Breakthrough - True Summit - page 56

“There's another reason,” Herzog adds. “I would think that being a mountaineering
professional means endlessly repeating the same routes. Isn't that tiresome? And fi-
nally, a true burnout?”
“Yes, but you can constantly change clients.”
As so often in Annapurna, here, with Terray's meek rejoinder, Herzog in effect
gives himself the last word.
In any event, in the 1940s Herzog became a good but not a great alpinist. With his
usual bluntness, Terray addresses the question in Conquistadors as he acknowledges
the fact that the choice of Herzog to lead the Annapurna expedition “caused a great
deal of argument both then and later. . . . The objections were mostly on the grounds
that he had done none of the greatest ascents of his day, and could therefore not be con-
sidered one of its leading climbers.” Still loyal in 1961, Terray counters the objections
by insisting that Herzog had “made himself into a good rock climber; and above all he
was a complete mountaineer with all the right qualities for the Himalayas.” Moreover,
Terray insists, “If Herzog's selection was justified on technical grounds, it was even
more so on intellectual and human ones.”
In L'Autre Annapurna, Herzog dances all around the question of just what level
of ability he attained as a climber. The gulf between Herzog's expertise and that of
the three Chamonix guides, however, emerges somewhat inadvertently in the topic.
Herzog devotes thirteen pages to an exciting account of what must have been his
greatest climb in the Alps: the 1944 first ascent of the Peuterey Ridge on Mont Blanc
via the north face of the Col de Peuterey, with his brother, Gérard, and Rébuffat and
Terray. The epic ascent culminates in a summit dash in the midst of a violent lightning
storm, as the four men avoid a potentially fatal bivouac.
Reading between the lines, one realizes that the cordée of Rébuffat and Terray led
virtually the whole climb, with the brothers Herzog trailing behind on a second rope.
In L'Autre Annapurna, Herzog calls the climb “the greatest ascent in the Alps” (to
date). Though a highly creditable new route, the Peuterey Ridge was not in the same
class as the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses or even Terray and Rébuffat's first on
the Col du Caïman. In Conquistadors, Terray relegates the Peuterey ascent to a single
sentence. Rébuffat seems never to have bothered to write about it.
Another key to Herzog's makeup lies scattered through the pages of L'Autre An-
napurna. At the age of seventy-nine, long after Rébuffat's radical aesthetic of the
mountains as an “enchanted garden” had gained the day, Herzog still automatically
conceives of ascent in martial terms. He speaks of his youthful climbs as “victories”
and “conquests.” One passage is explicit: “Adventure is a war. It determines the char-
acter of the combatant, who pledges at every instant his very existence.”