True Summit (28 page)

Terray had severely sprained his right elbow. There was no choice but to descend to Base Camp. Several days later, his right arm useless, Terray watched his teammates head back up the mountain. For the first time ever, he faced the prospect of lingering impotent in the rear, while his companions completed a first ascent. As he later wrote in the
American Alpine Journal:

All morning, sick at heart, I watch my friends climb. Rarely in my entire life have I felt so lonely and so miserable. I have not even the will to prepare lunch. During the night I can scarcely sleep, but by morning I have made up my mind.

Terray's resolve was to climb the mountain one-handed. Pulling on his ascending device with his good left hand, he hauled himself brutally up the fixed ropes to Camp I to join his comrades.

On May 25, Jacques Batkin and Sylvain Sarthou stood on top of Huntington. The next day, the other six members followed their track to the summit. As on Makalu, the whole team had collaborated in a first ascent that saw every member top out.

Terray felt a sense of despondency as he headed down. “On this proud and beautiful mountain,” he later wrote, “we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and really been men. It is hard to return to servitude.”

B
Y
1965, D
ON
J
ENSEN AND
I had begun to think of ourselves as Alaska veterans, even though we were only twenty-two. Despite our failure on the east ridge of Mount Deborah the previous summer,
we set our sights on an equally difficult objective for our third expedition. Bradford Washburn had become our mentor. In the inner sanctum of his office atop the Boston Museum of Science (which Washburn had founded), I spent long hours leafing through his thirty years' worth of aerial photos of Alaskan mountains.

By February, Don and I had settled on Mount Huntington as our challenge. Terray's team had beaten us to the first ascent, but in Washburn's pictures we had found a plausible route on the mountain's west face. It would require landing on the Tokositna Glacier, where no one had ever been, and it looked harder than anything yet climbed in Alaska, but we were at the apogee of youthful ambition.

In bad French, I wrote to Jacques Soubis, the author of the article on Huntington's first ascent that had appeared in
La Montagne et Alpinisme.
He was generous with advice and encouragement, informing us that Terray's team had considered only the northwest and east ridges as likely routes on Huntington, but that he would hesitate to call the west face—however grim it looked—impossible.

On Deborah, Don and I had realized that a two-man party was stretching the odds too thin in Alaska. For Huntington, we recruited a pair of younger Harvard climbers, Matt Hale and Ed Bernd. Relatively inexperienced, they seemed daunted by Don's and my ambition, but they could hardly say no to so heady an invitation.

By that year, Don's and my identification with Terray and Lachenal had become full-blown. On Huntington, however, it was Terray who seemed an almost tangible presence. We had all but memorized his article in the
American Alpine Journal.
Over and over again, Don would quote his favorite line from that account: “It is not the goal of
grand alpinisme
to face peril, but it is one of the tests one must undergo to deserve the joy of rising for an instant above the state of crawling grubs.” Like the French, we built a snow cave for our Base Camp. As the bad weather raged outside, I would cite another of Terray's lines: “I have read somewhere that in this range the big storms can last for eight or ten consecutive days.” (On Deborah and McKinley, we had sat out several interminable tempests.)

There was a kind of adolescent hubris in comparing ourselves
to Terray. We knew in our hearts that, as alpinists, we weren't in the same league with the French master. None of us, in fact, would ever climb in the Himalaya or the Andes. But in this one part of the world we had chosen as our specialty—the Alaska Range—we dared to believe that at the height of our twenty-two-year-old powers we might match the recent deed of a forty-three-year-old veteran who had confessed in his autobiography, “My own scope must now go back down the scale.”

After a month of discouragements and setbacks, we climbed the west face, arriving all four on top at 3:30
A.M.
on July 29. Our triumph was short-lived: only twenty hours later, as Ed and I descended in the dark, a rappel anchor failed. Without uttering a sound, Ed fell 4,000 feet to the lower Tokositna Glacier, to a basin so inaccessible we never had a chance to search for his body.

