Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The most revolutionary aspect of Rébuffat's works, however, was his thoroughgo-
ing rejection of the martial metaphors that had dominated mountaineering from Mont
Blanc in 1786 on. His own emphasis on a harmonious embrace of the alpine world
owed something to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of his favorite authors. But this new
philosophy was not one Rébuffat consciously created, in reaction to the militarism of
the Herzogs and Devieses; it seems to have been inborn, instinctive.
With the success of
Starlight and Storm,
Rébuffat began touring on the lecture cir-
cuit, giving slide shows. He soon gravitated to film. Collaborating with several vision-
ary filmmakers, he produced classics of mountaineering cinema, including
Starlight
and Storm
and
Entre Terre et Ciel,
that brought the enchanted garden to vast new
audiences. By the late 1960s, Rébuffat was the most famous guide in Europe.
M
Y OWN ENTHRALLMENT
to the Rébuffat aesthetic lasted most of a decade, after I first
read
Starlight and Storm
at age sixteen. But in the late 1960s, as climbing itself em-
braced the counterculture passions that swept America, I found myself drifting away
from the lyrical poets of mountaineering and toward its rowdy skeptics.
A turning point for me came in a long discussion in the middle of the night with
a Harvard friend, Hank Abrons, as we drove the Alaska Highway toward my first ex-
pedition, on Mount McKinley. Twenty years old, I earnestly voiced a cardinal Rébuffat
tenet: that in the mountains we seek difficulty, not danger. Could climbing be divorced
from danger altogether, it would reach its purest possible expression.
Nonsense, said Hank, who was two years older. Danger was precisely what made
our pastime so real, so rewarding. If you could separate danger from difficulty, climb-
ing would become just another sport. We wrangled on, but there, with the dusky tun-
dra plodding by us as we steered north toward the ineluctably dangerous Wickersham
Wall, I began to wonder whether Hank didn't have a point. (Today I believe Hank was
right, and Rébuffat, seduced by his own idealism, wrong. The sterility of such latter-
day developments in the climbing scene as indoor gyms, where risk has truly been di-
vorced from difficulty, furnishes my evidence.)
Climbing in the Shawangunks in New York State, I found the first gang of live
climbers (as opposed to eminences, such as Lachenal and Terray, whom I had met only
in books) to become my heroes. They were the Vulgarians—a hard-drinking, drug-
taking, pretension-pricking band of dropouts and misfits who also happened to be the
best climbers in the East.
The Vulgarians' counterparts in the United Kingdom were the iconoclasts of the
Creagh Dhu and Rock and Ice, loosely organized clubs of working-class blokes who
had replaced the Oxbridge gentlemen of the previous generation to become the finest
