True Summit

by David Roberts

  In Conquistadors, Terray does not address the guilt he must have felt for not roping up. He does not wonder whether he had dragged his protégé in over his head. But a few sentences register the impact of this accident:

  Crazed with grief I called and called to my friend. There came no answer but the sound of the wind.

  This experience left me badly shaken for several months, and for the first time I began to doubt. Were the mountains worth such sacrifices? Was my ideal no more than a madman’s dream?

  Nonetheless, by 1952, Terray was off on another expedition. This time the objective was Fitzroy, a magnificent spear of granite and ice in the heart of storm-lashed Patagonia. Though only 11,319 feet high, Fitzroy was technically more difficult by a whole order of magnitude than any remote mountain yet climbed in the world. Several previous attempts had accomplished nothing more than reaching the base of the 2,500-foot-high pyramid where the climbing began in earnest.

  Fitzroy too would be marred by tragedy on the approach, when one of France’s most talented young climbers, Jacques Poincenot, drowned in a botched river crossing, as the rope he had hoped to use for safety jammed, holding him instead pinned and helpless under water. His teammates pondered abandoning the expedition, but in the end pushed on. (The Aiguille Poincenot, one of Fitzroy’s handsomest satellites, commemorates the lost climber.)

  After three weeks of effort getting into position, with the team hunkering down in 125-mile-an-hour winds, Terray and Guido Magnone tackled the 2,500-foot pyramid. They succeeded only after both men led pitches of a higher grade of difficulty than had yet been solved in the expeditionary ranges. On the final headwall below the summit—after that revelatory outburst “Guido, the sardine tin!”—Terray pounded in the pair’s last piton, then pulled himself up the cliff. A tentless bivouac ensued before the exhausted duo got off the last rappel and joined their jubilant teammates.

  In a journal article the next year, Terray wrote, “Of all the climbs I have done, the Fitzroy was the one on which I most nearly approached my physical and moral limits.” Nine years later, in Conquistadors, he saw no reason to revise that judgment.

  Throughout the decade of the 1950s, Terray’s appetite for what he called “mountain ranging” was astounding. Back from Fitzroy, he stayed briefly in Chamonix before heading off again to Peru, lured by the invitation of a pair of well-off and talented Dutch clients he had guided in the Alps. In the prime of life, brimming with confidence despite the deaths that had clouded his joy in the mountains, Terray now demonstrated his strength by knocking off the highest unclimbed peak in the central Andes, 20,981-foot Huantsan, with clients rather than colleagues as his ropemates.

  For Terray, further expeditionary triumphs followed at the average rate of one a year. During the 1950s, no one else in the world was spearheading such bold deeds in the remote ranges at even half Terray’s pace. There was the Makalu reconnaissance, culminating in the bagging of Chomolonzo with Couzy in 1954, then Makalu itself with Couzy the following year. Although Annapurna had cost its victors all but their lives, Makalu was such a smooth success that Terray confessed to a feeling of anticlimax, even of disappointment, on the summit. In a characteristically passionate flight, he later scolded his own hubris:

  Was I completely stupid, to be feeling like this? Madman, for whom there is no happiness but in desire, rejoice for once in reality, exult in this moment when, half borne up by the wind, you stand over the world. Drink deep of infinity: below your feet, hardly emerging from the sea of cloud that stretches away to the horizon, armies of mountains raise their lances toward you.

  Never again would Terray undergo the experience he had freely chosen on Annapurna, where he gave up his summit chances first to haul loads to Camp IV, then to save Herzog and Lachenal. If Terray’s team made a first ascent, Terray reached the summit himself. More often than not, he led the hardest pitches and was in the first pair to arrive on top.

  Terray’s choice of objectives after 1950 bore the stamp of his passion. The mountains that he sought out—usually not only unclimbed, but previously unattempted—were not necessarily the highest in their ranges; instead, they were the most beautiful and the most difficult. In Peru in 1956, Terray had an annus mirabilis: as warm-up for his team’s principal objective, he made the first ascents of two difficult mountains in the Cordillera Blanca, Veronica and Soray. Then the party turned its sights toward 20,046-foot Chacraraju in the Cordillera Vilcabamba, possibly the hardest mountain in the Peruvian Andes, declared impossible by both Austrians and Americans who had reconnoitered it.

