It was summer 1938. Anderl Heckmair, Fritz Kasparek, Ludwig Vörg, and Heinrich Harrerreached the summit of the Eiger, in the Swiss Oberland, after completing the first climb of the north face in history. This meant that the last challenge in the Alps had been overcome, just as Heckmair would write in his book, The Three Last Problems of the Alps. The other two had been cracked during that same decade, and like the Eiger, they also came in the form of ice and rock: these were the north faces of Matterhorn and the Grandes Jorasses. The first was conquered by the Schmid brothers in 1931, and the second by Martin Meier and Rudolf Peters three years later. The pioneer who ascended the three north faces was the great French guide and mountaineer Gaston Rebuffat, between 1945 and 1952. Later, they were climbed in winter, solo, and at high speed – all three in just a few hours.
These days, climbing those walls is no great achievement, and they’ve been tackled with a whole range of combinations. But those rock cold faces of uncertain quality still inspire the dreams of thousands of mountaineers, year after year. Sometimes I wonder what drives these fantasies, and I’ve concluded that when you move through this terrain, imagining yourself at the top of the Eiger, you don’t just feel the attraction of the immense black wall, but also of all its history, the memory and fascination of everything you’ve read or heard. You’re not just conquering walls of rock and ice, but inside, you are accompanied by Heckmair’s experience, too. You see Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler climbing in just ten hours, revolutionizing mountaineering and the Alps. And you remember many more feats that you’ve dreamed of since you were a child. You don’t really know if you climb mountains because of their beauty, or if they are extraordinary for what they represent, always filtered through what you’ve read or been told.
In the liturgy of mountaineering, few walls have been praised as much as those three in the Alps, that were conquered in the 1930s. Even though I had already imagined climbing them when I was a boy, I had never decided to write in a notebook what it meant to fulfil this dream. Until one day by sheer coincidence I ran into Simón Elias on Mont Blanc.
Grandes Jorasses
Chamonix is the only city in the world where you can walk down the street calmly in ski boots and gore-tex in the middle of August when it’s thirty degrees, without feeling like an eccentric. It’s even occurred to me that there must be people who go to work at the office in jeans and a T-shirt, then put on their mountain boots after dinner and hang a rope round their neck as a prop, to out for few beers at the bar.
The first thing you see on arrival when you approach by road, is a sign saying “Chamonix Mont Blanc,” with a second line below, “La capitale mondiale de l’alpinisme.” It is also known by other names, like the one invented by the American climber Mark Twight, who called it “The World Capital of Death.” We could also name it world capital of ego per square meter, since the city is home, either permanently or for long stretches, to the best specialists of all mountain-related disciplines. From downhill cycling to climbing, not forgetting base jumping, parachuting, trail running, ice climbing, extreme skiing, and a long list of etceteras.
Chamonix was the departure point for the first ascent of Most Blanc in 1786, the feat that gave birth to mountaineering. It was also the town where the mountain guide profession first emerged. With time, Chamonix has adapted to cater to every imaginable mountain activity. Chair lifts, cable cars and shelters a have been built in the city center, so you can plant yourself in just a few minutes on any rock, snow or ice wall, or in areas where you can fly off in any direction possible. A system has been created for accessing weather and topographical information on routes that’s unique in the world, and the rescue service is flawless.
Evidently, all this has made Chamonix the world university of mountain sports, and the city attracts countless people ready to practice at the highest level possible, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Here, unusual sports are people’s daily bread, which creates a mixture of creativity, inflated egos, and cemeteries full of dreamers.
And among these enormous egos was mine, living for years in a valley where last names like Charlet or Terray were more famous than the Kennedys, where social hierarchy was determined by the difficulty of the routes you’d climbed, and the distinguished elite could be spotted by the silver badge always pinned to their gore-tex or the visor of their baseball caps on the hottest days, when it was ok to leave your jacket at home.
Suffice it to say that, concealed by the dead of night, a few daring counterrevolutionaries hung up some radical signs on the walls of some of the city’s landmarks that said, “What’s the difference between God and a mountain guide? God isn’t a guide.” But joking aside, the Chamonix valley is a unique microcosm and a world closed in on itself, like most of the people who live there.
In this parallel world of chosen ones, where the valley’s real problems, like its enormous pollution, were swept under the carpet of the circus of daily activities and records, I lived and had carved out a space for myself, though I was far from the city’s center and from its social life. In the almost ten years I lived there, I can count the number of friends I made on one hand, and I might only need one more finger to count the days I went into the mountains when I wasn’t alone. In any case, in that mountain paradise, I had all the space and desire I needed to progress.
