Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains Read online

  Ironically, the skill and vigilance of the PGHM may actually add to the astounding number of accidents in Chamonix, for many would-be Boivins take even greater chances than they normally would, knowing that Bellon and company are standing by 'round the clock to save their bacon. According to John Bouchard, an accomplished American alpinist who has been coming to Chamonix since 1973 (and who with his French wife owns Wild Things, the climbing gear company, and Feral, of the skull-and-crossbones paragliders), "These days, instead of taking emergency bivouac gear, guys go out on hard climbs and take nothing but a radio. If things get sketchy they assume they can just get on the horn and call for a rescue."

  I confess to contemplating a similar gambit myself during my visit last fall. On my second day in Cham, I set out alone up a steep but oft-ascended groove of ice on a 13,937-foot peak called Mont Blanc du Tacul. Low on the climb, I repeatedly struck rock as I slammed my ice axes through the couloir's thin glazing, carelessly dulling the picks; by the time I was midway up the route, being both unacclimated and badly out of shape, I began to have difficulty swinging the blunt tools hard enough to make them stick. Since I hadn't brought along a rope for rappeling down, however, my only option appeared to be to continue front-pointing the rest of the way to the top and walk down the easy backside. Just then a PGHM helicopter buzzed past on a routine flight, and, spying me, hovered to determine whether or not they'd come across another bonehead in trouble. Immediately, I decided to wave for help. Only the day before, after all, I'd plunked down seventy dollars for rescue insurance, so the impromptu extrication wouldn't cost me a dime.

  Problem was, I couldn't figure what sort of story I was going to give to the PGHM to justify the rescue when the guy in the natty blue sweater came down on the winch cable to pluck me from the ice. I hesitated for a moment, then, overcome with guilt, raised one arm-the signal that all was well-and the chopper darted off toward the valley like an overgrown dragonfly, leaving me to my own sorry devices.

  Among the thousands of lurid mishaps and stirring rescues that have occurred in Chamonix over the years, a few stand out. The most famous rescue of them all occurred in the summer of 1966 on the west face of the Petit Dru, an arresting granite obelisk that soars six thousand feet above the Mer de Glace. Two inexperienced Germans had started up the wall on August 14, and after four days of climbing became marooned on a three-foot ledge, two-thirds of the way to the top, unable to surmount the ice-plastered overhangs that guard the summit pinnacle. The Germans sent out an SOS, hunkered down on their tiny ledge, and waited for help as bad weather closed in.

  A massive rescue effort was set in motion. More than fifty French Mountain Troops and Chamonix guides ascended the less difficult north and east faces of the Dru, and attempted to lower a steel cable from the summit. The overhangs directly above the stranded climbers, however, repeatedly foiled this scheme, and three days after the signal for help went out, the Germans were still out of reach. By then Chamonix was flooded with reporters and television crews, and the rescue was front-page news in every major paper in western Europe.

  Gary Hemming read about the plight of the Germans on August 18, while sitting in a cafe on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, and decided straightaway that he was the man to save them. Hemming-a tall, dreamy Californian with shaggy blonde hair and bohemian inclinations-had been residing in France for five years, mostly in Chamonix but occasionally in Paris as well, where he slept under bridges by the Seine. Three years later, for reasons that are still puzzled over, Hemming would get drunk in a Teton campground and put a bullet through his own head, but in 1966 the thirty-three-year-old climber was at the top of his game.

  Hemming had been on the west face of the Dru many times; in 1962 he and Royal Robbins had pioneered a new route on the wall, the "American Direct," that at the time was considered one of the world's hardest climbs, and is still regarded as one of the great lines in the Alps. As a consequence, Hemming knew the mountain intimately, and when he read about the Germans' predicament, he quickly concluded that the best way to save them was to climb the west face itself, a course of action that both the military rescuers and the strongest guides in Chamonix had dismissed as impossible, given the stormy weather and the icy condition of the wall. Hem ming raced back to Chamonix and started up the west face on August 19, leading an ad hoc, multinational team that eventually came to number eight renegade climbers.

