Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Then I went back down to the crevasse to wait. I had taken bearings on the spot, so I
wouldn't lose it.”
Payot's sister, Elisabeth, details the search effort. “It was minus 20 degrees Centi-
grade. The guides didn't want to go out, but all of Lachenal's friends went up.” Among
them was Rébuffat.
Jean-Pierre: “Finally the others started to arrive. We burnt tires at the side of the
crevasse, as a beacon. Somebody went down into the crevasse and tied Lachenal onto a
rope. Then we pulled him out, put his body on a sledge, and pulled it all the way up to
the Aiguille du Midi. We were down to Chamonix by 11:00
A.M.
“Someone went to tell Adèle. She was prepared beforehand. She knew this was part
of the mountain life.”
L
ACHENAL WAS BURIED
in the Chamonix cemetery, not far from the monument to guides
killed in the mountains, which today names eighty-four victims between 1820 and
1995—including Lachenal. His headstone is a slab of brownish gray granite, on which
appears a simple inscription, with no mention of Annapurna:
LOUIS LACHENAL
GUIDE
1921-1955
VALLÉE BLANCHE
25-11-1955
From the soil beside the stone sprout lilies and the gray-green plants the French call
corbeille d'argent.
In the journal
La Montagne et Alpinisme,
Herzog wrote an obituary for Lachenal.
Generous and heartfelt, it nonetheless perpetuates the image of his teammate that
An-
napurna
had advanced, of a driven genius just this side of madness:
He didn't live, he “burned.” Action intoxicated him, and at its approach, his impatience mul-
tiplied. . . . All those who knew him well knew his affectation for wishing to believe himself
capable, with his appetite for action and enterprise, of pulling off at any given instant
whatever piece of folly.
Herzog tips his hat, however, to Lachenal's blunt honesty. “With no evasions or
prudence, he expressed the truth, even if that sometimes seemed cruel.” And he lav-
ishes an encomium on the
cordée
Lachenal-Terray, “at its time, the strongest in the
world.” Herzog remembers, “It was at once marvelous and touching to hear Terray