It was late June, the days were long, and the anticyclone that had been with us for weeks seemed to be happy where it was and to have no intention of leaving. I was grateful to be spending more time above four thousand meters than at home. And of course, every day I ran into hundreds of mountaineers, and those ineffable guides who accompany their clients and help them achieve their dream. Since I’d been living there for years, the hostility I’d first encountered as I ran up Mont Blanc or climbed one of the ridges of Bassin du Tour, when they looked me up and down disdainfully, and sometimes even insulted me for my way of ascending their mountains, were becoming a thing of the past.
One of the guides I ran into often was Simón Elías. He was from La Rioja and had been based in the valley for years, where he alternated the whirlwind of the tourist season when he worked, with the months when Chamonix became a ghost town, when he fled to remote mountain ranges and tried to open up new climbing routes. For example, the north face of Meru in the Himalayas, or the east face of the Cerro Torre in Patagonia. I’d known him a while, and not just from what I read in magazines about his well-deserved recognition. I met him after running my first Pierra Menta, though I was in the junior category, when I went to spend four days with other members of the Centro de Tecnificación Nacional in Chamonix, learning four basic safety concepts, such as what to do if a companion falls into a crevice, or how to rope yourself up to ski on a glacier. We were a dozen excited teenagers, some with our vanity through the roof after stepping down from the podium at Pierra Menta. You know, teenage endorphins. . .
As chance had it, Simón was our guide and coach. On the first day, we took a cable car to Aiguille du Midi, at three thousand eight hundred meters. To begin with, it was a mistake not to force us to go on foot, since this would have worn us out a little and given us some lactic acid in our legs, and a lower endorphin level. We left the cabin like famished lions who’d just spotted a herd of wounded gazelles. Once we reached the snow, as we put on our skis, Simón tried in his well-intentioned way to explain the key points for skiing a glacier. But we thought we were so smart, and we didn’t listen. We just waited impatiently for him to give us a starting signal and competed among ourselves to see who got down first. As soon as Simón gave the order, the stampede began. All of us set out downhill in a straight line, leaning back to keep our balance and feel the snow going by a few centimeters below our asses. And yes, we threw all the safety rules the instructor had explained just a few minutes earlier to the wind. We went down the Vallée Blanche glacier without making a single turn – very good, all parallel – entrusting ourselves to God each time a crevice approached, and instead of braking, trying to pick up more speed to jump over it, watching our companion out of the corner of our eye and waiting for him to separate, brake, and get left behind. And meanwhile, Simón watched that embarrassing spectacle in terror and astonishment, following us at a distance and begging us loudly to stop acting like idiots.
We hadn’t crossed paths again until I moved to Chamonix. Then, we met in the mountains often, and though we didn’t talk a lot, we wanted to plan some activity that represented a challenge for both of us: for Simón, because of the speed and resistance, and for me, because of the technical difficulty. But the interest we showed on the mountain vanished when we came back down to the valley, where each of us faced the reality of a packed schedule, and as the days went by we couldn’t find a single free one to spend together.
That Monday in late June, Vivian Bruchez, Seb Montaz, and I had been skiing a new route on the east face of Mont Maudit. When we got back to the car around midday, I saw that Simón had sent me a text that said: “Hey dude, do you feel like doing the Grandes Jorasses on Thursday?” I looked at my schedule. The next day, Tuesday, I had a photo session with a sponsor, on Wednesday I’d arranged to go out with Karl Egloff in his attempt of FKT at Mont Blanc, and Friday afternoon I was competing in the Chamonix vertical kilometer. But on Thursday I was free, so I quickly answered yes. Simón’s idea was very simple: climb a mountain like people used to. In other words, run and walk from Chamonix to the foot of a wall neither of us knew, climb a technical route – the Colton-McIntyre – up to the summit, and go down the other face to Courmayeur.
Simón and me are polar opposites: he smokes and drinks, I’ve never smoked in my life and alcohol doesn’t appeal to me at all; he likes the atmosphere of the city and crowds make me panic; he’s crazy about difficult climbs and I’m crazy about movement; he enjoys taking people up mountains every day and I’m obsessed with being alone; he thinks sport is a curse, and I can’t live without training. Despite our differences in lifestyle, we shared a great passion for the mountains. We had found a small area we agreed on, and we faced it with the excitement of children trying out a new toy.
