Travel Reference
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mountains alone, and fell into a kind of bitterness that alarmed his friends. In view of
the course of the rest of his life, that prolonged depression at age eighteen would come
to seem a kind of lost year.
It was only the next summer, when he returned to Chamonix for a series of climbs
with a veteran alpinist from Annecy, that Lachenal set his compass. One evening, from
the terrace of a high mountain refuge, the two men stared at the surrounding peaks
turning dull with dusk. Lachenal poured out his questions about guiding, then asked
his friend why he had never become a guide.
“I never gave it a thought,” said the man.
“Because you have a true passion for the mountains,” mused Lachenal. Moments
later, he pronounced his conclusion: “To be a true guide, you have to love the moun-
tains more than anything in life.”
U
NDER THE INFLUENCE OF
Starlight and Storm,
in the spring of my final year of high
school, I signed up for a beginning rock-climbing course taught by the Rocky Moun-
tain Rescue Group. After only five Saturdays on easy routes on the Flatirons above
Boulder, I considered myself a “real” climber. I scraped together enough cash to buy
a 120-foot rope (it cost twelve dollars), a few soft-iron pitons, and a half dozen cara-
biners. Fired all the more by Rébuffat's lyrical evocations of the great north faces of
the Alps, I grew ambitious. In June 1961, with a pal who had climbed for two years
(versus my four months), I ascended the east face of Longs Peak, a 2,000-foot precipice
of steep snow interrupted by short vertical pitches of clean granite. Because of a recent
tragedy on the face, when two experienced mountaineers had frozen to death after get-
ting caught in a storm, the whole east face was officially closed at the time my friend
and I sneaked in to its base. After finding our names in the summit register, a ranger
tracked us down to Boulder, where a benevolent elder in the Rescue Group talked him
out of arresting us.
The east face of Longs seemed a grand exploit, pushing my sketchy technique to
its very limit. On one smooth rock traverse, with my arms giving out from fatigue, I
just managed to clip a carabiner into a fixed piton before losing my purchase altogeth-
er. Late in the afternoon, only a few hundred feet below the top, as he led on perilous
mixed snow and rock, my friend screamed, “Get ready! I'm about to come off!” For-
tunately, he kept his cool and swarmed past the tricky part.
Despite this bold deed, I did not find the track that would lead me toward serious
mountaineering until I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1961. At the time, the college's
mountaineering club (the HMC) comprised the most ambitious collection of under-
graduate alpinists in the country. At my first meeting, I was dazzled to learn that cer-
