by Ed Viesturs
Nena Holguin started up the glacier to meet Messner as he stumbled down. In her diary, she wrote, “He glances at me, comes on with sunken head, is no longer consciously there. Going up to him I say: ‘Reinhold, how are you?’ A few sobs are the answer. . . . ‘Where are all my friends?’ is his first question. ‘I’m your friend, Reinhold. Don’t worry . . . ’ ”
• • •
Messner’s Everest solo was an achievement that in some ways can never again be matched. Yet only six years later, two Swiss climbers, Jean Troillet and Erhard Loretan, surged up another route on the north side of the mountain in a style that was every bit as audacious as Messner’s.
By 1986, Loretan had climbed eight of the 8,000-meter peaks. He would soon find himself in a head-to-head race with the Frenchman Benoît Chamoux to become the third climber to claim all fourteen (after Messner and the Pole Jerzy Kukuczka)—a race that both tried to downplay, but that ended in truly dramatic fashion in 1995, as the men worked their way side-by-side up the fourteenth 8,000er for each of them, Kangchenjunga. The race ended with Loretan topping out on October 5 only hours before Chamoux disappeared near the summit.
In 1986, there were three principal climbers on the north side of Everest in the summer monsoon season. Besides Troillet and Loretan, the ace French mountaineer Pierre Béghin had his sights set on a bold project on the mountain. Originally Troillet hoped to solo a route on the pillar between the Great and Hornbein couloirs. Troillet and Loretan had climbed well together before, notably on very fast ascents of K2 and Dhaulagiri. But Béghin and Loretan had only recently met at a trade festival in Annecy, France. There, Béghin asked Loretan to join him on some Himalayan project, and Loretan agreed. In the end, Troillet invited the other two to make a three-man team. Their goal was to link the Japanese Couloir lower on the north face with the Hornbein Couloir above 26,000 feet. They wanted to climb the route as fast as possible, alpine-style, with an absolute minimum of gear.
The only detailed account of the climb appears in Loretan’s memoir, Les 8000 Rugissants (The Roaring 8,000ers). As I prepared for the east ridge of Annapurna in 2002, I had the stunning first ascent of that route, by Loretan and Norbert Joos in 1984, before my eyes. Those two, rather than descend their route, had cut themselves off from retreat on the way up and had ended up traversing the mountain via a blind descent of the Dutch Rib on the north face. It had turned into an all-out ordeal.
Loretan’s book, published in 1996 by a small Swiss press, had never been translated into English, and I don’t read French. In terms of a “route description” in 2002, therefore, I had to rely on J.-C. Lafaille’s chats with Loretan before our expedition. It was only when I wrote The Will to Climb, my book about Annapurna, published in 2011, that my co-author, David Roberts, translated many of the passages from the Annapurna chapter in Les 8000 Rugissants, giving me a far richer understanding of just what Loretan and Joos had pulled off on that epic traverse.
David believes that Les 8000 Rugissants is one of the very finest climbing memoirs ever written, and that, in its mixture of verbal wit and a kind of absurdist sensibility, it’s utterly unique in the genre. What a shame it’s never appeared in an English edition! Today, in fact, the memoir is out of print even in Switzerland. On Bookfinder.com, the world’s leading resource for used and obscure books, I dug up a single copy, for sale through a French dealer for $63.50. If only I could read French, I’d snatch it up.
The Everest chapter in Loretan’s book, according to David, is every bit as droll, slyly self-deprecating, and downright funny as “Tell Me Why,” the chapter that narrates the Annapurna traverse. Loretan has a way of getting his digs in at climbers more media-hungry than himself, and Béghin turned out to be just such a guy. As Loretan puts it,
Pierre Béghin let us know that he was duty-bound to his sponsors. He was thus obliged to take along a camera team, as well as a doctor. His wife would also come, and also the son of his wife. . . . In my whole life, I’ve participated in only two expeditions with lots of people—those were K2 [in 1985] and Everest. Both were horror shows.
The team ended up comprising eleven members. Loretan invited Nicole Niquille, the first woman to be certified as a Swiss guide. With Annie Béghin, Niquille hoped to make the first female ascent of Everest without bottled oxygen, but neither woman acclimatized well. They got no higher than the foot of the north face, and both left the expedition early.