After dinner on Wednesday, we’d arranged to meet in the Montenvers parking lot to choose the equipment we were going to take with us. With our backpacks full, and guided by head lamps, we began our ascent walking up forest paths where I often ran. When we left the protection of the trees, a magnificent spectacle unfurled before us: on that pale night, the starlight shone and lit up the faces of the peaks around us. The Grandes Jorasses awaited us, covered in a film of intense and dazzling whiteness. Was this a sign that the snow was hard and we could climb up quickly and safely, or was it a fresh, inconsistent, powdery snow that scarcely covered the rocks? With this doubt internalized, we went on across the Mer de Glace, a snowfield that was once a kilometer in size, but has gradually lost hundreds of cubic meters each year, and now wears an oversized name, since it would be more fitting to call it a tongue or a pool of ice. In one of the streams that cross the snowfield, we stocked up on water – a liter for Simón and half a liter for me. That should be enough to get us to the other side of the mountain.
When we reached the foot of the wall, the shadow of twelve hundred meters of rock enveloped us in thick darkness. In the middle of the night, in a place like that, our feeling of smallness and insignificance became even more intense. We lost a few hours going up and down the base of the wall, dotted with spurs and channels, looking for the route we wanted to use to go up. In the end, just as it began to get light, we found the blue ice slopes that allowed us to start the ascent at a good pace up to the first third of the wall. When day had set in, a cold air peeled the sleep from our eyes, suddenly reminding us that we were right in the middle of the north face. When the difficult part began, the climb was much more static, since we were starting to belay each other and a bitter cold seeped into our bones. Meanwhile, we imagined the runners in tank tops at the bottom of the valley, and the climbers suffocating from heat on the sunny walls.
“Damn it, Simón, yesterday was so great. . . with the warmth of the sun, over four thousand meters, climbing all day in our T-shirts, and with those amazing views. . . why the fuck do we always have to go somewhere cold?” I grumbled sarcastically.
“Yeah, we could have been getting tanned and handsome down south, and here we are, quaking with cold and fear. But if you look at in another way, if this weather refreshes our bodies, imagine how it’ll refresh our souls!”
Simón had the gift of words, of succinct and spot-on answers – a gift that, if you have it, makes you the king of dinner parties. Not long ago I had read his book, Bisexual Mountain Climbing, a sharp and entertaining collection of writing, though I can tell you completely sincerely that what grabbed my attention in the bookstore was its cover. It was an amateur photoof the author himself, skinny, with hairy legs and a beard and long hair that fell into his face, stark naked except for a thong and some climbing boots, striking a pose like an eighties porn actor. And all this, for the love of God, in the middle of a Patagonian glacier, with all his climbing equipment and food in what looks like a bivouac scattered around him. Pure dynamite.
He contemplates everything he does through a satirical lense, and says that his work as a mountain guide is very unique, since it consists of putting people in danger in order to save them. As I spend time with him, I understand his passion for what he does, and the way he manages to convey his feelings at each moment as he climbs, with barely any need for explanations. And how he preserves his authentic mountaineer spirit, explaining to his clients that what matters isn’t to reach the summit, but what you experience along the way, whether or not you achieve your goal.
Simón tells me that his book is an “ode to failure,” since “in mountain climbing there are so many heroic tales about epic ascents and life or death challenges to reach a summit, but we all know that ninety-nine percent of the time you don’t actually reach the summit. There’s no heroism, because that’s not what mountain climbing is about. It’s bisexual, it’s about optimizing all the resources available, and usually ending up not setting foot on the summit, but that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Quite the opposite.”
We continue our climb and the words we exchange are brief. If one of us belays the other,we exchange the occasional comment about the beauty of our surroundings or the difficulty of the stretch we’ve just climbed, and with no further ado, we pass each other the equipment, and separate again. When we climb with a tense rope, advancing at the same time, with sixty meters of rope between us, we communicate via the cord that connects us. If the rope stops, that means it’s a difficult stretch; if it goes backward, it means we’re going the wrong way; if it advances slowly, we’re tired, if it’s getting tugged at, either we’ve arrived somewhere, or we need to move more slowly.
Climbing with Simón, I feel at ease. Although we want to move steadily and not waste any time, he doesn’t hesitate to look for the best placement for each protection, and when I hear him huff and puff because he can’t find the route, he soon finds a way to move forward, calmly and with a smile on his face.
Ten hours after we begin the climb, the sun skims our faces as we reach the summit, and we have to strip down quickly due to the heat coming up from the south. We could have done with a little of this to melt the thin layer of snow that hid the path and made the climb so difficult all morning!
Suddenly, our bodies relax in the heat, knowing that the most difficult part is over. The first thing to loosen up is our stomachs. “Ouch, what a belly ache!” We look at each other, and,sure that there’s no one for miles around, we take down our pants and empty out all the doubts that have been with us through the night and into the morning.