News of our ascent reached France, where it caught Terray's ear. Having never heard of these four young upstarts from Harvard, Terray was incredulous that little-known Americans might have succeeded on a route harder than his northwest ridge. He wrote Washburn inquiring whether or not we might have lied about the climb. Washburn wrote back, vouching for our ascent, and he told us about Terray's doubt-filled missive.

It was of course disappointing to have our hero wonder whether we were liars. Yet at the same time, for Don and me, it was the giddiest imaginable gratification to know that we had crossed the radar screen of his consciousness. Once Washburn had convinced Terray that we were telling the truth, perhaps we might even correspond with our hero, swapping details of our respective battles on Mount Huntington. Perhaps in the future we might even meet.

Having turned forty-four that summer, Terray was far from ready to see his scope go down the scale. He had, in fact, begun to experience a rejuvenation. Even as he had become the finest expeditionary mountaineer of his time, Terray had seen his skill as a rock climber deteriorate to the point where, on a local crag with youthful companions in top-notch shape, he felt embarrassed by his ineptitude. Such a progression is normal for aging mountaineers. As Terray's generation was the first to discover, climbing was becoming
so specialized a business that no single practitioner could excel in both big-range mountaineering and pure rock gymnastics. Other veterans accepted that fact, and contented themselves with leading expeditions. For Terray, to climb anywhere at less than an Olympian level was intolerable.

He set out, then, to teach himself all over again how to rock-climb. At Fontainebleau, the forest full of giant boulders south of Paris, he devised for himself a training program rigorous enough to challenge a hungry twenty-two-year-old. And he deliberately chose ropemates in their twenties for rock climbs that might test his refurbished mettle.

One of his favorite partners was his Huntington teammate, Marc Martinetti, who was only twenty-five years old. A native of Chamonix, boyishly good-looking, he had already been elected, despite his tender age, to the elite Compagnie des Guides. Martinetti had notched his belt with some of the finest faces in the Alps, including the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses and the north face of the Dru (two of Rébuffat's six great north faces). Optimistic, a great joker, fiercely independent, he had recently married a young local beauty.

On September 19, 1965, Terray and Martinetti set out for a long but moderate rock-climb in Terray's beloved Vercors, the
préalpes
south of Grenoble where Terray had first learned to climb three decades earlier. When the pair had not returned by dark, a search party set off to look for them. At the foot of the wall, they found the bodies of Terray and Martinetti, still roped together. From the damage the men had undergone (their helmets were smashed to pieces), the searchers concluded that they must have fallen as far as a thousand feet. At the top of the route, easy but steep grassy slopes are interspersed with short sections of cliff. It would have been normal for Terray and Martinetti to stay roped here, but to place only the occasional piton. No doubt one man had slipped, pulling off the other. Or perhaps one had seized a loose block and lost his balance, like Francis Aubert on the approach to the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey.

In France, Terray's death was the occasion for national mourning. In my first year of graduate school in Denver, I bought the latest
issue of
Paris-Match,
with Terray's rugged portrait on the cover, above a blurb reading “
Mort pour la Montagne.
” Staring at the photos that highlighted Terray's extraordinary career, I mourned, for my own selfish reasons, the near miss of our intersection in life.

Terray had died, I knew, before he could have received and read Washburn's letter. Every young climber's dream is to win the notice of his heroes. I had done that, across two decades and the Atlantic Ocean, only to have Terray die wondering whether some American college kids had faked the second ascent of Mount Huntington.

O
NE
A
PRIL DAY IN
1999, Michel Guérin and I decided to hike up to the base of the climb on which Terray had been killed thirty-four years before. Michel himself had done the climb at age twenty. “It was not a pilgrimage for me then,” he told me. “When you're young, you don't care about death.”

We drove route N75 south out of Grenoble, then left the highway to climb past farmsheds on a country road. It was a damp day, and the long limestone wall of the Vercors lay mostly hidden in mist to the east. The snows of a record winter had been slow to melt: above 4,000 feet, the forest still lay blanketed in wet drifts. Slushy streams coursed everywhere through drab fields.

In the square at the center of the sleepy perched village of Prélenfrey, Michel spotted an inconspicuous plaque affixed to a limestone boulder. We got out to read it.

