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in 1945, with the second ascent of the magisterial Walker Spur on the Grandes Jor-
asses, the “last great problem” solved by Ricardo Cassin seven years earlier. There fol-
lowed the north face of the Petit Dru, the northeast face of the Piz Badile, the north
face of the Matterhorn, and the north face of the Cima Grande in the Dolomites, the
last two accomplished in 1949. By the time he left for Annapurna, Rébuffat lacked
only the deadly Eigerwand in Switzerland, which had killed eight of the first ten men
to attempt it. In 1952 he would round out his sextet, after a life-or-death struggle on
the Eiger, during which he and the Austrian Hermann Buhl—meeting by chance and
joining forces, just as the first ascenders had done in 1938—led seven teammates who
might otherwise have perished to the top.
In his masterpiece, Etoiles et Tempêtes ( Starlight and Storm ), published in 1954,
Rébuffat sang those six great ascents. Yet where nearly every other mountain writer in
Europe (including Terray) would have narrated those tales in terms of all-out battles
against enemies conjured up out of unforgiving cliff and icefield, Rébuffat stayed true
to his vision.
A famous aside in the topic, titled “The Brotherhood of the Rope,” pushes that vis-
ion to a height of mystical ecstasy:
Together we have known apprehension, uncertainty and fear; but of what importance is all
that? For it was only up there that we discovered many things of which we had previously
known nothing: a joy that was new to us, happiness that was doubled because it was shared,
a wordless friendship which was no mere superficial impulse. . . .
I wish all climbers an Elder Brother who can always be looked up to with love and re-
spect, who will watch the way you rope yourself up, and who, as he initiates you into an ex-
acting life, looks after you like a mother hen.
The one who shares with you his fleeting sovereignty at 12,000 feet and who points out
the surrounding peaks as a gardener shows his flowers.
The one at whom we all gaze with envy, for the mountain hut is his lodging and the
mountain his domain.
The friendship of a man as rich as that cannot be bought.
A NNAPURNA HAD FIRED ME , by the age of sixteen, with the passion to become a mountain-
eer. Under its influence, exploring the ranges of my native Colorado, I graduated from
easy “walk-ups” such as Mount Elbert (the state's highest peak) to more challenging
objectives: a solo traverse of the treacherous Maroon Bells, near Aspen; a winter at-
tack on the east ridge of Pacific Peak, in the Tenmile Range. Yet I continued to hesitate
short of the real plunge—learning to climb with rope and piton and carabiner and the
tight-fitting special footgear called kletterschuhe.
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