Free True Summit by David Roberts Page B

mountains. Already we were scheming a return to Alaska. On McKinley, we had been tutored by the more experienced men a year or two older than us. Now Don and I wanted to organize our own expedition, and find a mountain route even more challenging than the Wickersham Wall.
    Sometime in 1963, Don and I came across a book with the awkward title Conquistadors of the Useless. First published in France two years before (as Les Conquérants de l’Inutile ), the 351-page tome had just been translated and published in Great Britain. (How we found a copy, I have forgotten: perhaps an older bibliophile in the HMC had sent away for the book.)
    To say that Don and I devoured Conquistadors is an understatement. Every page brimmed with revealed truth—for we were reading the autobiography of Lionel Terray. At once, the book replaced both Annapurna and Starlight and Storm as my favorite work of mountain literature. In blunt, vivid prose, Terray went straight to the heart of the mystical calling in which Don and I had started to become acolytes. Not for him the rapturous poesy of Rébuffat, the idealized drama of Herzog. We relished every detail. Even a sentence like, “As I went on, it became more and more difficult to let go with one hand even for a moment, and the axe was getting in my way,” rang with a clarion purity. Here was the very stuff of extreme climbing, laid out in all its logistical and technical minutiae. The book met the ultimate criterion of adventure writing, for as Don and I read Terray’s pages, our palms grew damp with sweat.
    Of the six principal climbers on Annapurna, only two—Jean Couzy and Lionel Terray—ever went on another expedition. Yet after 1950, Terray became arguably the greatest expedition mountaineer in history, as he spearheaded small expeditions to some of the remotest and most daunting mountains in the world. Fitzroy in Patagonia, Jannu and Makalu in the Himalaya, Chacraraju and Taulliraju in the Peruvian Andes—always with the indomitable Terray solving the crux pitches that led to victory. This was the kind of mountaineer Don and I aspired to become: an expeditionary expert, seeking out not so much the highest unclimbed mountains as the hardest and most beautiful.
    More than anything else in Conquistadors of the Useless, however, what stirred Don and me to the core was the account of the partnership Terray and Lachenal forged after 1945. By that year, Lachenal had found his direction in life. He had worn down the haughty opposition of Mme. Rivier and married his beloved Adèle. After a brilliant stint in Jeunesse et Montagne, where he came in first in virtually all the competitions waged among the finest young skiers and alpinists in France, he had won a job as a ski and climbing instructor in the Contamines, near Chamonix. And despite his flight to Switzerland to avoid his labor service obligation, after the war Lachenal was voted into membership in the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix.
    With Terray, Lachenal started knocking off one prize after another among the hardest routes yet essayed in the Alps, starting with the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses. Driven by Lachenal’s impatience, the pair set extraordinary time records on these formidable ridges and walls. The first ascent of the northeast face of the Piz Badile, in Italy, had been accomplished by Ricardo Cassin with four partners in 1937. The climb had taken this strong party three days, and they reached the summit in an all-out storm. On the descent, two of Cassin’s teammates died of exhaustion.
    In 1949, Terray and Lachenal stormed up this wall—one of the six great north faces of the Alps, as categorized by Rébuffat—in the astounding time of seven and a half hours. Their ascent had been three times as fast as the fastest previous success, four times as fast as the hitherto matchless Cassin.
    In “The Brotherhood of the Rope,” that lyrical set piece in Starlight and