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he deliberately chose ropemates in their twenties for rock climbs that might test his
refurbished mettle.
One of his favorite partners was his Huntington teammate, Marc Martinetti, who
was only twenty-five years old. A native of Chamonix, boyishly good-looking, he had
already been elected, despite his tender age, to the elite Compagnie des Guides. Martin-
etti had notched his belt with some of the finest faces in the Alps, including the Walker
Spur on the Grandes Jorasses and the north face of the Dru (two of Rébuffat's six great
north faces). Optimistic, a great joker, fiercely independent, he had recently married a
young local beauty.
On September 19, 1965, Terray and Martinetti set out for a long but moderate rock-
climb in Terray's beloved Vercors, the
préalpes
south of Grenoble where Terray had
first learned to climb three decades earlier. When the pair had not returned by dark, a
search party set off to look for them. At the foot of the wall, they found the bodies of
Terray and Martinetti, still roped together. From the damage the men had undergone
(their helmets were smashed to pieces), the searchers concluded that they must have
fallen as far as a thousand feet. At the top of the route, easy but steep grassy slopes
are interspersed with short sections of cliff. It would have been normal for Terray and
Martinetti to stay roped here, but to place only the occasional piton. No doubt one man
had slipped, pulling off the other. Or perhaps one had seized a loose block and lost his
balance, like Francis Aubert on the approach to the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey.
In France, Terray's death was the occasion for national mourning. In my first year
of graduate school in Denver, I bought the latest issue of
Paris-Match,
with Terray's
rugged portrait on the cover, above a blurb reading “
Mort pour la Montagne.
” Staring
at the photos that highlighted Terray's extraordinary career, I mourned, for my own
selfish reasons, the near miss of our intersection in life.
Terray had died, I knew, before he could have received and read Washburn's letter.
Every young climber's dream is to win the notice of his heroes. I had done that, across
two decades and the Atlantic Ocean, only to have Terray die wondering whether some
American college kids had faked the second ascent of Mount Huntington.
O
NE
A
PRIL DAY IN
1999, Michel Guérin and I decided to hike up to the base of the climb
on which Terray had been killed thirty-four years before. Michel himself had done the
climb at age twenty. “It was not a pilgrimage for me then,” he told me. “When you're
young, you don't care about death.”
We drove route N75 south out of Grenoble, then left the highway to climb past
farmsheds on a country road. It was a damp day, and the long limestone wall of the
Vercors lay mostly hidden in mist to the east. The snows of a record winter had
