Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Of the six principal climbers on Annapurna, only two—Jean Couzy and Lionel Ter-
ray—ever went on another expedition. Yet after 1950, Terray became arguably the
greatest expedition mountaineer in history, as he spearheaded small expeditions to
some of the remotest and most daunting mountains in the world. Fitzroy in Patago-
nia, Jannu and Makalu in the Himalaya, Chacraraju and Taulliraju in the Peruvian
Andes—always with the indomitable Terray solving the crux pitches that led to vic-
tory. This was the kind of mountaineer Don and I aspired to become: an expeditionary
expert, seeking out not so much the highest unclimbed mountains as the hardest and
most beautiful.
More than anything else in
Conquistadors of the Useless,
however, what stirred
Don and me to the core was the account of the partnership Terray and Lachenal forged
after 1945. By that year, Lachenal had found his direction in life. He had worn down
the haughty opposition of Mme. Rivier and married his beloved Adèle. After a brilliant
stint in Jeunesse et Montagne, where he came in first in virtually all the competitions
waged among the finest young skiers and alpinists in France, he had won a job as a ski
and climbing instructor in the Contamines, near Chamonix. And despite his flight to
Switzerland to avoid his labor service obligation, after the war Lachenal was voted into
membership in the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix.
With Terray, Lachenal started knocking off one prize after another among the hard-
est routes yet essayed in the Alps, starting with the Walker Spur on the Grandes
Jorasses. Driven by Lachenal's impatience, the pair set extraordinary time records on
these formidable ridges and walls. The first ascent of the northeast face of the Piz
Badile, in Italy, had been accomplished by Ricardo Cassin with four partners in 1937.
The climb had taken this strong party three days, and they reached the summit in an
all-out storm. On the descent, two of Cassin's teammates died of exhaustion.
In 1949, Terray and Lachenal stormed up this wall—one of the six great north faces
of the Alps, as categorized by Rébuffat—in the astounding time of seven and a half
hours. Their ascent had been three times as fast as the fastest previous success, four
times as fast as the hitherto matchless Cassin.
In “The Brotherhood of the Rope,” that lyrical set piece in
Starlight and Storm,
Rébuffat had sung the virtues of the
cordée
—the pairing of soul mates bound together
by a nylon rope. Yet it seemed that Rébuffat himself, while treasuring the compan-
ionship of any number of loyal teammates, had never found his ideal partner, the man
with whose destiny he wished to intertwine his own. Now Don and I discovered, in the
example of Lachenal and Terray, what the
cordée
meant at its most crystalline.
In one canny passage in
Conquistadors
(I think I learned it by heart), Terray ana-
lyzed that partnership:
