Free True Summit by David Roberts Page A

his friends. In view of the course of the rest of his life, that prolonged depression at age eighteen would come to seem a kind of lost year.
    It was only the next summer, when he returned to Chamonix for a series of climbs with a veteran alpinist from Annecy, that Lachenal set his compass. One evening, from the terrace of a high mountain refuge, the two men stared at the surrounding peaks turning dull with dusk. Lachenal poured out his questions about guiding, then asked his friend why he had never become a guide.
    â€œI never gave it a thought,” said the man.
    â€œBecause you have a true passion for the mountains,” mused Lachenal. Moments later, he pronounced his conclusion: “To be a true guide, you have to love the mountains more than anything in life.”
    U NDER THE INFLUENCE OF Starlight and Storm, in the spring of my final year of high school, I signed up for a beginning rock-climbingcourse taught by the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group. After only five Saturdays on easy routes on the Flatirons above Boulder, I considered myself a “real” climber. I scraped together enough cash to buy a 120-foot rope (it cost twelve dollars), a few soft-iron pitons, and a half dozen carabiners. Fired all the more by Rébuffat’s lyrical evocations of the great north faces of the Alps, I grew ambitious. In June 1961, with a pal who had climbed for two years (versus my four months), I ascended the east face of Longs Peak, a 2,000-foot precipice of steep snow interrupted by short vertical pitches of clean granite. Because of a recent tragedy on the face, when two experienced mountaineers had frozen to death after getting caught in a storm, the whole east face was officially closed at the time my friend and I sneaked in to its base. After finding our names in the summit register, a ranger tracked us down to Boulder, where a benevolent elder in the Rescue Group talked him out of arresting us.
    The east face of Longs seemed a grand exploit, pushing my sketchy technique to its very limit. On one smooth rock traverse, with my arms giving out from fatigue, I just managed to clip a carabiner into a fixed piton before losing my purchase altogether. Late in the afternoon, only a few hundred feet below the top, as he led on perilous mixed snow and rock, my friend screamed, “Get ready! I’m about to come off!” Fortunately, he kept his cool and swarmed past the tricky part.
    Despite this bold deed, I did not find the track that would lead me toward serious mountaineering until I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1961. At the time, the college’s mountaineering club (the HMC) comprised the most ambitious collection of undergraduate alpinists in the country. At my first meeting, I was dazzled to learn that certain juniors and seniors had come back from summer expeditions to the Coast and Saint Elias Ranges of Canada, where they had reached the summits of such storied mountains as Waddington and Logan. Until that moment, the idea that I might ever emulate Rébuffat or Terray and go to the great ranges had remained an improbable fantasy.
    The summer after my sophomore year, I was invited on my first expedition. That July, six HMC cronies and I made the first directascent of the Wickersham Wall on Mount McKinley, a 14,000-foot-high precipice of ice and rock that forms the tallest single mountain face in the Americas. Our adventure was capped by a week-long vigil at 17,000 feet as we waited out a blizzard so severe that our bush pilot—who had flown through the storm to see our tracks disappearing into avalanche debris—reported us missing and feared dead.
    On the Wickersham Wall, I cemented a partnership with a classmate named Don Jensen. Stocky, strong, moody, and painfully sincere, Don had hardened his high school apprenticeship with three-week solo outings in the Sierra Nevada of his native California. During our junior year, we met every day in the dining hall and talked obsessively about