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of the summit. “We were beaten again. Days of mortal combat had led us to no more
than an unheard-of little summit.”
In 1961, with his decade of big-range mountaineering behind him, Terray could see
his pigheaded enthusiasm for the Northwest Spur as the folly it was. In
Conquistadors,
he was unsparing: “What ignorance of Himalayan conditions! What an accumulation
of errors of judgment!”
Yet for all that, Terray retained a certain pride in his effort on the spur: “Nothing
will ever surpass those desperate days when I gave myself up to the struggle with all
the strength and courage at my command.” To this day, the full Northwest Spur re-
mains unclimbed.
H
ERZOG
'
S OWN ACCOUNT
of the five days of wasted effort exemplifies his penchant for
the retrospective I-told-you-so. In
Annapurna,
he presents himself as skeptical from
the start about the Northwest Spur. In the face of his demurrals, “Lachenal and Terray
stormed away at me. They thought we ought to decide to attack at once, and kept on
insisting that this was the right route.” The leader chalks up the pair's “wild enthusi-
asm” to “a very excitable state after their day's climbing.”
“I've no intention of hazarding the whole strength of the expedition on a route we
know so little about,” Herzog quotes himself as saying. Yet as if to humor Terray, he
agrees to the three days' push on the spur. In his detailed account of the fierce climbing
the duo performed, Herzog seems to lapse into the same blithe enthusiasm as the head-
strong guide. Yet at the high point, staring at their defeat, he concludes: “No long dis-
cussion was necessary. Even if no other obstacle cropped up to hinder our progress . . .
it would have been madness to launch an expedition on this route.”
The true skeptic regarding the Northwest Spur was undoubtedly Rébuffat. Despite
his lanky, acrobatic grace on vertical rock, the guide from Marseille saw the spur as a
seductive distraction from the start. To him, the self-evident best hope of attaining the
relatively low-angled north face of Annapurna was to climb the glacier that sprawled
west from unseen basins to the very foot of the spur. Even as Terray and Herzog flailed
away at the difficult pitches on the spur, Rébuffat set off with a now-disillusioned
Lachenal to scout a route among the crevasses and seracs. The choice of line of attack
was Rébuffat's, and it turned out to be a sublimely canny piece of route-finding, lead-
ing without major difficulties up to a snowy plateau from which the north face began
to unfold.
For the rest of his life, Rébuffat harbored a bitterness toward Herzog for not suffi-
ciently acknowledging the critical jump-start in the expedition's fortunes that his re-
connaissance up the glacier had provided. Writes Ballu, his biographer:
