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the passion of an acolyte, I read “The Brotherhood of the Rope” from my favorite
mountain book.
It might seem odd that a Colorado boy should have taken as his climbing heroes
men from far-off France. By 1959, on the crags only a few miles outside of Boulder, a
six-foot-five bricklayer named Layton Kor was putting up the hardest and most dar-
ing routes ever climbed in Colorado. One of my high school classmates even climbed
with Kor—or rather, was dragged bodily up pitches far beyond his ability by a demon
so possessed he would pair up with anyone capable of tying in to the other end of the
rope. Kor would go on to become a climber every bit as legendary as Rébuffat. Though
I was in awe of his deeds, however, I never chose Kor as a hero.
Similarly, at age fourteen I had gone on a hike with Charley Houston, an Aspen
physician who was a friend of my father's. Houston, I knew, had led the 1938 and
1953 American K2 expeditions, gallant failures on the world's second-highest moun-
tain. And with longtime partner Bob Bates, Houston had written an account of the lat-
ter journey, called
K2: The Savage Mountain,
that would become a classic. Houston
would later serve as a mentor to me—but never as a hero in the sense that Rébuffat
became on first reading.
I was hardly alone in my infatuation with the men of Annapurna. As I grew into my
mountaineering prime, I encountered one American climber after another who con-
fessed that reading Herzog's book as a teenager had turned him irreversibly toward
alpinism. After 1959, Rébuffat published a series of gorgeous picture books, such as
Neige et Roc
(
On Snow and Rock
),
Entre Terre et Ciel
(
Between the Earth and Sky
),
and
Mont-Blanc, Jardin Féerique
(
Mont Blanc, Enchanted Garden
) that by themselves
created a kind of cult. The photos of Rébuffat in action—always wearing the same pat-
terned pullover, caught in profile against a vertical cliff, rope dangling from his waist
into the void, hands resting gently on wrinkles of granite while toes clung to invisible
holds—adumbrated an alpine acrobatics far more graceful than any climbing his read-
ers had performed. The dreamy lyricism of the text elaborated further on the radical
aesthetic of the Alps as an “enchanted garden” that Rébuffat had invented.
It was the poet of the mountains who had inspired me at sixteen, writing, in
Star-
light and Storm,
“I am immensely happy, for I have felt the rope between us. We
are linked for life.” That the same man could have penned, in his private notebook,
“Depersonalization . . . a certain Nazification,” after the oath-swearing at the CAF,
would have utterly surprised me.
All his life, even as his books made him mildly famous, Rébuffat kept his other
side—the skeptical individualist, distrustful of all things grandiose and chauvinistic;
the satirist, armed with a gift for the mordant phrase—under close wraps. His friends