“Have you ever taken a shit with a better view?”
And we both burst out laughing as we gaze at the Alps from on high.
Summer ran its course and as usual, after the twenty-three hours our shared expedition lasted, each of us went back to our schedules, erasing events as we achieved them. And we couldn’t find a single page with a gap for any of the expeditions we’d planned as we went down to Courmayeur, on the trail of the scent of the pizzas awaiting us.
The next day, Simón put his mountain guide uniform back on, and with the same calm and patience as ever, kept teaching lessons of love for the mountains to hundreds of clients wanting to climb mountains like Mont Blanc. All of them learned so much that in the end they knew the summit they’d been chasing wasn’t what mattered most. Maybe guides like Simón do have godlike qualities, since they can light the way for others through their love of themountains, and initiate them into this path of sacrifice and fulfilment.
For my part, the day after sharing that truly amazing experience with Simón, I put a number on my back and went on with my usual procession of summer events.
Eiger
I’m lost in the narrow streets of Ringgenberg, a tiny town near Interlaken, Switzerland, still full of rural charm and the smell of nature. Unlike the neighboring villages and stations in France, it hasn’t become overcrowded, and its inhabitants haven’t massacred the architecture. The streets are all paved with cobblestones and the houses are built from polished, round logs. The houses have a maximum of two stories, and all of the windows and balconies are bursting with flowers of many colors and not a single wilted petal to spoil the effect. Water flows abundantly from the fountain in the central plaza, and old men spend the afternoons sitting on benches and chatting.
I’ve been past the fountain twice, and haven’t found the house I’m looking for. In the end, I stopped the car and rolled the window down to ask an old man, “Excuse me, do you know where Ueli Steck lives?” I can’t quite understand the answer he gives in Swiss German, but I can decipher his gestures well enough to be satisfied.
I reach the door to Ueli’s house, call him, and he comes out to tell me where to park. We jump into gear and ten minutes are enough to get all the equipment we need ready to climb the north face of the Eiger the following morning. When we’re done, we have a dish of pasta with parmesan for dinner.
The first time I heard any mention of Ueli Steck was around 2007, when I read in a magazine that he’d done the climb we were about to repeat in less than four hours. The next year, he destroyed his own record by climbing it in less than three. Compared with that, what we were getting ready to do was just some simple training. I, on the other hand, was overwhelmed by a mixture of excitement and respect. I was also afraid of looking ridiculous next to a man who’d scaled the wall we were about to climb thirty-nine times.
A few weeks earlier, we had met in the Himalayas. I had twelve days of vacation between the end of the trail running season and a trip to present products for a sponsor in Southeast Asia, and I took the chance to take a recreational trip to the Khumbu, the Nepalese region home to emblematic mountains like Everest, Lhotse and Ama Dablam. I stopped in Katmandu for a few hours to process my trekking permits, took a flight straight to Lukla, and as soon as I arrived, set off running with my small backpack that had everything I needed to spend a long week in the mountains. After a few days in the valleys of Gokyo and on the summit of Lobuche, I reached Chukhung, the last village in the valley that leads to the south faces of Lhotse and Nuptse, at an altitude of almost five thousand meters. I went straight to the Pemba lodge, which I knew from my other trips, and when I walked into the dining room I saw Ueli Steck and Hélias Millerioux. They told me they’d already been there a while, acclimating and waiting for the right conditions to try to climb the south face of Nuptse Alpine style, and meanwhile, they were taking advantage of the opportunity to run and climb in the surrounding area.
I like Khumbu for the training facilities it has to offer. You can do six and seven thousand meter mountains like in the Alps, climbing three or four thousand. The villages are five thousand meters high and have everything you need to live and to train: beds with blankets, rooms with fireplaces to shelter from the cold nights, plenty of food, and even, if you’re in Dingboche, delicious chocolate croissants straight out of a wood-fired oven.
One day, I go out with Hélias y Ueli, and we go up in sneakers to the foot of one of the unnamed six thousand meter peaks nearby. We reach the snow, put on our crampons and start to climb a sharp, rocky ridge with incredible views of the immense wall of rock that forms the south face of Lhotse and Nuptse. Makalu is right beside us, and we’re surrounded by hundreds of slender pyramids of snow. We reach the highest point, and after a brief pause begin to descend the side in the shade. Since we didn’t bring any rope, we keep a good distance from each other as we descend, to avoid throwing snow on top of each other. I follow Ueli’s footprints, amazed at how he can get through with just one ice-axe. I take my second ice-axe out of my backpack and climb down to the glacier. I catch up with him and while we wait for Hélias, he asks me if I’ve ever been to Grindelwald, Switzerland. I tell him I haven’t. He wants to know if I’ve ever climbed the Eiger. I tell him no. He suggests that we do it one day. I say yes.