On the subject of being part of a team of eleven, Loretan spins a characteristic riff:
Suppose that you have to put together a jigsaw puzzle of eleven pieces, and suppose that you have eleven pieces in your hands. . . . If the eleven pieces come from two or three different puzzles, you indeed have to fit them together by force, round off their corners, amputate their rough edges—and you will never end up with the harmony of a whole picture.
While insisting, tongue-in-cheek, that he is unwilling “to wash my dirty laundry in public,” he lets Niquille do it for him. Once back in Switzerland, she wrote a piece for a magazine that Loretan quotes, in which she deplored how a civilized group had degenerated into a “hysterical eruption,” and how money and fame had “choked in their tentacles friendship, the pleasure of going to the mountains, and the appetite for a common effort.” At base camp, some kind of wholesale collapse of teamwork had clearly occurred. Without naming names, both Niquille and Loretan evidently point the finger at Béghin, with his family, his sponsors, and his film crew.
Like Messner, Loretan, Troillet, and Béghin had decided to attempt Everest in the monsoon season, though none of them specifies why. Loretan has fun with the miseries of the season: “The monsoon—that’s when the earth gets caught up in yearning for the time when everything was made of liquid.” On the sodden approach to the Rongbuk, “The ground was greasy, the trucks often got stuck in the mud many times, and the men had to give a hand to the short-winded motors.” At base camp, a “broken-down team gathered. . . . Because of the trucks, we had climbed much too fast. Nausea, headaches, insomnia, vertigo. All the warning lights on the control panels of our depressurized bodies turned on.”
The monsoon made the carrying of loads up to advance base camp on the backs of the yaks another ordeal. At one point, the men strung a Tirolean traverse across a glacial torrent. Loretan muses, “Yaks have many advantages over humans, but they are pretty clumsy at rope work, and instead of using the Tirolean traverse, they had to climb another hour to find a ford.” In that ford, “We managed to reduce the salinity of the Indian Ocean by dissolving several kilos of sugar in the coffee-colored water of the stream.”
Along with getting in sly digs at Béghin and the “horror show” of an eleven-person team, Loretan could make fun of himself. He had brought along a parapente, a collapsible device that fits in a backpack. Once unfurled, the parapente, part wing, part parachute, allows an expert to sail off a cliff to the valley below. Loretan was nursing what he calls “the slighty crazy idea” of using the device to paraglide off the summit of Everest. (That startling deed would actually be accomplished only two years later by Jean-Marc Boivin, who got a running start from just below the top of Everest and sailed down to Camp II in only twelve minutes!) But, writes Loretan, “In 1986 the parapente was still in its early stages. In fact, it was really an umbrella [the play on words here is between parapente and parapluie], but less convenient, because it didn’t even have a handle.”
Loretan decided to make a practice run from a cliff at 19,700 feet above advance base camp. He narrates the attempt as a comedy of errors.
I unpacked my sail. The wind was pretty violent. So much the better! The violence would compensate for the lack of lift characteristic of these altitudes. I struggled with myself for an hour and a half to get up the nerve to take off. . . . Finally, with the sky streaked with a rainbow, the cloth inflated, and I took off!
Between a flight and a fall, the only difference has to do with its duration. If you fall for a long time, it’s a flight. If you fly only briefly, it’s a fall. T
he spectators watching my flight unanimously declared it a fall.
The doc confirmed the general impression with his diagnosis: “Severe sprain of the ankle, ‘soccer heel,’ violent blow to the bones with instep and heel damaged. . . . I hope that there are no broken or cracked bones. Complete immobilization for eight to ten days, then you can try to lace up your boots and see how it goes.”
The parapente accident could well have been fatal. But in this whimsical passage, Loretan treats it like a joke. At the time, he must have wondered whether the damage he had done to his body would cancel any chance of climbing the mountain. Did he contemplate throwing in the towel and going home? Not according to his memoir. Instead, he rested at base camp for a full fifteen days, while the others acclimatized on lower peaks. At last, Loretan couldn’t stand it anymore.