  Eschewing tented camps on the route, prepared instead to bivouac in the open, Terray led the ascent, as he had on Fitzroy, in brilliant lightweight style. The party arrived on top at 5:00 P.M. and descended en rappel by headlamp in the dark. Most expeditions would have turned toward home after Chacraraju, but Terray snagged the highly technical Taulliraju almost as an afterthought. In little more than two months, his team had claimed four of the finest unclimbed peaks in the Peruvian Andes, including its cynosure, Chacraraju.

  One of Terray’s paramount achievements was the first ascent of Jannu in 1962. This 25,295-foot Himalayan mountain, near Kanchenjunga in far eastern Nepal, was not the highest summit in the world still untrodden, but a group of French experts had deemed it, in Terray’s words, “the most spectacular of all the unclimbed peaks . . . the most impregnable of nature’s remaining fortresses.” Fiendishly complex, with no weaknesses, Jannu defeated the best French climbers in 1959, to Terray’s vexation. Stopped by an unclimbable crag 900 feet below the summit, the team, led by Terray, had to admit “that our ambition exceeded our abilities.” Yet three years later, Terray led another attempt, solving the hardest pitches himself, paving the way by which the whole team eventually reached the top. In the same year, Terray climbed Chacraraju East in Peru (fully as hard as the mountain’s main peak) and the Nilgiris, near Annapurna. From the latter summit, he gazed across at the north face of the mountain that had cost him and his comrades so much agony twelve years before.

  Terray had never deceived himself about the risks of climbing. He had seen Francis Aubert and Jacques Poincenot killed before his eyes, and had grieved the loss of his two closest Annapurna teammates, Lachenal and Couzy. It was remarkable that in all his big-range mountaineering, Terray had never suffered a serious accident.

  Yet in 1959, tragedy struck him again in the Alps of his backyard. On a routine traverse of the Fresnay Glacier, as Terray moved with a roped client in tow, a jumble of seracs collapsed above and avalanched over the two men. The client was instantly killed. Terray came to rest under fifteen feet of debris in the bottom of a crevasse, with a huge block of ice directly over him. In his glacial prison, he could barely twitch, let alone move.

  Terray’s escape is virtually without parallel in alpine annals:

  I managed by a series of contortions to reach a knife which I had by sheer chance left in my pocket. With its aid I was able to reach a cavity in the debris which, once again, had formed close to me by the merest luck. With an ice piton and my peg hammer I then carved out a gallery toward the light. Five hours later I reached the fresh air. This stay in the antechambers of death, where yet another companion was lost at my side, ripened me more than ten years of successful adventures.

  As he turned forty in July 1961, Terray wrote the last pages of his autobiography, which Gallimard published within the year as Les Conquérants de l’Inutile. The book was immediately popular, for Terray was riding the crest of his fame as France’s greatest active mountaineer. Two years later, the book was translated into English.

  Conquistadors of the Useless (to use its English title) has its faults. From the outset, Terray set too leisurely a pace, so that halfway through the book he was only on the north face of the Eiger in 1947, with all his greatest climbs ahead. Recognizing this too late, he crammed his astounding decade of expeditionary triumphs after Annapurna into a mere forty-one pages. His early success with Rébuffat on the Col du Caïman thus
occupies eleven pages, Chacraraju only a page and a half.

  Terray’s style can be plain and even clumsy. And his penchant for idealizing his comrades can get in the way of our seeing them as fully rounded characters.

  Yet from humdrum paragraphs of route description or logistical summary, he bursts again and again into sudden passages of startling eloquence. All in all, there is so much that is vivid, true, and deeply pondered in Conquistadors that more than a few aficionados of mountain literature regard it as the finest climbing autobiography ever written.

