Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
home from Annapurna, Rébuffat put up an important new route on the Aiguille de
Blaitière near Chamonix.
On July 29, 1952, Rébuffat reached the summit of the Eiger, the last of the six great
north faces of the Alps, the ensemble of which he was the first man to climb. That as-
cent through storm, waterfall, avalanche, and falling stones was Rébuffat's most har-
rowing “epic” in the Alps. Of the nine climbers who found themselves trapped on the
Nordwand that July, Rébuffat and the fiercely motivated Austrian Hermann Buhl were
the strongest. The ascent verged toward chaos, with ropes entangled, climbers setting
loose small avalanches upon one another. Buhl's stubborn refusal to share the lead,
even when his lapses of judgment threatened to maroon the whole party, drove the
calm and premeditating Rébuffat into a silent fury.
In his account of the Eiger in
Starlight and Storm,
Rébuffat casts no aspersions on
the Austrian. Even reading between the lines, the reader would be hard put to discern
the sharp interpersonal conflict that unfurled high on the face. “Buhl and Gaston didn't
like each other,” says Françoise. “Buhl knew that Gaston could outclimb him.”
After 1952, Rébuffat lowered his sights slightly, although he continued to make the
occasional first ascent, as well as to guide talented clients on routes otherwise reserved
for experts. With the success of
Starlight and Storm
in 1954, Rébuffat started to be-
lieve that he might pursue a second career as an author.
For almost three decades after 1955, Rébuffat published large-format picture books
about his beloved Alps. Some, such as
Mont-Blanc, Jardin Féerique,
were primarily
historical; others, including
Entre Terre et Ciel
and
Les Horizons Gagnés,
amounted to
lyrical evocations of his “enchanted garden.”
It was these books that revolutionized the aesthetic of mountaineering. Virtually
never before had a professional guide written about his craft—let alone written at such
a high poetic pitch. Nor had any previous photographs captured the grace and eleg-
ance of climbing as did the dozens of pictures of Rébuffat, shot by alpine lensmen,
that spangled these luxurious volumes. In a typical photo, Rébuffat was seen in profile
against a vertical cliff, with a distant glacier providing a backdrop. No apparent struggle
breathed in these images: instead, the lanky acrobat calmly clasped the clean granite
with his fingers, while his toes adhered to minuscule holds. The rope plunged free in
space out of the bottom of the picture, with not a single piton for protection. The pat-
terned pullover sweater that Rébuffat wore in every photo became his signature. (A
photo of Rébuffat on the Aiguille de Roc was chosen by NASA as a representation of
human life on Earth, to ride aboard Voyager II probing the remote reaches of outer
space in search of extraterrestrial intelligence.)
