Above the Clouds

by Kilian, Jornet

  SIMÓN AND I HADN’T CROSSED PATHS AGAIN UNTIL I MOVED TO Chamonix. Then we met in the mountains often, and though we didn’t talk a lot, we wanted to plan some activity that would be a challenge for both of us: for Simón, speed and resistance, and for me, technical difficulty. But the interest we showed on the mountain vanished when we came back down into the valley, where each of us faced the reality of a packed schedule, and as the days went by, we couldn’t find a single free one to spend together.

  On a Monday in late June, Vivian Bruchez, Sébastien Montaz, and I skied a new route on the east face of Mont Maudit. When we got back to the car around midday, I saw that Simón had sent me a text that said: “Hey, dude, do you feel like doing the Grandes Jorasses on Thursday?” I looked at my schedule. The next day, Tuesday, I had a photo session with a sponsor, on Wednesday I’d arranged to go out with Karl Egloff, and Friday afternoon I was competing in the Chamonix Vertical Kilometer. But on Thursday I was free, so I quickly answered yes. Simón’s idea was very simple: climb a mountain like people used to. In other words, run and walk from Chamonix to the foot of a wall neither of us knew, climb a technical route—the Colton-McIntyre—to the summit, and go down the other face to Courmayeur.

  Simón and I are polar opposites. He smokes and drinks; I’ve never smoked in my life, and alcohol doesn’t appeal to me at all. He likes the atmosphere of the city, and crowds make me panic. He’s crazy about difficult climbs, and I’m crazy about movement. He enjoys taking people up mountains every day, and I’m obsessed with being alone. He thinks sport is a curse, and I can’t live without training. Despite our differences in lifestyle, we shared a great passion for the mountains. We had found a small area we agreed on, and we faced it with the excitement of children trying out a new toy.

  We’d arranged to meet after dinner on Wednesday in the Montenvers parking lot to choose the equipment we were going to take with us. With our backpacks full, and guided by headlamps, we began our ascent, walking up forest paths where I often ran. When we left the protection of the trees, a magnificent spectacle unfurled before us: on that pale night, the starlight shone and lit up the faces of the peaks around us. The Grandes Jorasses awaited us, covered in a film of intense and dazzling whiteness. Was this a sign that the snow was hard and we could climb up quickly and safely, or was it a fresh, inconsistent, powdery snow that scarcely covered the rocks? With this doubt internalized, we went on across the Mer de Glace, an ice field that was once kilometers long but has gradually lost hundreds of cubic meters each year and now wears an oversized name, since it would be more fitting to call it a tongue or a pool of ice instead of a sea. In one of the streams that cross the ice field, we stocked up on water—a liter for Simón and half a liter for me. That was likely enough to get us to the other side of the mountain.

  When we reached the foot of the wall, the shadow of 1,200 meters of rock enveloped us in thick darkness. In the middle of the night, in a place like this, our feeling of smallness and insignificance became even more intense. We lost a few hours going up and down the base of the wall, dotted with spurs and channels, looking for the route we wanted to use to go up, the Colton-McIntyre route. In the end, just as it began to get light, we found the blue ice slopes that allowed us to start the ascent at a good pace up the first third of the wall. When day had set in, a cold air peeled the sleep from our eyes, suddenly reminding us that we were right in the middle of the north face. When the difficult part began, the climb was much more static, since we were starting to belay each other, and a bitter cold seeped into our bones. Meanwhile, we imagined the runners in tank tops at the bottom of the valley and the climbers suffocating from heat on the sunny walls.

  “Damn it, Simón, yesterday was so great . . . with the warmth of the sun, over 4,000 meters, climbing all day in our T-shirts, and with those amazing views . . . Why the fuck do we always have to go somewhere cold?” I grumbled sarcastically.

  “Yeah, we could have been getting tanned and handsome down south, and here we are, quaking with cold and fear. But if you look at in another way, if this weather refreshes our bodies, imagine how it’ll refresh our souls!”

  Simón has the gift of words, of succinct and spot-on answers—a gift that, if you have it, makes you the king of dinner parties. Not long ago I had read his book Alpinismo Bisexual y Otros Escritos de Altura (Bisexual Mountain Climbing and Other Writings of Height), a sharp and entertaining collection, though I can tell you completely sincerely that what grabbed my attention in the bookstore was its cover. It’s an amateur photo of the author himself, skinny, with hairy legs and a beard, stark naked except for a thong and some climbing boots, plus a headband and some sunglasses, striking a pose like an eighties porn actor. And all this, for the love of God, in the middle of a Patagonian glacier, with all his climbing equipment and food in what looks like a bivouac scattered around him. Pure dynamite.

