Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the route in perpetual shade, the pair climbed in brutal cold. Night overtook them, but
they climbed on by starlight. At last Terray cut his way through the cornice cresting
the col and the men emerged on that lonely saddle. Wrote Terray, “We shouted our
joy to the moon like a couple of madmen.” For more than twenty years after this epic
climb, Terray and Rébuffat's route on the Caïman went unrepeated.
Between the two men there was lively competition as well as happy camaraderie.
Rébuffat was gratified to finish a particularly demanding mountain course set by the
JM in first place, while Terray finished third. And in 1942, the highest honor he had
ever sought was granted the twenty-one-year-old, when he was invited to join the
Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix. His mentor, proffering the invitation, said, “You
have great integrity, and you climb well.” For Gaston, that his moral qualities were
cited ahead of his technical ability formed a lasting point of pride.
All the while he was serving his alpine apprenticeship, Rébuffat was forming his
own highly original aesthetic of mountaineering. After their initial spell of enthusi-
asm, both he and Terray grew disenchanted with Jeunesse et Montagne. By the end of
his service, Terray later wrote, he was “completely disgusted with the organization.”
For Rébuffat, the rhetoric on which JM was founded began to seem highly distasteful.
The unabashed aim of the division's architects was to form a “sportive elite . . . to exalt
the finest French virtues.” Climbers were to become “knights of the sky” through “the
secularization of the chivalric virtues,” ultimately creating “an army of true alpinists.”
Ever since the first ascent of Mont Blanc, the struggle of men against the heights
had been conceived of and narrated in martial terms. A team “laid siege” to a moun-
tain; it “attacked” its objective by the likely “weaknesses” in its “defenses”; reaching
the summit was inevitably a “victory,” even a “conquest.”
All this chest-thumping was anathema to Rébuffat. From his early years on, he had
gained his remarkable proficiency on slab and serac not by battling against the natural
world, but by embracing it. The mountain was not an enemy: it was a magical realm
of peace and harmony, entered into in a spirit of communion, not of war.
Even though he had dropped out of school at sixteen, Rébuffat was intellectually
ambitious. He wanted to write about his adventures in the mountains, and to pass on
his vision of the Alps not as a battlefield but as (in the subtitle of a later book) a
“jardin
féerique”
—an enchanted garden. Eventually he would become not only an author but
a prize-winning photographer and cinematographer.
As he came into the prime of life after the war ended, Rébuffat grew as skilled and
daring as any mountaineer in Europe. Without announcing to anyone his goal, he set
about becoming the first climber to succeed on the six great classic north faces of the
Alps, all first ascended in the 1930s. His initial blazing success in this campaign came