He decided he had to try simply to walk. In running shoes, the pain in his bad foot was unbearable, but with climbing boots he could barely manage. Two days later, with Nicole Niquille, he climbed a minor summit near base camp. He actually brought his parapente with him in hopes of making another “flight,” but thought better of it.
The next day, with the whole team, Loretan headed up toward the Lho La, the pass that overlooks the Khumbu Glacier on Everest’s west shoulder. But now he suffered another accident, when he fell into a snow hole and in the process gashed his arm badly with the pick of his ice axe. Once again, in his memoir Loretan treats this mishap as comedy:
Somewhere I had read that Trotsky was killed with the blow of an ice axe to his head. I can well understand why he didn’t survive the caress of metal: just above the elbow, my arm was cut across seven or eight centimeters [about three inches] with a beautiful slash. Blood flowed in abundance.
Alerted by radio, the team doctor climbed up to the snow hole, bandaged up Loretan’s arm, and helped him down to advance base camp. “The blade of the ice axe,” Loretan wrote, “had transformed my arm into an anatomy lesson: you could see the artery pulsing amid the tatters of carved-up flesh.” At advance base camp, the doctor turned the dining tent into an “operating room,” as he disinfected the wound, cut off loose pieces of flesh, and sewed up others. Fortunately, neither Loretan’s biceps or tendons had been cut, but now the doctor ordered another week of complete rest before his patient could try to climb. Loretan mused, “The sky was bound up with my inactivity: it snowed every day, as if to mitigate the weight of my convalescence.”
By now, Loretan must have felt like a virtual cripple. Yet on August 29, six weeks after the team had first reached base camp, he headed up the north face with Béghin and Troillet. “We crouched at the foot of the wall, waiting for the mâchicoulis to stop vomiting its torrents of snow.” (The mâchicoulis was a gap in the floor of the battlement of a medieval castle, through which the defenders could drop stones on the invaders.)
The men had agreed that speed meant safety, so they carried less gear and food than anyone had ever assaulted Everest with. They took neither a tent nor sleeping bags, but only sleeping-bag covers to use like bivouac sacks; a snow shovel “to bury ourselves in the cloak of the mountain as we sought out the illusion of warmth”; no climbing gear (not even a rope!); no bottled oxygen; a single stove and pot; and a mere half pound of food apiece, mainly Ovo-Sport, a Swiss energy bar.
They started up the Japanese Couloir at midnight on August 29. The snow was so deep and loose that the men sank in to their knees, and it seemed so unstable that at any moment they expected a slide to carry them down into the bergschrund. They traded leads every fifteen minutes. Despite his injuries and the enforced rest prescribed by the doctor, Loretan somehow felt himself “in Olympic form.” He guessed that having spent six weeks at an altitude of 18,000 feet had allowed him to acclimatize perfectly. Perhaps resting at this altitude combined with Loretan’s natural strength made an ideal recipe for preparing to climb at an extreme level.
The three men uttered not a word to one another, but they moved as efficiently as climbers ever have, gaining 6,600 feet of altitude in ten hours. That’s an unbelievable pace. The best I’ve ever managed at comparable altitudes on an 8,000er was when I climbed 7,500 feet on K2 from base camp to Camp III in ten hours. But I was not dealing with thigh-deep snow, I was on a route that I’d already traveled numerous times, and I had the benefit of fixed lines on most of the critical passages. At 11:00 a.m. on August 30, approaching 26,000 feet, the three men found themselves just below the Hornbein Couloir. They used their snow shovel to dig a cave (Loretan calls it an “igloo”), in which they rested for several hours. In his ironic way, Loretan jokes about the tight confines of their snow hole: “To be comfortable there, you had to be fond of elevators, spaceships, bathyspheres, squash courts, and everything that is packed into tin cans.”
Setting out at 8:00 p.m. on August 30, the men stripped down their belongings even more radically, leaving behind their sleeping-bag covers, their stove and pot, and their shovel. In fanny packs they carried only a water bottle and an energy bar each, as well as a single camera. In one hand, each climber clutched his ice axe, in the other, a ski pole.
