June 3 - True Summit - page 9

faithful collies, such as Lad and Lassie. It never occurred to me, reading about Nanga
Parbat or K2, that I might some day go on a mountaineering expedition myself.
Annapurna hit me hard. By the time I read the topic, at age sixteen, I had started
hiking up some of the inimitable “talus piles” of the Colorado Rockies—shapeless
lumps of scree and tundra strung along the Continental Divide, peaks such as Audu-
bon, James, Grays, and Torreys. It took stamina to push on at 14,000 feet, and judg-
ment to descend in the face of a July lightning storm, but I knew that what I was do-
ing was a far cry from real mountaineering. Staring at a true precipice, such as the
2,000-foot-high east face of Longs Peak, I felt an ambivalent longing: surely it took the
competence and arrogance of the gods to inch one's way, armed with ropes and pitons,
up such dark landscapes of terror.
Annapurna ratcheted that uncertain longing into full-blown desire. When I put
down the topic—swallowed in one sitting, as I recall—I wanted more than anything
else in the world to become a mountaineer.
Over the decades, Herzog's narrative has had precisely that effect on an inordinate
number of adolescents of both sexes. It might seem curious that a tale fraught with
near-death, with fearful trials by storm and cold, and finally with gruesome amputa-
tions of fingers and toes turned black and rotting, should encourage any reader to take
up the perilous business of climbing. Yet so exalting were the ideals that Herzog lyric-
ally sang—loyalty, teamwork, courage, and perseverance—that rational apprehension
was drowned in a tide of admiration. Those Frenchmen—Herzog, Lachenal, Terray,
and Rébuffat— were gods, or at least mythic heroes.
So I became a mountaineer, and then a writer about mountaineering. In 1980, hav-
ing survived thirteen Alaskan expeditions of my own, I wrote an article for the Sierra
Club's semiannual journal Ascent, called “Slouching Toward Everest,” that tried to
identify the finest mountaineering expedition books yet written, giving readers a taste
of each. Summing up my roster of twenty-one classics, I concluded that Annapurna
was the best of them all.
A decade and a half later, in February 1996, I met Michel Guérin for dinner in the
French ski town of Morzine. A specialty publisher of mountaineering topics based in
Chamonix, Guérin and I had struck up an epistolary friendship based on many a mu-
tual enthusiasm in the climbing world.
Our long evening's conversation took place mostly in French, for while Michel
proved to be an elegant conversationalist in his native tongue, his spoken English ten-
ded to emerge in gnostic bursts of decidedly unidiomatic phraseology. Over our second
Armagnac, the talk turned to Annapurna. Michel reminded me of my paramount
ranking of Herzog's book in “Slouching Toward Everest,” which he had recently read.