CHAMONIX

Asking why in the
“Death Sport Capital of the World”

Written by Jeff Jackson
Photography by Fumiyoshi Sagawa & Ken Moriyama

 

 

Italians Casimiro Ferrari and Vittorio Meles battled up the east pillar of Fitz Roy, an ice-encrusted granite spear point, 6,401 feet tall, rearing over the border of Argentina and Chile in a place where locals refer to the wind as the Broom of God. With a nearly vertical face and rock looser than a Jenga tower, the summiting the point was about as dangerous as juggling chainsaws. The two men plunged their axes into snow-stuffed cracks and picked their way up cola-colored rime.

Late in the day, Ferrari crept across a section of verglas, rock coated with a thin layer of clear ice. His crampon points sheared through the ice, and he face-planted and fell. When he stopped sliding, it felt to him like his nose had been scraped off. Meles climbed up to assess. “There’s good news and bad news,” Meles said. “Your nose is still there but you’ve knocked your front teeth out and broken a couple of molars.” Meles mentally noted the resemblance between Ferrari’s splintered teeth and the desolate, needlelike crags all around them, but kept the observation to himself. He started building an anchor so the two could begin rappelling and get the heck back to the nearest town, El Chalten, and a dentist. Ferrari put a hand on his partner’s arm.

“Let’s keep going,” he said, spitting blood and pieces of teeth.

“But … we’re days from the summit.”

“This is our time,” Ferrari said.

“But … how will you eat?”

“You will chew my food for me.”

And that’s what they did. On February 23, 1976, after six days of hard climbing (and chewing), Ferrari and Meles became the first people to stand on the summit of the Pilar Este of Fitz Roy.

Is there a sport more fucked up than alpine climbing? Aside from the timed Yorkshire miner’s game where you put a ferret in your trousers (no underwear), seal the legs and allow the animal to bite and claw its way to daylight, I can think of no more self-absorbed and masochistic way to pass the time. Why do people do it? The usual explanations sound pretentious and cliché. Because it’s there. Because I’m here. To turn off the mind. To turn on to oneness. To feel fully alive. It all sort of smells like bullshit.   

And yet, I get it.  For the last eleven years I’ve been covering Alpinism as an editor for Rock and Ice, and I’ve written about the various instances of disasters, manslaughter, fistfights, lies, indiscretions, philandering, fornication, imbroglios and just plain crazy behavior that seems to follow those individuals intent on flinging themselves upon the active caldera of the high mountains.  I’ve also been climbing for forty years. And while most of the time I prefer sunny rock climbing, in winter I climb ice and at least once or twice a year I get the itch to climb something huge, cold and petrifying.

This past May, Corey Simpson, the PR and communications coordinator at the outdoor-apparel company Patagonia, invited me to Chamonix, France, to check out Patagonia’s new “Alpine Kit.” The junket was a “press trip;” a way for Patagonia to introduce new swag and hopefully garner some media coverage. In this case, the company was debuting a “core” product line, and editors from the leading international climbing publications were invited to meet with designers and athletes, listen to them talk about the kit, eat good food, drink a lot of alcohol, and climb every day for a week — all on YC’s tab. (YC is what the Patagonia crew calls their boss, Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder and the sawed-off mogul/curmudgeon known as Coonyard to his climbing buddies.) 

I usually decline these press trips because I live in Hawaii and I’d rather pack my ass with hot sand than travel by air these days. But it so happened that Corey’s invitation coincided with my seasonal yen to get into the mountains, and for dilettante Alpinists like myself, Chamonix is the perfect destination.

Located in the Haute-Savoie département of the Rhone Alps which claims the summit of Mont Blanc within its borders, Cham (as it’s known to sportsmen these days) is what Alpinist and author Mark Twight memorably dubbed the “Death Sport Capital of the World.” Twight was referring not only to climbers, but also to the cult of extreme athletes who come to Cham to throw themselves from its heights in wingsuits and paragliders or let kites drag them along while they ski. But ultimately, Cham is a climbers’ town, and it has been that way for a very long time. After all, Chamonix is the place that put the Alps into Alpinism.

In 1760, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a 20-year-old Swiss polymath with a keen interest in geology and botany, invented modern Alpinism when he walked through Chamonix and the surrounding parishes nailing up notices offering a “handsome reward” to the first person to climb Mont Blanc (15,777 feet) — and not to mention, carry up a few of Saussure’s instruments including his magnetometer, cyanometer, diaphanometer, anemometer, mountain eudiometer and hair hygrometer, among others.

Saussure was something of a geek. One of those Enlightenment-era geniuses, he was elected professor of philosophy at the Academy of Geneva when he was 22, and lectured in Latin on physics, logic and metaphysics. Politically radical, socially liberal, Saussure was also a serious climber who made the second ascent of Mont Blanc, hung out with Ben Franklin, and appeared in the form of a posthumous anecdote for Schopenhauer in his On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. “Saussure is reported to have seen so large a moon,” Schopenhauer wrote, “when it rose over Mont Blanc, that he did not recognize it and fainted with terror.”

Standing in the Place du Mont Blanc in front of the statue of Saussure with flakes of spring snow spooling down, it was easy to see why it took twenty-five years for anyone to claim the professor’s reward. From this vantage in the center of Chamonix, the mountain looks impenetrable. Blue glaciers tumble down from snow-draped scarps that guard heaped-up frosty heights bulging into threatening clouds.