The three men moved with steady, mechanical, wordless efficiency as they climbed the Hornbein Couloir. But Béghin started to lag behind. Not far above the snow hole, Troillet and Loretan heard their partner call out, “I’m going back to the igloo!” In his own brief note in the American Alpine Journal, Béghin explained his turnaround:
At 8000 meters I was so sleepy that I decided to go back to the snow cave to have another try in the daylight. But I could not find it! I sat in the snow to bivouac without any equipment. . . . There was no wind and I passed the night without frostbite.
This setback underlines the unbelievable performance of Troillet and Loretan. At the time, Pierre Béghin was one of the strongest climbers in the world, but he could not keep up with his Swiss partners.
Around midnight, the two men hit a rock band. In his memoir, Loretan boasts about how, on all his attempts on 8,000ers, he never studied route topos or the accounts of other climbers beforehand. Instead, he relied on his “adaptation to the terrain.” Almost mystically, he claims, “I know where the summit is, and I know where the starting point is. Outside of that, as in life itself, I improvise.” Indeed, on his blind descent of Annapurna in 1984, Loretan had carried in his pocket only a postcard showing the mountain from the north as a route guide.
To me, this attitude is extraordinary. I do just the opposite when I prepare for a climb: read everything I can about the route, study photos and topos till I’ve got them memorized. Loretan must have been a different breed of climber. Yet there’s a certain logic to his approach, trusting his own well-trained instincts over outside information. There’s more mystery in Loretan’s style of climbing, but also a bit more risk.
Finding their way through the rock band with only the cones of light from their headlamps, however, proved an “abominable” challenge. Later Loretan realized that that passage was the crux pitch that for Hornbein and Unsoeld had sealed their point of no return. Working their way up a chimney toward the right, the two men heard rather than saw a big avalanche tear across the gully they had just vacated.
Two or three hours after parting from Béghin, Loretan was seized with the “third man” hallucination—the conviction that he and Troillet were climbing upward with a shadowy companion right beside them, whom they could never quite confront. It was the first time such a phenomenon had ever worked its way into his mind, and Loretan was mildly disturbed by it. At 27,500 feet, they took another rest stop, sitting on their packs and huddling against each other, but cold soon drove them on.
The moon rose, and then the sun. At last, the two men reached the point where the West Ridge and the north face join. Loretan’s account of the final push to the top is uncharacteristically straight: “We continued for fifty meters, our heads bowed as a sign of obstinacy. And then suddenly there was nothing above us except the sky. I felt a lump in my throat, tears in my eyes. It was 2:30 p.m. I was on the summit of Moun
t Everest, the summit of the world. Joy, weeping with joy.”
It was a perfect day. The two men spent an hour and a half on top. “That was the only time,” Loretan later wrote, “that neither Jean nor I were obsessed with thoughts about the descent.”
But then Troillet had his own hallucination, as he saw an electric transformer take shape in a distant cloud. “I was quite sure that there were no electric transformers in the vicinity of Everest . . .” Loretan later wrote. “It was time to descend.”
That descent was probably the most astounding part of the whole climb. Sitting on their rear ends, using their axes as brakes, Loretan and Troillet glissaded the whole of the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs! Picking up Béghin on the way, they regained the foot of the north face in the unthinkably short span of three and a half hours. The whole climb to the summit and back had taken only forty-three hours.
News of the astonishing deed quickly traveled around the world, where it was greeted with admiration and incredulity. During the twenty-seven years since that landmark ascent, Everest has been climbed more quickly than Loretan and Troillet’s time, but only by the well-worn standard South Col and North Col routes. Given the difficulties of the route the Swiss pair chose, it’s fair to say that their deed has still not been matched. Even the otherwise stolid Walt Unsworth, in his definitive history of Everest, was moved to pronounce the deed “one of the greatest mountain climbs of all time. Just think of it—the highest mountain in the world climbed in less than two days!” Unsworth might well have added, “and in the purest and simplest of styles.”
I’m in awe of Loretan in particular because he climbed so many of the 8,000ers in spectacular fashion by difficult routes. By 1986, if he had simply wanted to bag his ninth 8,000er, he could have climbed Everest in conventional fashion, via the South Col route. Instead, he wanted to make a statement about the boundaries of alpinism.
Closing his Everest chapter in Les 8000 Rugissants, Loretan lets pride trump his penchant for the absurd.