Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Was I completely stupid, to be feeling like this? Madman, for whom there is no happiness
but in desire, rejoice for once in reality, exult in this moment when, half borne up by the
wind, you stand over the world. Drink deep of infinity: below your feet, hardly emerging
from the sea of cloud that stretches away to the horizon, armies of mountains raise their
lances toward you.
Never again would Terray undergo the experience he had freely chosen on An-
napurna, where he gave up his summit chances first to haul loads to Camp IV, then
to save Herzog and Lachenal. If Terray's team made a first ascent, Terray reached the
summit himself. More often than not, he led the hardest pitches and was in the first
pair to arrive on top.
Terray's choice of objectives after 1950 bore the stamp of his passion. The moun-
tains that he sought out—usually not only unclimbed, but previously unattemp-
ted—were not necessarily the highest in their ranges; instead, they were the most
beautiful and the most difficult. In Peru in 1956, Terray had an
annus mirabilis:
as
warm-up for his team's principal objective, he made the first ascents of two difficult
mountains in the Cordillera Blanca, Veronica and Soray. Then the party turned its
sights toward 20,046-foot Chacraraju in the Cordillera Vilcabamba, possibly the hard-
est mountain in the Peruvian Andes, declared impossible by both Austrians and Amer-
icans who had reconnoitered it.
Eschewing tented camps on the route, prepared instead to bivouac in the open, Ter-
ray led the ascent, as he had on Fitzroy, in brilliant lightweight style. The party arrived
on top at 5:00
P.M.
and descended
en rappel
by headlamp in the dark. Most expeditions
would have turned toward home after Chacraraju, but Terray snagged the highly tech-
nical Taulliraju almost as an afterthought. In little more than two months, his team
had claimed four of the finest unclimbed peaks in the Peruvian Andes, including its cy-
nosure, Chacraraju.
One of Terray's paramount achievements was the first ascent of Jannu in 1962.
This 25,295-foot Himalayan mountain, near Kanchenjunga in far eastern Nepal, was
not the highest summit in the world still untrodden, but a group of French experts
had deemed it, in Terray's words, “the most spectacular of all the unclimbed peaks . . .
the most impregnable of nature's remaining fortresses.” Fiendishly complex, with no
weaknesses, Jannu defeated the best French climbers in 1959, to Terray's vexation.
Stopped by an unclimbable crag 900 feet below the summit, the team, led by Terray,
had to admit “that our ambition exceeded our abilities.” Yet three years later, Terray
led another attempt, solving the hardest pitches himself, paving the way by which the
whole team eventually reached the top. In the same year, Terray climbed Chacraraju
East in Peru (fully as hard as the mountain's main peak) and the Nilgiris, near An-