Next to the copper Saussure stands the statue of another man, Jacques Balmat, whose outstretched arm and extended index finger point to the summit of Mont Blanc. Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard, both Chamoniardes, made the first ascent of Mont Blanc on August 8, 1786; a feat described by Alpine historian and explorer Eric Shipton as “one of the greatest in the annals of mountaineering.”

After the climb, Balmat was given the honorary title of “le Mont Blanc” by King Victor Amadeus III, and the acclaim seemed to go to his head. In his best-selling account of the climb, The First Ascent of Mont Blanc: A True Story, Balmat downplayed Paccard’s role. C. Douglas Milner, another historian, describes the book as “cloudily romantic and largely fictional;” a story that elevates the author and denigrates his partner. Perhaps that’s why there’s a condom rolled down the statue Balmat’s pointing finger? Because he was a dick. Or maybe everybody has forgotten Balmat’s lies and the condom is simply a long-standing prank with no provenance? I’ve heard the prophylactic has been there, off and on, since the 1950s.

On this late-season afternoon, Chamonix was an oil-and-water mix of wealthy après skiers just down from the slopes and impecunious, mainly British mountaineers prowling the narrow streets in clunky boots and spicy-smelling polypro. The skiers congregate at high-end bistros eating meat and cheese boiled in wine while the climbers all seem to wind up at the end of Avenue Michel Croz at a bar called Elevation 1904, gathering outside in the snow drinking Grimbergens like their guts are on fire.

The press trip had passed in a jetlagged haze; the kind where you feel like your face is pressed up against a wall of glass. You know there’s life happening on the other side of the glass. You can see people talking and having a good time, but on your side of the glass it’s 3 a.m.

YC’s people are clever. Corey, an amiable, earnest, good-looking, rather large-headed guy with a mop of shoulder-length hair and a neat beard who, I’m guessing, gets a lot of hugs, spirited away all the editors — all twenty-five of us — into the mountains outside Chamonix where he put us up in a chalet with no Internet. Thus sequestered, he had goons tie us up and prop our eyelids open with toothpicks while Kristo Torgersen, Christian Regester and Jimmy Forester delivered (what seemed like) four-hour spiels on insulation weights and the depth of jacket pockets. Finally, the beer came and they allowed us to blink.

One day they unlocked the chalet and outfitted all the editors in the new “Alpine kit.” Something like forty people dressed in the same bright orange jackets with robin’s-egg blue britches debouched and dispersed onto a broad white plane under a shoulder of the Aiguille des Grands Montets (13,524 feet) and divided up into teams of editors and athletes. I wound up climbing next to Marko Prezelj, a Slovenian super Alpinist who made the first ascent of the north face of the world’s sixth highest mountain, Cho Oyu, in 1988 and has been ripping it up with first ascents of high, difficult peaks ever since.

Prezelj’s face has a rocky angularity born of his freakish VO2 max and his time above 7,000 meters. Cool blue eyes with pinhole-sized pupils regarded the landscape like a wolf sizing up a herd of elk. He seemed positively delighted by the fog, wind and spindrift that whipped our faces like buckshot.

“This is good, no? I prefer real things.”

We all agreed with Marko.

About 500 feet up a system of easy, snowy cracks, I looked down and saw that Prezelj had climbed off-route and onto a steep, snow-plastered slab where he was balanced on his front points, reaching high with his axe, and clearing away the heavy wet snow. He then dragged his pick, the tip skipping along the surface of the stone till it hung up on a tiny lip. He locked off and front-pointed up and started clearing snow again; a slow, tenuous, dangerous process. With each move up, he was more committed. With a hundred feet of rope out and no protection, falling was out of the question. It occurred to me that Prezelj could have stayed in the low-angled crack to his left, but he’d purposely strayed, looking for something harder.

Standing there with the copper Saussure and Balmat, I thought about Marko’s choice, Ferarri’s broken teeth and Patagonia — both the Broom of God and the Alpine Kit. I looked out at Mont Blanc, glowing blue and merciless, and thought about how strange it was that, for over two and half centuries, people have been coming to these mountains to do something as pointless and painful as climbing. And every year more people pour into the heights — so many that apparel companies are now targeting “core Alpinists” as a market. This brings us back to the question of why we climb.

In his book The Gay Science, Schopenhauer’s contemporary Nietzsche, wrote about how suffering and pleasure complement one another. “Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms.”

I suspect the reason people climb is tied to this concomitant relationship between pain and joy. Every step up is a choice and an emphatic “yes” you whisper into your own ear. Somehow, because of some quirk in the human condition, Alpinism works a mysterious alchemy where suffering is transformed into bliss. You can’t reduce the motivation to a sound bite like “Because it’s there,”  as climbing, like all the real things — making love, raising kids, music and dan-cing — are beyond words. There is no rejoinder to a rhetorical “Why?” other than the simple, intrinsic reward of the thing itself.

Ask Casimiro Ferrari. Teeth splintered, nose busted, with nothing to look forward to but nights of throbbing pain in a wind-lashed tent eating chocolate that Meles had already chewed. He probably couldn’t tell you why he kept climbing, but he knew beyond doubt that going up felt better than going down. I took one last look at Saussure and Balmat and the bustle of Chamonix, and shouldered my new Patagonia pack. Dressed in the best Alpine kit money could buy, I walked toward the Téléphérique de l’Aguille du Midi. The press trip was over. It was time to stop thinking and start climbing.

 

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