The next day, I have to leave in a rush to catch the plane that will take me to Kuala Lumpur. After a few days of roaming around enormous Asian cities, I return to a regular autumn in the French station of Tignes, where I make the most of the snow and altitude to start skiing and do as much as I need to before the snow arrives near home. We call this “doing the hamster” on the ski slopes – up and down, up and down, without getting off the wheel, tediously counting the hours and the meters.
One of those days, on my way back from training, when I’d completely forgotten about Ueli, I receive a messaged from him. “Hi, conditions look great on Eiger, I’m free tomorrow.” Wow! I glance up from my phone and quickly assess what’s scattered around in my car: some crampons, an ice-axe, and a light harness. “This won’t be enough. Luckily Chamonix is nearby and I’ll be able to stock up on everything I need.”
While most people I’ve gone into the mountains with had a hard time taking unnecessary items out of their backpack to lighten their load, with Ueli it was the opposite. After packing up a thirty-meter rope with some quickdraws, a couple of ice-screws and half a liter of water, our twenty-liter backpacks were half empty and we wondered what we were forgetting. What took the longest was deciding which boots and crampons to take. When I went to the Grandes Jorasses with Simón, I wore some waterproof sneakers whose flexibility made the approach more pleasant, but which, when I added the rigid crampons, stayed relatively firm for climbing on ice. This saved me having to lug heavy climbing boots around in my backpack. Though the invention worked and gave me ideas for designing some new footwear prototypes, I did suffer on the steepest ice slopes from a lack of stability in my feet. Ueli wanted to see how that invention would work on the Eiger, but in the end, we decided it would be better to take light sneakers and climbing boots in our backpacks until we started climbing. The crampon-sneaker concept would have to wait until some other time.
The next day we leave early. We set our running across the fields, and the cows hold it against us, since they’ve been sleeping in peace until now. Though Ueli knows these trails as if he’d grown up running along them, he’d never set out running from Grindelwald to climb the Eiger, since there’s a cog railway than can take you to the foot of the wall. His passion comes from when he used to do technical climbing, attempting increasingly difficult walls and opening up new routes. When he looked at a mountain, what he really saw was the wall, the straightest part; the rest of the mountain held no special interest. Despite his preferences, when I suggested we set out running from town, he was excited.
We run up at a good pace, and as we adjust to the day’s rhythm, we continue our conversation from the night before. When Ueli asks me about training and nutrition for long-distance races, I take refuge in the certainty of my answers to get the uncertainty of what will happen later off my mind, when I trade the comfort of a sixty-degree slope for the challenges of a vertical climb. Ueli wants to know if our pace is good, and I tell him not to worry, that he’s a great runner, that many professional runners would love to have his twenty-second place in the OCC, the UTMB’s fifty-kilometer sister race.
“Don’t you believe it,” he answers. “I got there an hour after Marc Pinsach, the guy who came first, at eighteen percent of his time. I’m not a runner, but I want to train to get faster, and I also want to run hundred-kilometer races.”
I can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s imagining what that could bring to his future mountain projects, and I encourage him, saying that judging by how he’s running on this trailnow, it won’t be hard for him to do long distance if he applies himself and trains well.
“You know what?” he continues. “I don’t buy it, that idea that you can improve just by climbing and doing mountains. A lot of mountain climbers just climb and don’t train. If they have some free time, to give you an example, they use it to do an interesting climb, but it doesn’t even occur to them to go running or go to the gym, and they don’t do any anaerobic exercise. I know if I want to achieve all the projects I have in mind, I need to train really hard in all those activities so I can be successful at the riskiest, most difficult climbs.”
It’s not easy to find someone like Ueli, not just among mountain climbers, but among athletes in general, who takes disciplined training so seriously. Every day of the year, he follows the guidelines of an Olympic trainer, and it’s interesting to observe the similarities and differences between his activity and my own.
“What I do is divide the season into stages,” I tell him. “but since every year my goals are scheduled around the same time – skiing from January to April, running from May to September – it’s easy to set up a routine. That way I already know in advance that fall is when I need to focus on volume, and the beginning of winter I need to work on intensity, and I keep going like that, following the blocks I’ve set up.”
“I train in blocks, too,” he explains, “but they’re not fixed by the time of year. Instead, I set them depending on what I’m working toward at the time. For example, if my goal is to go to California and free climb El Capitán, I do a few specific months of strength training and sport climbing beforehand, with a week of distance training in between, so I don’t lose any muscle mass. If the goal is a huge wall in the Himalayas, I spend a block focusing on resistance training, with a lot of slopes with easy terrain, and a few weeks of technical training mixed in.”