To Lionel TERRAY

Dead on the mountain, with Marc Martinetti, 25 years ago.

His comrades in the S.E.S., of the Compagnie STEPHANE (1/15th BCA) 19 September 1990

The S.E.S., Michel explained, was the Section des Eclaireurs et Skieurs—the Section of Scouts and Skiers; the BCA was the Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins—the Battallion of Alpine Soldiers. Thus,
on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, the survivors of Terray's doughty Compagnie Stéphane, with whom he had played his absurd and perilous games in World War II, had assembled in this obscure plaza to commemorate their comrade's passing. I wondered how often even the stray hiker came across this quiet memorial, or paused as we did to ponder it.

Where the dirt road plunged into snowdrift, we parked, got out, and started hiking up the slope. Mats of soggy dead leaves lay in the patches of clearing; birches leaned toward the higher drifts. Soon our feet were completely soaked. In the crisp air, there was only the faintest hint of a late spring.

The route we sought was in the center of a long wall called the Gerbier; its name was the Fissure en Arc de Cercle. With fog covering the upper two thirds of the cliff, I could see only a gray, featureless precipice; but Michel had soon picked out the route. Pointing, he indicated landmarks he remembered from his own youthful ascent.

“The route was put up by Serge Coupé, who was on Makalu with Terray in 1955,” said Michel. “Coupé did a lot of new routes in the Vercors and the Chartreuse. Everywhere you go around here, there's a
voie Coupé.
”

We stopped to gaze at what we could see of the route. “You go up six or seven pitches there,” said Michel, suddenly animated, waving his hands in the eternal pantomime of climbers recalling routes, “then there's a big traverse, then five more pitches. On the top, there are these razor-thin arêtes you have to traverse. Maybe that's why they didn't unrope.” Later I read a route description of the fissure. In the accompanying diagram, the top of the cliff was reduced to a pair of stylized horizontal lines, marked “terraces—very easy.”

Michel stared at the cliff, as fog drifted in and out, and speculated out loud: “Possibly the accident was due to a competition between the young, very good climber running ahead, with the older, heavier climber still trying to prove he could keep up. Or maybe it was the younger one who was overimpressed. The guiding season was just over. Normally, a guide is exhausted in September.” We realized, as is so often the case in fatal climbing accidents, that we
would never know what had happened that long-ago day. All the searchers had had to judge by was the rope still linking the dead bodies, with no piton attached.

I was filled with a heavy sense of gloom. No one else was about in this still-wintry landscape. Below us, a deer bounded noiselessly through the trees. I heard the unmistakable sound of rocks plunging down the cliff above. I looked up, but could not find the falling stones against the gray smear of the cliff. Michel had hoped the weather would be good enough for us to climb the route. In that despondent moment, I was glad it was not.

N
OT EVERYONE IN
F
RANCE
thought Lionel Terray a hero. Loyal to her husband's estrangement from Terray after Annapurna, Françoise Rébuffat took the man to task for his servility to Herzog. “Terray was a
lèche-bottes,
” she told me bluntly, “a
béni-oui-oui
” (a bootlicker; a yes man).

During that interview with Françoise, less than a week before, I had been devastated to learn that Terray had not in fact written
Conquistadors of the Useless.
“It was ghostwritten for him by Roger Nimier, an academician,” she said. “Terray was a bit of a country bumpkin. His writing, even in letters, was only semiliterate.” Later Yves Ballu independently told me the same thing, naming Nimier, and other journalists confirmed the claim. Michel knew Nimier's name as Terray's original editor at Gallimard, but it came as a shock to him also to be told that Nimier was ghostwriter as well as editor. The consensus was that Terray could never have written a book by himself, let alone so good a one as
Conquistadors.

A day or two after our hike in the Vercors, Michel took me to visit Terray's childhood home in Grenoble. The château, he had been told, had fallen into disrepair. The ground floor had been rented out to a writer, but the rest of the house had been locked up and left to its decay. The building still belonged to Terray's widow, Marianne, but she never visited the place.