Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
There was a kind of adolescent hubris in comparing ourselves to Terray. We knew
in our hearts that, as alpinists, we weren't in the same league with the French master.
None of us, in fact, would ever climb in the Himalaya or the Andes. But in this one
part of the world we had chosen as our specialty—the Alaska Range—we dared to be-
lieve that at the height of our twenty-two-year-old powers we might match the recent
deed of a forty-three-year-old veteran who had confessed in his autobiography, “My
own scope must now go back down the scale.”
After a month of discouragements and setbacks, we climbed the west face, arriving
all four on top at 3:30
A.M.
on July 29. Our triumph was short-lived: only twenty hours
later, as Ed and I descended in the dark, a rappel anchor failed. Without uttering a
sound, Ed fell 4,000 feet to the lower Tokositna Glacier, to a basin so inaccessible we
never had a chance to search for his body.
News of our ascent reached France, where it caught Terray's ear. Having never
heard of these four young upstarts from Harvard, Terray was incredulous that little-
known Americans might have succeeded on a route harder than his northwest ridge.
He wrote Washburn inquiring whether or not we might have lied about the climb.
Washburn wrote back, vouching for our ascent, and he told us about Terray's doubt-
filled missive.
It was of course disappointing to have our hero wonder whether we were liars. Yet
at the same time, for Don and me, it was the giddiest imaginable gratification to know
that we had crossed the radar screen of his consciousness. Once Washburn had con-
vinced Terray that we were telling the truth, perhaps we might even correspond with
our hero, swapping details of our respective battles on Mount Huntington. Perhaps in
the future we might even meet.
Having turned forty-four that summer, Terray was far from ready to see his scope
go down the scale. He had, in fact, begun to experience a rejuvenation. Even as he had
become the finest expeditionary mountaineer of his time, Terray had seen his skill as a
rock climber deteriorate to the point where, on a local crag with youthful companions
in top-notch shape, he felt embarrassed by his ineptitude. Such a progression is normal
for aging mountaineers. As Terray's generation was the first to discover, climbing was
becoming so specialized a business that no single practitioner could excel in both big-
range mountaineering and pure rock gymnastics. Other veterans accepted that fact,
and contented themselves with leading expeditions. For Terray, to climb anywhere at
less than an Olympian level was intolerable.
He set out, then, to teach himself all over again how to rock-climb. At Fon-
tainebleau, the forest full of giant boulders south of Paris, he devised for himself a
training program rigorous enough to challenge a hungry twenty-two-year-old. And