In any case, Ueli is a guy who trains for twelve hundred hours a year, a figure like those of cross-country skiing or cycling world champions. Just like my terrain for doing the hamster in autumn is the ski slopes of Tignes, Ueli pays homage to that cute little metaphorical animal on the north face of the Eiger.
We’re talking so much that we almost don’t notice we’ve arrived at the foot of the wall. It’s taken us just over two hours to get here. I look up for the first time since we left, and allow myself to be intimidated by the eighteen hundred meters of black rock. Despite being the smaller of the three mountains in the massif, the Eiger is the most feared. It stands beside two other peaks, each of which – the Jungfrau (virgin) and the Mönch (monk) – inspire respect. The name of the mountain in front of me doesn’t lie: the Eiger – the ogre.
We take off our sneakers and put on our boots and crampons. Without wasting any more time at the foot of the wall, we begin to climb up some relatively easy sheets of rock, and after passing some steep patches of snow, we reach the half-way point. This is where the real difficulties begin. With a little imagination, if we wanted to go down now, we could ski. With a little imagination, I repeat. But now, on our way up, everything is vertical.
We rope ourselves a few meters apart and keep climbing together, placing the occasional protection when the terrain is more vertical. Meter by meter, the anxiety of not being able to climb with skill starts to disappear, and I get caught up in enjoying myself and feeling playful. Our path is very long, almost three kilometers, and we traverse the wall from right to left for numerous stretches, on terrain where the difficulties never last long. Small ledges of twenty orthirty vertical meters of ice or rock give way to simpler snowy slopes, which, hanging over the void, give you an intimidating sense of exposure.
The two of us are alone on the wall, and though we have to start opening a trail, Ueliknows it so well that he doesn’t hesitate for a moment which way to go, and as we press forward,he shows me the routes he’s already climbed.
“Here’s Jeff Lowe’s Metanoia route. I tried it a few years ago. And there are Patience and The Young Spider, which I established myself years ago.”
“Ueli, is there anything you haven’t done on this wall?”
“Oof, a whole lot of things. . . even if I did a wall a day, I’m in my forties now and I’m getting old, so I see them all with different eyes. Look, even today: I’d never set out running from Grindelwald to climb up here.”
“Maybe one day you should try skiing down from here,” I say to rib him, knowing he isn’t a fan of skiing.
“Well, I’ve never done it with skis, but I did a couple of descents to train for Annapurna.”
“What. . . ?” I let slip in amazement. “But. . . But. . . that wall is already pretty hard to climb up, and getting down is even more complicated on technical terrain!”
“Well, I wanted to make sure I could climb back down a technical stretch and on a large wall, so I’d have the resources and confidence when I went to the Himalayas. That’s why I thought a good way to train would be to go up the west face, the easiest one, and climb down the north face, which I know from memory and can do with my eyes closed.”
I was so amazed to hear him talk such nonsense that I couldn’t even think of an answer.He kept talking about this and that, saying that actually the south face of Annapurna wasn’t any more difficult than this wall, and was therefore easy to climb down. Incredible. I try to absorb what he’s just told me as we keep climbing.
In fact, a couple of years earlier, when Ueli completed a solitary climb with two thousand meters of wall on the south face of Annapurna, ending at 8,901 meters, the whole world was stunned. That wall presents enormous difficulties, and the altitude implies additional obstacles. He climbed it alone and in a single twenty-eight hour burst. A few weeks later, the French mountain climbers Stéphane Benoist and Yannick Graziani did the same route. It took them ten days from start to finish and there were many complications due to the altitude and cold, which eventually led to the amputation of four fingers.
Ueli’s account of his climb was jaw-dropping.
“While I climbed, I was completely detached from the world. Nothing existed except the climb. The idea of past or future had disappeared, and I was just in the here and now. A stab with the ice-axe, then another, one step, then another. All I could see was the ice-axes penetrating the snow and ice. My vision narrowed. There I was, in the middle of a gigantic wall, with very little equipment. I felt light but very exposed. I knew if I made a mistake, no matter how small, I’d be dead. And despite all that, I wasn’t afraid I would make a mistake. I gave myself orders. I was in control of the person climbing the south face of Annapurna. I didn’t feel myself. If that person fell, it wouldn’t bother me. Because the future didn’t exist.”
