egger and Cesari Maestri, seems to me the greatest mountaineering feat of all time.

  The end of the expedition was one long party. Our ascent was given star billing by the Argentine government, and for nearly three weeks there was a continual round of receptions and banquets, accompanied by considerable popular enthusiasm. The Andean Mountain Club of Mendoza and the Argentine army even invited us to climb Aconcagua, which at 21,991 feet is the highest summit in the Andes.[1]

  Set on foot in four days, without any time to acclimatise to the altitude, this extremely easy ascent almost ended in disaster. Each member of the party in turn was so overcome by mountain sickness that they had to give up, but I managed to preserve our honour by reaching the summit (though only with great difficulty) with Paco Ibanez, the likeable young Argentine officer who had been with us in Patagonia. The whole idea had been to get acclimatised for an attempt on the unclimbed south-east ridge of the mountain, plus possibly a reconnaissance of the south face. This vast wall was obviously a magnificent objective for a future expedition. Unhappily, on the descent, we found a party of Chileans almost asphyxiated by lack of oxygen. The rescue was long and exhausting, and one of them later died. These various peripatetions cost us much time, and we decided to return straight home to France without trying the ridge.

  Hardly had I returned to Chamonix than a new opportunity came my way. My Dutch clients Kees Egeler and Tom De Booy, both professors of geology at the University of Amsterdam, were going to Peru to carry out some research, and had decided to prolong their stay in order to attempt a couple of large peaks. Reckoning that a party of two would not have much chance, they asked if I would come as their guide. The Fitzroy had shown me what a perfect playground the Andes were, and although I was: fully aware that the Peruvian mountains were quite different from those of Patagonia, there seemed no reason why they should not be just as good in their own way. Nothing could have pleased me more than the idea of returning.

  In this area, I realised, it would not be a question of scaling acrobatic rock walls so much as high, ice-mantled peaks, sometimes so steep that no one had yet found a way of getting up them. I knew too that the generally stable climate of the old Inca ‘Empire of the Sun’ would facilitate our task, but that on the other hand the rarefaction of the air at over eighteen thousand feet would make every movement far more of an effort than at Alpine levels. But these new problems, far from deterring me, seemed an added attraction.

  Egeler, De Booy and I had climbed together so much in the Alps that we were already close friends, and this was another attraction. I had often had occasion to appreciate their courage, enthusiasm, sense of humour and comradeship, and in fact had rarely met climbers with whom I felt so much in sympathy, so that one way and another I was overjoyed to accept their invitation.

  Our main objective was the Nevado Huantsan, a fine peak of 20,981 feet which happened to be the highest unclimbed summit in the central Andes. It looked as though this would be taking on a great deal for a party of three with limited equipment, due to the length and difficulty of the route. In order to get acclimatised and acquire some notion of local conditions, therefore, we decided to have a shot at the more modest Nevado Pongos (18,733 feet) first, which despite considerable difficulties in its upper portions, was climbed in a day and a half from base camp. For me this was something of an achievement, since, thanks to air travel, I took only eight days from Paris to the top of Pongos, of which the journey from Lima accounted for four.

  Huantsan proved to be quite a different kettle of fish. Our first attempt failed, very nearly ending in tragedy. We were retreating down through the night when De Booy, seized with cramps after a false move, let go the rappel rope and fell twenty-five feet free, then shot down a steep ice slope more than two hundred feet high. By one of those miracles which occasionally occur in mountaineering he fetched up on the glacier virtually unhurt.

  After a few days rest and a spell of bad weather we had too little time left to envisage the classic method of building up a succession of camps. The mountain would have to be stormed and revolutionary tactics were the only hope. Having found a good route and placed a second camp at around 18,000 feet, we decided to go straight for the summit from there, carrying with us everything we would need for a week.

  At first our sacks weighed over fifty pounds. With such a load on one’s back it was both exhausting and delicate to traverse the narrow, corniced ridges, where we were constantly forced off on to steep ice slopes on one side or the other. After a first night in the tent the going got easier and our sacks lighter. We crossed the north peak, 20,013 feet high, and descended into the saddle separating it from the principal summit. On the third day the mountain was finally vanquished after some very difficult ice climbing. It took us another two days to retreat back down the mile and a half of ridge to Camp Two, so that we had been absent for five days altogether. The porters, convinced that we had met with an accident, had packed up and gone home!