  The climbing was unspeakably hard, but after three days Hemming's party reached the Germans' ledge to find the two men alive and in surprisingly good shape. Incredibly, five minutes later, one of the guides from the north face team arrived on the scene as well, having made a circuitous traverse from the easier route, and announced that he and the other guides would now be evacuating the Germans. "No," Hemming is said to have replied with feeling. "We got here first. The Germans are ours."

  A day later, Hemming's team completed their descent with the Germans safely in tow to find the assembled media waiting for them at the base of the Dru with cameras and tape recorders rolling. When Hemming's contemplative visage and stirring tale landed in the papers and on the TV screens of Europe, he became the toast of the Continent. The French, especially, went gaga over "le Beatnik," this noble savage from America with the rugged good looks and Gary-Cooper-like reticence. Hemming was suddenly a hero, transformed overnight from a penniless, maladjusted climber into a perfect blonde god, and launched into enduring myth.

  "There is no easy way into another world," writes James Salter in Solo Faces, the spare, powerful novel he set in Chamonix and based loosely on the life of Hemming. Chamoniards are an exceedingly insular people, disinclined to open their lives to outsiders. Many of the surnames one sees above the shops on the Rue du Dr. Paccard or on the roster at the Guides Bureau-Balmat, Payot, Simond, Charlet, Tournier, Devouassoud-have been there since Goethe and Empress Josephine first came to town. Indeed, no "outsiders"-which Chamoniards define as anyone born more than a few kilometers beyond the town limits-are accepted into the ranks of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix Mont-Blanc without a special, seldom-granted dispensation. A band of young, "foreignborn" (i.e., non-Chamoniard) guides has retaliated by forming a competing service, Les Guides Independant du Mont Blanc, but in the eyes of most Chamoniards the freelancers are to the established Compagnie what a jug of Gallo is to vintage Chateau Lafite- Rothschild.

  Hemming managed to penetrate Cham's closed society only after his heroics on the Dru (the French have always had a deep and abiding respect for fame). John Bouchard was eventually embraced by the Chamoniards, too, but not until he completed a string of brilliant, unthinkably bold ascents-two of them on previously unclimbed routes; several of them done done-that culminated in his marriage to Titoune Meunier, an extraordinary climber herself, who is a member of the local Simond clan. According to Marc Twight, Bouchard's friend and protege, "John went to Cham, snatched these coveted first ascents away from the heaviest hitters in the Alps, and then stole the heart of the most desirable girl in town." It was just the sort of tour de force, executed with consummate style, that the French find irresistible. From that point on Chamoniards regarded Bouchard as one of their own, a native son who by some inexplicable cosmic accident happened to have been born in America.

  Beyond Hemming and Bouchard, however, precious few Americans-or foreigners of any stripe, for that matter-have ever been admitted to the club. Marc Twight-an intense, very talented twenty-eight-year-old alpinist-is a case in point. Over the past five years Twight has polished off a horrific list of infamous Chamonix "death routes," and last March was the subject of a ten-page spread in Montagnes, the French climbing magazine. But he still does not feel accepted, really, by the locals. "When I first arrived here in 1984," he says, "I was basically shunned and ignored. Now that I've done some good climbs, the hot local climbers and parapilots will let me into their periphery, talk to me, share info about routes. But that's all you get. You still aren't invited over for dinner; you'll never be admitted to the inner circle. I'm not
sure why; that's just the way it is."

  Most foreign climbers and skiers-the legions of Basques, Brits, Czechs, Poles, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards, Argentines, Americans, Koreans, Canadians, Australians, Norwegians, New Zealanders, Indians, and Japanese who flock to Chamonix annually-could care less about gaining entrance to Chamonix society; they aspire only to be left alone, to roll the dice on the heights as the spirit moves them, and to get by as cheaply and comfortably as possible in the valley between epics.

  As one might imagine, with such a wide range of nationalities, an equally wide range of strategies has been adopted to achieve these ends. The Czechs and Poles, for instance, who tend to be both short of hard currency and hard as nails, eschew the hotels and pensions in favor of farmers' fields on the outskirts of town, where they pay four or five francs per night for the privilege of shitting in the woods and pitching their ragged tents amid the mud and cow pies.