  As he neared the last pages of his book, Terray lapsed into a valedictory mood. Turning forty, he sensed that his best years lay behind him. He prepared to pass the baton to younger “tigers,” and looked forward to the settled, self-accepting maturity he had vainly hoped Lachenal might find. Conquistadors ends with a paragraph as memorable and perfect as the closing lines of Annapurna:

  My own scope must now go back down the scale. My strength and my courage will not cease to diminish. It will not be long before the Alps once again become the terrible mountains of my youth, and if truly no stone, no tower of ice, no crevasse lies somewhere in wait for me, the day will come when, old and tired, I find peace among the animals and flowers. The wheel will have turned full circle: I will be at last the simple peasant that once, as a child, I dreamed of becoming.

  Contrary, however, to his own valedictory prescription, Terray charged ahead in his early forties into expeditionary adventures every bit as grueling as Fitzroy and Makalu. In 1962 alone came the stunning trilogy of Jannu, Chacraraju East, and the Nilgiris. And in 1964, for the first time, Terray went to Alaska.

  Very few Europeans had yet ventured into the subarctic mountains of “Seward’s Icebox.” The Duke of the Abruzzi, who seemed to have gone everywhere, had pulled off a dazzling first ascent of Mount Saint Elias way back in 1897, approaching North America’s third-highest mountain from the seacoast. Heinrich Harrer, the veteran of the Eiger Nordwand, had enjoyed a single brilliant summer in 1954, when with the American legend Fred Beckey, he had claimed the first ascents of Mounts Hunter and Deborah. In 1961, Ricardo Cassin (the great Italian pioneer of the Walker Spur and the Piz Badile, whom a youthful Terray and Lachenal had despaired of emulating), now fifty-two years old, crafted the first ascent of a rib in the center of the south face of McKinley, then the mountain’s hardest route. Cassin’s party had badly underestimated Alaskan cold, and several members incurred serious frostbite on the route.

  By 1964, however, unlike the Andes, Alaska remained all but terra incognita to the top European climbers. Terray had first cast his eye on some of the territory’s finest unclimbed mountains in 1955, but year after year, other expeditions had claimed his attention. During those years, he had corresponded often with Bradford Washburn, Alaska’s finest mountaineer of the previous generation—the first man to climb McKinley three times and the author of a dozen first ascents of lower mountains. Washburn had tempted Terray with some of the breathtaking large-format aerial photos he had taken of Alaska’s unclimbed prizes.

  In 1964, Terray came to Alaska to try Mount Huntington, about ten miles south of McKinley. Though only 12,240 feet high, it was Alaska’s Fitzroy. Many regarded it as the most beautiful mountain in the Alaska Range, and it promised to be the hardest climb in the McKinley massif.

  Yet just like Cassin, Terray underestimated Alaskan conditions. With a very strong cohort of seven younger French alpinists, Terray landed on the Ruth Glacier in early May, planning to knock off Huntington and then move on to another objective, perhaps a new route on McKinley. Huntington, however, gave the team all they had bargained for.

  The high winds and interminable storms reminded Terray of Fitzroy, but the severe cold surpassed that of Patagonia. None of the climbers had previously encountered the quality of ice and snow they ran into on Huntington, from rock-hard black ice to unconsolidated froth as airy as Styrofoam. Inching their way up the lacy, spectacularly corniced northwest ridge, the team made pitifully slow progress. After two weeks, they were nowhere near the final obstacles.

  Meanwhile Terray had suffered the worst accident of his big-range career. Descending from a new high point, he felt a snow ridge crumble underfoot. To avoid falling into a crevasse, he made a small jump—a maneuver he had often performed in the Alps. But the ice was so hard his crampons skittered off: suddenly he was plummeting toward the void. Terray’s partner, unprepared, hadn’t bothered to belay, but stood tightening a crampon strap. Only a fluke kept both men from being snatched off the mountain to their deaths, when a thin fixed rope Terray had been trailing, anchored to a snow picket by the second team only moments before, brought him to a wrenching halt.