  In two months from the time I had left I was back in Paris, reaching Chamonix the following day. Forty-eight hours later I was bivouacking with two British clients at the foot of the Pillars of Fresnay on .Mont Blanc, and the day after we did the third ascent of this very difficult route.

  This short expedition to Peru is one of my happiest memories. Despite the daring shapes of the peaks with their huge cornices and elegant ice-pendants we had not been through any experiences intense or dramatic enough to rival those of Annapurna, nor had we conquered any adversary so redoubtable as the Fitzroy. We had not even done anything especially notable from a technical point of view. Yet, though I might easily have become blasé through too-frequent adventure, I had in fact returned home radiantly happy, aware of having lived through moments of hitherto unequalled quality.

  With little equipment, with no other aid than that of cowardly porters, always ready to steal or to desert, the three of us had ventured out into a savage, semi-deserted range, peopled only by a few Indians reduced to the state of beasts by four centuries of subjection. Tiny and alone in the midst of this frozen world we had fought our way past every obstacle to our chosen goal in the limited time available. The very meagreness of our means safeguarded the proportions of the peaks and restored difficulties to their true value, giving us back mountain adventure in its original purity, as known to Whymper and the pioneers.

  On the ridge of Huantsan, without a support party or means of communication, we had been in the truest sense cut off from the world, a rope of three friends linked together for better or worse. Nothing but our common ideal impelled us towards the unknown summit. The utter silence, the remoteness from all human concerns, the friendship without reserve, all gave to our conquest a flavour more piercing than that of other, more celebrated victories.

  Nor had the climbing been the only satisfaction derived from this voyage. As had happened before in Nepal, the old Inca empire had shown me another world, another point of view, a new kind of poetry. I marvelled at the land’s richness in contrasts and extremes, its people at once colourful and dirty, splendid and crude, ecstatic alike in happiness and sorrow, hospitable yet dishonest, artistic yet drunken and dull. As I returned to the kind soil of France I reta
ined a heavy sense of nostalgia for that country of high relief where adventure still lurks at the roadside, and to return became one of my most constant dreams. As with so many of my young dreams, four years later this one came true with greater richness even than I had imagined. Against all expectation, the first adventure was father of the second.

  Up to 1952 I had hardly taken a photograph, let alone a film. At the time we did the Walker and the Eiger Lachenal and I were such purists in matters Alpine that the thought of profiting from our adventures never even crossed our minds. The most elementary cameras seemed fussy, cumbersome objects, liable only to spoil our pleasure, and in point of fact we never took a single photo during the five years of our partnership. My point of view had changed little by the time of the Annapurna and the Fitzroy expeditions. We had specialist photographers with us – it was up to them. I had come to climb mountains. On the Fitzroy I was at such a pitch of tension that I several times told Strouvé to go to hell when he wanted me to pose or to climb down a few feet so he could film me, and it was largely my fault that we took no camera with us on the final assault.

  Somewhat later, on Aconcagua, we spent quite a lot of time kicking our heels. For lack of anything better to do I asked Strouvé to show me how these mysterious gadgets worked, took a few photos, and even carried a light cine-camera to the summit. On my return to Paris I was quite surprised to see how well the pictures came out. It then dawned on me at last that, contrary to what I had so stupidly supposed, photography was a straightforward technique rather than an occult art. About the same time I began to realise that our expedition films were and would always remain priceless souvenirs of some of the greatest days of my life.

  In setting out for Peru I felt rather sad to think that for lack of a professional cinematographer we would have no record of our adventures. My friends had an ordinary camera and even an old movie camera as well, but they had little experience and less film, added to which the movie camera was too heavy and fragile for high mountain use. A few days before leaving, I had a violent and inexplicable impulse to try making a film myself. Being practically without funds, I borrowed 100,000 francs from a friend, and with it bought thirteen hundred feet of Kodachrome in magazines which would fit the light camera we had had in Patagonia.[2]