  Likewise, few Swedes will be found in Chamonix hotels, although for a different reason. In Sweden, it seems, there is a prohibitively stiff tax on alcohol. When Swedes come to France, where booze costs approximately half what it does in Scandinavia, they are apt to overindulge, and, as Twight puts it, "get wicked out of control. They start fights, trash rooms, and become extremely unruly. As a result, when Chamoniard innkeepers see a Swedish passport they usually say, `I am sorry, but I just remembered that all the rooms are already taken.' " Things have degenerated to the point where Swedish businessmen recently bought some hotels in the village of Argentiere, a few miles up the valley, just so their countrymen would have a place near Chamonix to sleep; nowadays, during ski season, Argentiere turns into a veritable Swedish colony.

  Even touchier than Franco-Swedish relations, however, are those between the French and the British, thanks to a mutual enmity that has been festering for so many centuries that it's been encoded in the respective parties' genes. The Brits do have one or two allies among the Chamoniards: The local Snell clan has for three decades allowed Englishmen, by tacit agreement, to camp in a family-owned field at the edge of town in return for not ripping off the two familyowned climbing shops on the Rue du Dr. Paccard. But the bad blood between many French and British alpinists runs deep nevertheless, and has on occasion escalated into legendary brawls that have devastated bistros and landed a number of famous English climbers in the Chamonix jail.

  The bad blood is also reflected in Franco-English slang. To the English, for instance, a condom is a "French letter"; to the French it's "une capote anglais." When someone sneaks away dishonorably the Brits refer to it as "taking French leave"; the French say `filer a l'anglais." In colloquial French, sodomy is known as "le vice an- glais," and although the English in this case lack a precise etymological equivalent, British climbers have long considered the sartorial flair of their Gallic counterparts to be proof positive that all Frenchmen are latent deviants.

  Lately, however, the French have seemed to be enjoying the last laugh. These days the native Chamoniards are not only the bestdressed climbers, skiers, and parapilots on the hill, but for the first time since the Paccard-Balmat climb there isn't an Englishman (or anyone else) alive who can match their astonishing poise and prowess on severe ice and rock. Superstars like Profit, Boivin, and Patrick Gabarrou might have a weakness for pink scarves and colorcoordinated alpine ensembles, but nobody's calling them weenies.

  It takes about half an hour for the two-stage telepherique to travel the nine thousand vertical feet between Chamonix and the summit of the Aiguille du Midi. Sixty of us have been shoehorned into the rusty box of the cable car for the ride up: Frenchmen in fluorescent orange-and-green outfits with matching backpacks; several teams from an Italian climbing club, singing and farting and laughing enthusiastically; a few silent Japanese tourists incongruously attired in business suits and dresses.

  At the summit-a dizzying spike of brown granite, honeycombed with tunnels and barnacled with bizarre steel structures-I find my way to the restaurant for a quick croque-monsieur, then board another lift for a ride across the heavily crevassed plain of the Vallee Blanche to the Italian frontier. From there, a short downhill walk takes me to my objective for the day, the north face of a peak called the Tour Ronde. Were this mountain in Alaska, where I have done much of my climbing, I might have spent three or four days laboring beneath an eighty-pound pack to arrive at this point from the Chamonix Valley. Because the peak is in France, the approach has taken me less than two hours (breakfast stop included), my rucksack holds little more than lunch and an extra sweater, and I haven't yet broken a sweat.

  Were this peak in Alaska, however, I would probably have had it to myself; as I strap on my crampons at the foot of the Tour Ronde, I count seven climbers on the route above.

  The climb follows an hourglass-shaped slab of glassy grey ice straight up for twelve hundred feet. By Chamonix standards the route is easy, but I'm concerned, nonetheless, about all the folks above me: In 1983, a pair of climbers fell near the top of the face, and as they plummeted to the glacier, still roped together, they flossed off eighteen people who had been climbing below, killing six and themselves.

