Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
who has the most trouble acclimatizing, the one whom Herzog relegates to organiz-
ing load-carries low on the mountain, always (it seems) ill and weak—Couzy stumbles
through the expedition like a sleepwalker. He never complains, never enters into the
“polemics” that always seem to center on Lachenal, yet he is seldom cited by Herzog
as having done much at all to help the team's efforts.
On the basis of his portrait in
Annapurna
alone, it would have made sense had it
been Couzy, rather than his close companion, Schatz, who would quit mountaineering
within the year following the expedition. Instead, Couzy went on to become a brilliant
climber, with, as Terray wrote in
Conquistadors,
“one of the greatest alpine records of
all time.”
Couzy started climbing on modest routes in the Pyrenees at age fifteen. Meeting
Schatz in 1946, he embarked on a career of solid face climbs all over the Alps. Even-
tually he would knock off many of the most vaunted routes of his day, including the
Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses and the wildly overhanging north face of the
Cima Ovest di Lavaredo in the Dolomites. He also put up new routes stamped with an
elegant purity of line, a boldness of conception. Yet he was known to be a very safe
climber. He had chosen never to attempt the north face of the Eiger (of which Terray
and Lachenal had made the second ascent), because he judged it too dangerous.
Couzy's climbing was carved out of a promising career as an aeronautical engineer.
He made an art form of the three-day weekend, borrowing a plane from his flying club
to whisk off to whatever part of France had the best weather forecast, where he would
storm up some route that would take lesser climbers a week to prepare for.
At the age of twenty-seven, he was thin, lithe, and remarkably handsome, with a
penetrating gaze and a strong, thin-lipped mouth. According to Schatz, Couzy “burned
with ideas, impassioned alike by jazz and art.” He was an omnivorously curious
climber who taught himself Italian and relearned German so that he could read the
local guidebooks and better commune with the pioneers of the routes he attacked.
In 1948, Couzy married a young woman who promptly went out and climbed many
difficult routes with him. After Annapurna, Lise Couzy would give birth to four chil-
dren, including twins in 1955.
Terray analyzed Couzy's strengths and weaknesses in
Conquistadors:
Muscular and with tremendous stamina under his almost frail appearance, he was an accom-
plished athlete. Unshakeable health and the digestive system of an ostrich were further as-
sets on big climbs. A certain lack of manual dexterity handicapped him, by contrast, in his
earlier days; and on mixed ground [i.e., the very terrain that was Terray's forte], where no
technique or intelligence can make up for instinctive neatness of gesture, he always re-
mained slow and ill at ease. . . . On rock, in particular, he became a past-master.