  He contemplates everything he does through a satirical lens, and says that his work as a mountain guide is unique since it consists of putting people in danger in order to save them. As I spend time with him, I understand his passion for what he does and the way he manages to convey his feelings at each moment as he climbs, with barely any need for explanations. And how he preserves his authentic mountaineer spirit, explaining to his clients that what matters isn’t reaching the summit but what you experience along the way, whether or not you achieve your goal.

  Simón tells me that his book is an “ode to failure,” since “in mountain climbing there are so many heroic tales about epic ascents and life-or-death challenges to reach a summit, but we all know that ninety-nine percent of the time you don’t actually reach the summit. There’s no heroism, because that’s not what mountain climbing is about. It’s bisexual, it’s about optimizing all the resources available, and usually ending up not setting foot on the summit, but that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Quite the opposite.”

  We continued our climb, and the words we exchanged were brief. If one of us belayed the other, we exchanged the occasional comment about the beauty of our surroundings or the difficulty of the stretch we’d just climbed, and with no further ado, we passed each other the equipment and separated again. When we climbed with a tense rope, advancing at the same time, with 60 meters of rope between us, we communicated via the cord that connected us. If the rope stopped, that meant it was a difficult stretch; if it went backward, it meant we were going the wrong way; if it advanced slowly, we were tired; if it was getting tugged, either we’d arrived somewhere or we needed to move more slowly.

  Climbing with Simón, I felt at ease. Although we wanted to move steadily and not waste any time, he didn’t hesitate to look for the best placement for each anchor, and when I heard him huff and puff because he couldn’t find the route, he soon discovered a way to move forward, calmly and with a smile on his face.

  Ten hours after we began the climb, the sun skimmed our faces as we reached the summit, and we had to strip down quickly due to the heat coming up from the south. We could have done with a little of this to melt the thin layer of snow that had hid the path and made the climb so difficult all morning!

  Suddenly, our bodies relaxed in the heat, knowing that the most difficult part was over. The first thing to loosen up was our stomachs. “Ouch, what a bellyache!” We looked at each other, and sure that there was no one for miles around, we took down our pants and emptied out all of what had been with us through the night and into the morning.

  “Have you ever taken a shit with a better view?”

  And we both burst out laughing as we gazed at the Alps from on high.

  AS USUAL, AFTER THE TWENTY-THREE HOURS OUR SHARED EXPEDITION lasted, each of us went back to our schedules, and summer ran its course, erasing events as we achieved them. And we couldn’t find a single page with a gap for any of the expeditions we’d planned as we descended to Courmayeur, on the trail following the scent of the pizzas awaiting us.

  Simón put his mountain guide uniform back on and, with the same calm and pat
ience as ever, kept teaching lessons of love for the mountains to hundreds of clients wanting to climb peaks like Mont Blanc. All of them learned so much that in the end they knew the summit they’d been chasing wasn’t what mattered most. Maybe guides like Simón do have godlike qualities since they can light the way for others through their love of the mountains, and they initiate new climbers on a path of sacrifice and fulfillment.

  For my part, the day after sharing that truly amazing experience with Simón, I put a number on my back and went on with my usual procession of summer events.

  Ueli

  I was lost in the narrow streets of Ringgenberg, a tiny town near Interlaken, Switzerland, still full of rural charm and the smell of nature. Unlike the neighboring villages and stations in France, it hasn’t become overcrowded, and its inhabitants haven’t massacred the architecture. The streets are all paved with cobblestones, and the houses are built from polished, round logs, with a maximum of two stories, all the windows and balconies bursting with flowers of many colors, not a single wilted petal to spoil the effect. Water flows abundantly from the fountain in the central plaza, and old men spend the afternoons sitting on benches and chatting.

  I’d been past the fountain twice and hadn’t found the house I was looking for. In the end, I stopped the car and rolled down the window to ask an old man, “Excuse me, do you know where Ueli Steck lives?” I couldn’t quite understand the answer he gave in Swiss German, but I could decipher his gestures well enough to be satisfied.

  I reached the door to Ueli’s house, called him, and he came out to tell me where to park. We then jumped into gear, and ten minutes was enough to get all the equipment we needed ready to climb the north face of the Eiger the following morning. When we were finished, we had a dish of pasta with parmesan for dinner.

  The first time I heard any mention of Ueli Steck was around 2007, when I read in a magazine that in less than four hours he’d done the climb we were about to repeat. The next year, he destroyed his own record by climbing it in less than three. Compared with that, what we were getting ready to do was just some simple training for him. I, on the other hand, was overwhelmed by a mixture of excitement and respect. I was also afraid of looking ridiculous next to a man who’d scaled the wall we were about to climb thirty-nine times.