  The climbers overhead don't pose a problem until I reach the midway point on the wall, the waist of the hourglass, where rock buttresses on either side funnel all the ice kicked loose by those above down through a narrow slot, up which I must climb for two hundred feet. Fortunately, most of the ice chips whistling down are small and glance harmlessly off my helmet. Falling ice is to be expected on a climb like this-climbers can't help knocking off small divots when they drive in their axes-but for some incomprehensible reason one of the teams above begins sending down frisbees of granite, too, some of them weighing eight or ten pounds. "Hey!" I scream up in their direction. "Can't you see there's someone below you?" This, however, only seems to encourage them: When I turn my face upward to yell again, I catch a pebble in the chin. I quickly tuck my head back down and begin front-pointing even faster.

  In ten minutes I'm out of the slot and onto the upper face, where it's possible to dodge the fusillade. Forty-five minutes after that I'm on top, where I find the two Frenchmen who rolled the rocks my way lounging beside the bronze statue of the Virgin Mary that marks the summit. Approaching them, I inquire politely, "What gives, assholes? On the descent maybe I should kick a few boulders down so you can see what it feels like."

  The two climbers, who are in their early twenties, act supremely unconcerned. One of them shrugs and tells me, "The falling rocks, they are one of the many natural hazards climbers must face in the Alps. If you do not like the climbing here, perhaps you should return to America, where the mountains are not so big."

  By and by, the Frenchmen depart, leaving me alone on the summit, and I begin to settle down. The rock is warm, the September sky crystalline and absolutely still. Around me, so close I can almost reach out and touch them, the Aiguilles rise in wave after endless wave. Here are the crest of Mont Blanc and the thin fingers of the Peuterey Ridge; over there, the Grepon and Charmoz, the immense tusk of the Dent du Geant, the twin summits of the Drus, the formidable profile of the Grandes Jorasses. For most of my life I've read about these peaks, stared at fuzzy photos of them clipped from magazines and scotch-taped to my walls, tried to imagine the texture of their storied granite.

  It's getting late. I need to start climbing down, pronto, or I'll miss the last telepherique to the valley. But there's a pleasant, peculiar sort of warmth inching up my spine, and I'm reluctant to cut it short before it has a chance to get wherever it may be going. "Five more minutes," I bargain with myself out loud. A quarter-mile beneath my feet, the shadow of the Tour Ronde stretches across the glacier like a cat.

  When I glance at my watch, an hour has passed. Down in Chamonix, the streets are already deep in shade, and the bars are starting to fill with climbers and parapilots back from the heights. If I were down there now, sharing a table with some wild-eyed heir to Messner or Bonatti or Terray, my trip up the Tour Ronde would probably be too banal
to mention. Up here on top of the mountain, my ledge affords a different perspective. The summits are still gleaming in the autumn sun. The walls are humming with history, the empty glacier is alive with light. "Five more minutes," I tell myself again. "Just five more minutes, and then I really will start down."

  THE SALT RIVER SNAKES ACROSS THE MIDRIFF OF ARIZONA, FLOWING west from the high Apache country near the New Mexico line, down onto the scorched hardpan of the Sonoran Desert, and finally through the smog and sprawl of Phoenix before surrendering both its name and what remains of its waters to the Gila River. The Salt has been so emasculated by dams, reservoirs, and irrigation canals that, by the time it reaches downtown Phoenix, it's nothing more than a sandy wash bounded by concrete embankments. When I first laid eyes on the mighty Salt from the window of a 7 37 on final approach to the Phoenix airport-on a day in early April, when the stream was supposed to be running near full flow-there didn't appear to be any water in the river at all.

  Consequently, an hour later, when a fellow named Rick Fisher earnestly informed me that the Salt was "one of the most spectacular and challenging rivers in all of North America, and encompasses one of the last true wilderness areas in the lower forty-eight states," I nodded politely and tried to cut the guy some slack by reminding myself that I once attempted to convince a friend from Boston that the Seattle Mariners-my hometown club, and perennial cellar dwellers in the American League West-were in reality the most talented team in baseball. Fisher, a thirty-six-year-old photographer and backcountry guide from Tucson, picked up the skeptical look in my eyes. "Just you wait," he smugly protested. "You'll see soon enough."