Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Because of the team's shortness of time, Lachenal believed, they had been forced to
follow an unjustifiably dangerous route up the north face of Annapurna. The whole
basin between Camps II and IV was a gigantic avalanche slope. Only extraordinary
good luck had allowed the team to be swept by but a single avalanche—the one that
had carried Herzog, Sarki, and Aila 500 feet on the descent. But, “there was no choice:
it was either this route or a complete fiasco.” To future teams of alpinists, Lachenal re-
commended a far lengthier route traversing beneath the dangerous basin and climbing
the face well to the east. (Subsequent tragedies on the north face have proven Lachen-
al's advice prophetic.)
In these tempered words, we see a canny and cool-headed mountaineer reassessing
the perilous ascent that Herzog had blazoned as sheer glory and triumph. If, at this
point, Lachenal has still not answered his own crucial query—was Annapurna worth
the cost?—in the last two pages of the “Commentaires” he makes it clear how that
question played itself out in the
agon
of June 3, 1950. Those seven concluding para-
graphs amount to a testament from beyond the grave, furnishing, in their laconic elo-
quence, a last word on Annapurna. To the truths they embody, we shall return.
A
S
J
EAN
-C
LAUDE
L
ACHENAL CAME OF AGE
in Chamonix, reading the
Carnets du Vertige
that Gérard Herzog had thrust into print in 1956, comparing it to the manuscript diary
his father had brought home from Annapurna, a quiet rage burned in his heart. Yet
he squelched any thought of exposing the gulf between his father's story and that of
the brothers Herzog, for he sensed that he owed a certain gratitude to the
tuteur
of his
adolescence. Jean-Claude was, moreover, a shy and modest man, with no connections
in the world of
belles lettres
or journalism beyond the valley of the Arve. He made a
living as a ski instructor, though he never became a serious mountaineer.
After moving to Chamonix in 1994, Michel Guérin—a former book dealer and pas-
sionate collector of mountain literature—decided to go into business as a publisher of
deluxe reprints of mountaineering classics. By now, the “red books” of Editions Guérin
(so named for their uniform covers and bindings in scarlet cloth) have won a cachet as
perhaps the most handsome climbing books ever published, but at the outset the whole
project was a risky one-man venture. Guérin began with Terray's
Les Conquérants de
l'Inutile,
which came out in 1995.
Having befriended Jean-Claude Lachenal, Guérin was enthralled to read his father's
original diary. For several years, he tried to persuade Jean-Claude to permit an unex-
purgated publication of the diary, embedded in a reprint of
Carnets du Vertige.
Jean-
Claude deliberated, then agreed.