He practically experienced the beyond. Before setting out, he’d accepted that his path only went in one direction. He’d accepted that he might end up dead. Once he made it down alive and kicking, a void took hold of his spirit, the kind of void that fills everything when you’re convinced you’ve reached a limit you’ll never be able to top. When you have experienced the limit.
Ueli had to deal with criticism from people who cast doubt on his feat since he couldn’t document it with photos. “Oh, I’m sorry, all night climbing, dodging the wind and the rockfalls without my camera because I lost it in a little avalanche on the wall.” Within the professional community, no one had any doubt about his climb, and he was awarded the Golden Ice-Axe, the prize for the best mountain climbing activity of the year. Even so, for a while he was bothered by the criticisms and lack of understanding.
“But what does anyone know about what it means to solo climb a wall like that?” he said. “How can they imagine the decisions I made if they’ve never climbed in such an exposed situation?”
Every once in a while, this happens: when someone imagines and goes through with something the whole world believes impossible, rather than feeling inspired, many people shut off in denial. It’s easier to say no than to recognize your own limits.
But all wounds heal with time. At least, that’s what they say. Ueli had gotten his motivation back by doing all the peaks over 4,000 meters in the Alps in a row, climbing in the Himalayas again, and training to improve in other areas. No matter how many times he tells me, I can’t believe what he promised his wife: that he would never solo climb an extremely difficult route again. As we climb, he constantly observes the wall’s conditions and talks enthusiastically about different strategies, telling me his ideas for lighter materials, or for getting food and drink more efficiently in order to pick up the pace.
“Even though I told Nicole I wouldn’t,” he says, “I can climb the Eiger fast and without any risk.”
Today, the weather is fantastic. There isn’t even a shred of wind, and it’s warm – bearing in mind that we’re on a north face and almost four thousand meters up. This means we can climb in a jacket and gloves, and fully enjoy the ascent. It’s priceless to watch Ueli move around this terrain. He looks like he’s ascending along a flat path. I watch him assess the ice quality, noticing how easily he carries out all the movements. I try to absorb everything I see and everything he explains. This is my favorite kind of mountain, because the difficulties demand concentration and present a certain amount of risk, but they aren’t so huge that you have to stop and climb one at a time so as not to slip up at any step. In a couple of more complicated stretches, Ueli belaysme by running the rope around my back, and we keep climbing at a good pace until we reach thefinal crevices, where he practically breaks into a run, even though the terrain is still tricky. I follow him as best I can, a few meters behind, with the rope nice and taut. I copy his movements but have no time to see where to put my hands and feet. Ice-axe on ice, crampon on rock, ice-axe on rock, crampon on ice. After a while, we find ourselves on the highest ridge.
Two thousand meters below, in the green fields, the cows we annoyed this morning are grazing peacefully. It’s midday, just seven hours after we left Grindelwald, and start headingdown the other side of the mountain. For me, today’s climb has been a first-class experience, but for Ueli it’s just part of his regular training. I’m grateful to him for this masterclass in mountain climbing. It takes us less than two hours to get down the east face, and we pass in front of the cable car. We put our sneakers back on and take off running toward the car. It’s been ten hours since we left it. I buy a couple of drinks and some cookies. We scarf them up and exchange some equipment. He puts on some shorts and heads off to a rock wall in the Interlaken area to do some sport climbing. I’m going to Tignes. I’ll have time for another ascent in the afternoon.
Four days go by, packed with intense training. I get another text message from Ueli: “Today it was great conditions. 2 hours 22 minutes ;).”
Cervino / Matterhorn
I go up and down glaciers and count the days in thousands of meters. Since I came back from the Eiger, an idea has gotten into my head and keeps growing as I rack up training hours, almost of its own accord. The weather has been good for a week, and cold, which means the mountain conditions are probably still good for climbing. After everything I learned from Simón in June, and from Ueli a few days ago, I’d like to complete my personal trilogy by putting it into practicefor myself. For me, solo climbing is the most direct and authentic. It’s just you, with you doubts and fears. You write your destiny with your decisions alone.
I go back to the apartment with tired legs after spending the morning training. I glance at the weather forecast. I see on Google Maps that it’s five hours to Zermatt, at the foot ofMatterhorn. That sounds about right. I let the friends I train with know that they shouldn’t wait for me the next day. I load up the truck with everything I need. The road ends in Täsch. I make a little pasta with olive oil and go straight to sleep.
Dawn comes, and I drive to Zermatt, where I still see a few tourists looking like zombies, wandering around on the verge of a drunken coma, trying to find the hotel where they’ve booked a thousand-euro room for the night. I drive through the streets, and stop at the exit to thePatrouille des Glaciers. This time, there aren’t two thousand runners behind me and I don’t feel the excitement of having to compete, but I breathe in the same energy, now that I’m leaving town to head toward the valleys.
