Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pretty short, because in our tent Lionel held forth at length on his youth, his love life,
and a bit about his career as a skier. We had to go to sleep at last at 1:00
A.M.
” “I took
two sleeping pills to try to sleep, which gave me very funny dreams: I caught Thivierge
[a fellow Chamonix guide] and Momo [Herzog] stealing cans of food!” (Both passages
suppressed.)
One of the most interesting entries in Lachenal's diary hints at a serious argument
between Rébuffat and himself. “With Gaston, discussions take on a macabre charac-
ter,” he wrote, softening the conflict with an edge of irony. “It's important not to have
them too often, because they engender a certain melancholy, a nostalgia for our return,
which puts a bad aspect on the adventure.” Referring to their dispute, he writes, “We
talked again about the business on the central spur of the Grandes Jorasses with the
College. Gaston stuck to his position. He's wrong.”
With typical bluntness, Lachenal thus brought up a painful episode in the men's
shared past. In 1947, Lachenal and Rébuffat had led a group of five aspirant guides
from the Collège des Praz, an elite guides' school near Chamonix, on a climb of the
central spur on the great north face of the Grandes Jorasses—a route only marginally
less serious than the Walker to its left, of which Rébuffat had made the second ascent
two years before. On the descent, the team bivouacked just below the summit on the
south side of the mountain. Just as the team settled in to sleep on their ledge, a huge
block of rock came loose thirty feet above. Rébuffat and the aspirant Georges Michel
were knocked from their perch. Michel plunged 1,500 feet to his death. In mid-fall,
Rébuffat miraculously jammed himself into a chimney thirty feet below, saving his life
at the cost of a broken foot, kneecap, and rib.
In
Starlight and Storm,
Rébuffat narrated that accident in an oddly dreamy passage.
For the poet of the Alps, death was not easy to countenance: on the following day, the
guides found their protégé's corpse lying face up on the glacier.
The expression on his face was serene. The morning before, as we started up the spur, he
had said to me, “Gaston, think of doing the north face of the Grandes Jorasses! I've dreamed
of this all my life.” And he added with a laugh: “After, I don't mind dying.”
What Rébuffat neglects to mention is that at the last minute, he had talked Lachenal
out of an easier route. The central spur had been climbed only four times before, never
by Frenchmen. Apprised of the formidable objective Rébuffat proposed, the aspirants
were at first taken aback; then, swayed by their faith in their tutors, they voiced whole-
hearted enthusiasm.
The passage in Lachenal's Annapurna diary seems to indicate that, three years later,
he held Rébuffat at least indirectly responsible for the death of Georges Michel. Per-