  Terray had severely sprained his right elbow. There was no choice but to descend to Base Camp. Several days later, his right arm useless, Terray watched his teammates head back up the mountain. For the first time ever, he faced the prospect of lingering impotent in the rear, while his companions completed a first ascent. As he later wrote in the American Alpine Journal:

  All morning, sick at heart, I watch my friends climb. Rarely in my entire life have I felt so lonely and so miserable. I have not even the will to prepare lunch. During the night I can scarcely sleep, but by morning I have made up my mind.

  Terray’s resolve was to climb the mountain one-handed. Pulling on his ascending device with his good left hand, he hauled himself brutally up the fixed ropes to Camp I to join his comrades.

  On May 25, Jacques Batkin and Sylvain Sarthou stood on top of Huntington. The next day, the other six members followed their track to the summit. As on Makalu, the whole team had collaborated in a first ascent that saw every member top out.

  Terray felt a sense of despondency as he headed down. “On this proud and beautiful mountain,” he later wrote, “we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and really been men. It is hard to return to servitude.”

  BY 1965, DON JENSEN AND I had begun to think of ourselves as Alaska veterans, even though we were only twenty-two. Despite our failure on the east ridge of Mount Deborah the previous summer, we set our sights on an equally difficult objective for our third expedition. Bradford Washburn had become our mentor. In the inner sanctum of his office atop the Boston Museum of Science (which Washburn had founded), I spent long hours leafing through his thirty years’ worth of aerial photos of Alaskan mountains.

  By February, Don and I had settled on Mount Huntington as our challenge. Terray’s team had beaten us to the first ascent, but in Washburn’s pictures we had found a plausible route on the mountain’s west face. It would require landing on the Tokositna Glacier, where no one had ever been, and it looked harder than anything yet climbed in Alaska, but we were at the apogee of youthful ambition.

  In bad French, I wrote to Jacques Soubis, the author of the article on Huntington’s first ascent that had appeared in La Montagne et Alpinisme. He was generous with advice and encouragement, informing us that Terray’s team had considered only the northwest and east ridges as likely routes on Huntington, but that he would hesitate to call the west face—however grim it looked—impossible.

  On Deborah, Don and I had realized that a two-man party was stretching the odds too thin in Alaska. For Huntington, we recruited a pair of younger Harvard climbers, Matt Hale and Ed Bernd. Relatively inexperienced, they seemed daunted by Don’s and my ambition, but they could hardly say no to so heady an invitation.

  By that year, Don’s and my identification with Terray and Lachenal had become full-blown. On Huntington, however, it was Terray who seemed an almost tangible presence. We had all but memorized his article in the American Alpine Journal. Over and over again, Don would quote his favorite line from that account: “It is not the goal of grand alpinisme to face peril, but it is one of the tests one must undergo to deserve the joy of rising for an instant above the state of crawling grubs.” Like the French, we built a snow cave for our Base Camp. As the bad weather raged outsi
de, I would cite another of Terray’s lines: “I have read somewhere that in this range the big storms can last for eight or ten consecutive days.” (On Deborah and McKinley, we had sat out several interminable tempests.)

  There was a kind of adolescent hubris in comparing ourselves to Terray. We knew in our hearts that, as alpinists, we weren’t in the same league with the French master. None of us, in fact, would ever climb in the Himalaya or the Andes. But in this one part of the world we had chosen as our specialty—the Alaska Range—we dared to believe that at the height of our twenty-two-year-old powers we might match the recent deed of a forty-three-year-old veteran who had confessed in his autobiography, “My own scope must now go back down the scale.”

  After a month of discouragements and setbacks, we climbed the west face, arriving all four on top at 3:30 A.M. on July 29. Our triumph was short-lived: only twenty hours later, as Ed and I descended in the dark, a rappel anchor failed. Without uttering a sound, Ed fell 4,000 feet to the lower Tokositna Glacier, to a basin so inaccessible we never had a chance to search for his body.

  News of our ascent reached France, where it caught Terray’s ear. Having never heard of these four young upstarts from Harvard, Terray was incredulous that little-known Americans might have succeeded on a route harder than his northwest ridge. He wrote Washburn inquiring whether or not we might have lied about the climb. Washburn wrote back, vouching for our ascent, and he told us about Terray’s doubt-filled missive.