At midmorning, I reach the Hörnli refuge, where I drink some water and eat the four cookies I’ve brought. As I change from sneakers to boots, I notice that no one has stayed in the free refuge overnight. This means there won’t be any rope teams up where I’m headed. Without wasting any time, I set out to look for the foot of the wall. The temperature is good. Not so cold that I’ll have a rough time, and not so warm that detached rocks or ice will give me any trouble.
I head up the sixty-degree slope of snow and ice. I’m doing well and can move quickly, almost running along this terrain, and I feel comfortable. When I get to the foot of the ramp, a kind of rock and ice gully, I’m surprised to see that it’s completely dry and I have some doubts. It’s going to be tougher than I thought. “But that’s what I came for, right? So I’d have to make decisions like this one. . .” I decide to keep going. I’m carrying a thin thirty-meter rope and some equipment I could leave behind, or that would be helpful if I had to rappel down or belay myself in case I decide to keep going. I decide to start climbing up the ramp, placing the ice-axes and crampons delicately in the cracks in the black schist. After about a hundred relatively easy meters, I come upon a more vertical chimney formation. I climb a couple of meters, but I can’t see how to position myself to keep going safely, and if I look down, I realize the fall would be. . . No, falling isn’t an option. I climb down a few meters until I find a well-placed piton. I reinforce it by hammering it further in with an ice-axe, and when it seems firm, I take the rope from my backpack and tie one of the ends to my harness, thread the rope through the hole in the piton, and tie the rope back onto the harness with a slip knot. I give myself more rope as I climb, and hope the piton will be able to resist the jolt if I fall. If not, I figure the twenty or thirty meter drop wouldn’t do too me much harm and I could either climb back up or back down. So I measure my pace as if I weren’t in a harness. Little by little, the stress diminishes. I pick the rope back up and keep climbing up the ramp, which now, finally, starts to have ice beneath a layer of powdery snow. At least now I can drive my crampons and ice-axes into something that makes me feel safe.
Three hours later, I emerge onto the ridge near the summit. It’s been an intense climb and has taken maximum concentration, and when I leave the wall I feel a rush of adrenaline as the energy leaves my body.
The days are short in fall, and it’s mid-afternoon by the time I reach the metal cross that someone has planted at the summit of Matterhorn. I look down and see the shadow beginning to lengthen over the valleys. I wish it were summer so I could see the clean ridges without snow. A couple of years ago, I took only fifty-six minutes to get down to the town of Cervinia from this spot. Now, it looks it will be much longer and trickier, since it’s covered in ice and snow and there are no markers indicating which path to take for a quick descent.
I climb down cautiously, as the shadow of Matterhorn lengthens toward the east, casting an immense arrow that shows me which way to go. I’m trapped by the night. I turn on my head lamp and look for a better path. The terrain on the ridge isn’t complicated, but it is exposed, and in these conditions I can’t go jumping from rock to rock, even though I feel safe and I’m going at a good pace.
Suddenly, I feel my right crampon catch on something on my left leg. My body slowly lurches forward, I try to free my foot to step ahead but it’s caught on my pants. There’s nothing I can do. My body plunges into the void and I turn upside down. I feel the first impact when I land on my shoulders, then tumble down even further into the darkness. I can’t see myself. The second blow hits me on the back.
I’ve been convinced I was living the last seconds of my life on two occasions. That was the first. I thought everything was ending right there. As I fell, all I could do was murmur “Shit!”in a low voice, as if not wanting to disturb anyone, but angry at myself. I thought of nothing except compacting my body to resist the impact however I could, and with my arms outstretched,I struggled to try to grab onto something to avoid what seemed inevitable.
With one of those movements, my arm got trapped between some rocks and I managed to break my fall. I got up as best I could. My whole body was shaking, and I was breathing heavily from adrenaline. I couldn’t decide whether to scream at the top of my lungs, or whether I wanted to merge with my surroundings and completely disappear. After taking a minute to recover from the fright, I did a quick check of my injuries. My elbow had suffered the first blow and was semi-dislocated, but since that was nothing new for me I quickly clicked it back in place. My legs had been hit a number of times and I had a small wound, right where the crampon that tore my right pant leg had got caught. None of this seemed too serious, so I could keep going down. With the first few steps, I noticed my legs were shaking, and I dropped my butt to the ground to move forward with small steps. Gradually, I got back to a normal pace.
Ten and a half hours after setting out, I was back in Zermatt. I bought a slice of pizza in a supermarket to eat on my way back to Tignes.
