True Summit

True Summit by David Roberts Page B

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Authors: David Roberts
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“taciturn and introverted,” but a veritable misogynist (his own word). Everything feminine, everything to do with romantic love, seemed to him softand weak. His heroes were Wagner’s Lohengrin and Siegfried; his masters, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
    Just like his teammates Lachenal, Rébuffat, and Terray, Herzog discovered Chamonix early in life, thanks to a family chalet at the foot of the Glacier des Bossons, which spills northeast from the summit of Mont Blanc. On solitary excursions, he explored the wonders and terrors of the great glacier, graduating to more and more ambitious ascents of the granite peaks and aiguilles that tower above it.
    Chamonix was Herzog’s “little native land,” but school took him increasingly to Paris, where he earned his baccalauréat in mathematics and philosophy and an advanced degree in business from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales. In 1945, just as Terray and Lachenal were becoming Chamonix guides, Herzog was hired as a director at Kléber-Colombes, the mammoth tire company.
    Herzog thus remained firmly an “amateur” in mountaineering. In his memoir, he recounts an exchange with Terray, whom he had befriended in Chamonix. Terray asks Herzog why he doesn’t want to become a guide.
    â€œI suppose I could,” he responds, “but I wouldn’t enjoy squeezing money out of the mountains. Living off what I love.”
    â€œNature is nobler than offices and labs and factories,” retorts Terray.
    â€œExactly! A passion should remain free.”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake,” bursts out the guide, “the point isn’t to make money, but just to get by!”
    â€œThere’s another reason,” Herzog adds. “I would think that being a mountaineering professional means endlessly repeating the same routes. Isn’t that tiresome? And finally, a true burnout?”
    â€œYes, 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 ofargument 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 considered 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 book. 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

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