Conquistadors of the Useless (10 page)

To the majority of laymen the ascent of a difficult mountain sounds like a series of acrobatic dramas, in which the heroes only escape death by means of superhuman energy and miraculous luck. In reality such odysseys only occur to a few foolhardy beginners looking for a place in the headlines, but never to real climbers. If mountaineering were really as dangerous as legend would have us believe, the law of probabilities would not have allowed men like Heckmair, Solda or Cassin to survive dozens and even hundreds of extremely difficult climbs. It seems to be unknown to the public that climbing, like cycling or athletics, includes numerous different specialities, varying widely in the degree of risk they involve, and each calling for a technique which is complex and slow to master.

Now it is true that every year, in France alone, mountain accidents cause the death of thirty to fifty people: though when one considers the fifteen thousand active mountaineers this does not seem a very high figure. But what seems to be less widely known is that nine-tenths of these accidents happen to foolhardy novices or to climbers who have wildly overestimated their technical abilities. It is as stupid to undertake a climb without first having acquired the necessary technique as to try and take off in an aeroplane without having learnt to fly. To pursue the analogy, if one is a climber of no more than average ability and experience, it is as silly to embark on some of the really big stuff as to try looping the loop when one has just learnt to take off.

This is not to say that the experts in climbing run no risk. Literature, and even the climbers themselves, may have exaggerated, but it remains none the less true that high standard climbing, like car racing or aerobatics, though far from being suicidal, does involve danger. Even the best can make mistakes, and nobody has a charm against bad luck. Like pilots and racing drivers, some great climbers die of old age and some get killed.

My alpine career has been a full one, and I have done hundreds of difficult climbs in all the various special departments of the sport, yet I could not say that I have had more than a score or so of close escapes; and although I have had several long falls I carry no scars of any serious injury. This is in no way exceptional: on the contrary, a number of famous climbers, through skill and good luck, have had the most sensational careers without a single accident.

The specialised departments of mountaineering range from the acrobatic scaling of vertical and even overhanging cliffs to the laborious conquest of giant mountains of over twenty-six thousand feet. Each implies danger to life and limb, but in degrees which range in their turn from the simple to the unlimited. However odd it may seem, the danger of a climb has no connection with its impressiveness. Thus much the most impressive kind of climbing to watch is gymnastic rock climbing, but given proper technique it is also by far the safest. By contrast the ascent of giant mountains, which has practically nothing spectacular about it at all, is extremely dangerous.

It is often imagined that falling off is the greatest danger, but this is a complete mistake. The majority of accidents to experienced mountaineers are in fact caused by rocks and ice falling on them from above. As long as the climbing is easy there is in fact almost no likelihood of falling off. When the difficulty is increased by the holds getting smaller and farther apart, or by the angle becoming vertical or overhanging, the climber hammers pitons into the ice or (more often) the rock, on to which he clips the rope by means of strong karabiners, so that if he falls he will be stopped by his companion holding the rope passed through them. In practice it is comparatively rare to go more than thirty feet without finding a crack that will take a piton, so that falls rarely exceed twenty or thirty feet. Very exceptionally they may attain sixty feet; that is to say thirty feet above the piton and the thirty feet below before the rope comes taut.

It may seem astonishing that it should be possible to drop sixty feet without killing or injuring oneself, and it does happen that even falls arrested by the rope have fatal consequences when the climber, in falling, hits ledges or protuberances. But when the climbing is really difficult the face is usually
ipso facto
vertical or overhanging, so that the body drops clear and strikes nothing on the way down. The moment of greatest danger is when the second man succeeds in arresting the fall.

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.
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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.