  A few weeks earlier, we had met in the Himalayas. I’d had twelve days of vacation between the end of the trail-running season and a trip to present products for a sponsor in Southeast Asia, and I took the chance for a recreational trip to Khumbu, the Nepalese region home to emblematic mountains like Everest, Lhotse, and Ama Dablam. I stopped in Kathmandu for a few hours to secure my trekking permits, took a flight straight to Lukla, and, as soon as I arrived, set off running with my small backpack, which had everything I needed for a long week in the mountains. After a few days in the valleys of Gokyo and on the summit of Lobuche, I reached Chukhung, the last village in the valley that leads to the south faces of Lhotse and Nuptse, at an altitude of almost 5,000 meters. I went straight to the Pemba lodge, which I knew from my other trips, and when I walked into the dining room, I saw Ueli Steck and Hélias Millerioux. They told me they’d already been there awhile, acclimating and waiting for the right conditions to try to climb the south face of Nuptse Alpine style—which means without using any fixed ropes, altitude camps, assistance, or porters, carrying all of what is needed for the climb on your shoulders. Meanwhile, they were taking advantage of the opportunity to run and climb in the surrounding area.

  I like Khumbu for the training opportunities it has to offer. You can do 6,000- and 7,000-meter mountains, like in the Alps, climbing 3,000 or 4,000. The villages are 5,000 meters up and have everything you need to live and to train: beds with blankets, rooms with fireplaces to shelter from the cold nights, plenty of food, and even, if you’re in Dingboche, delicious chocolate croissants straight out of a wood-fired oven.

  One day I went out with Hélias and Ueli, and we traveled in sneakers to the foot of one of the unnamed 6,000-meter peaks nearby. When we reached the snow, we put on our crampons and started to climb a sharp, rocky ridge with incredible views of the immense wall of rock that forms the south face of Lhotse and Nuptse. Makalu was right beside us, and we were surrounded by hundreds of slender pyramids of snow. We reached the highest point and, after a brief pause, began to descend the shaded side. Since we hadn’t brought any rope, we kept a good distance between us as we descended, to avoid throwing snow on top of each other. I followed in Ueli’s footprints, amazed at how he could manage with just one ice axe. I took my second ice axe out of my backpack and climbed down to the glacier. I caught up with him, and while we waited for Hélias, he asked me if I’d ever been to Grindelwald, Switzerland. I told him I hadn’t. He wanted to know if I’d ever climbed the Eiger. I told him no. He suggested that we do it one day. I said yes.

  The next day, I had to leave in a rush to catch the plane that would take me to Kuala Lumpur. After a few days of roaming around enormous Asian cities, I returned to a regular autumn in the French station of Tignes, where I made the most of the snow and altitude by starting to ski and getting in as much training as I could before the snow arrived near home. We call this “doing the hamster” on the ski slopes—up and down, up and down, without getting off the wheel, tediously counting the hours and the meters.

  One of those days, on my way back from training, after I’d completely forgotten about Ueli, I received a message from him. “Hi. Conditions look great on Eiger. I’m free tomorrow.” Wow! I glanced up from my phone and quickly assessed what was scattered around in my car: some crampons, an ice axe, and a light harness. This won’t be enough. Luckily Chamonix was nearby and I was able to stock up on everything else I needed.

  WHILE MOST PEOPLE I’VE GONE INTO THE MOUNTAINS WITH HAVE HAD a hard time taking unnecessary items out of their backpack to lighten their load, with Ueli, it was the opposite. After packing up a 30-meter rope with some quickdraws, a couple of ice screws, and half a liter of water, our twenty-liter backpacks were half empty and we wondered what we were forgetting. What took the longest was deciding which boots and crampons to take. When I went to the Grandes Jorasses with Simón, I wore some waterproof sneakers whose flexibility made the approach more pleasant, and when I added rigid crampons, they stayed relatively firm for climbing on ice. This saved me from having to lug heavy climbing boots around in my backpack. Though the invention worked and gave me ideas for designing some new footwear prototypes, I did suffer on the steepest ice slopes from a lack of stability. Ueli wanted to see how that invention would work on the Eiger, but in the end, we decided it would be better to take both light sneakers and climbing boots. The crampon-sneaker concept would have to wait until some other time.

  The next day we left early. We set out running across the fields, and the cows held it against us, since they’d been sleeping in peace before we’d arrived. Though Ueli knew these trails as if he’d grown up running along them, he’d never set out running from Grindelwald to climb the Eiger, since there’s a cog railway than can take you to the foot of the wall. His passion came from when he used to do technical climbing, attempting increasingly difficult walls and opening up new routes. When he looked at a mountain, what he really saw was the wall, the straightest part; the rest of the mountain held no special interest. Despite his preferences, when I had suggested we set out running from town, he was excited.

  We ran up at a good pace, and as we adjusted to the day’s rhythm, we continued our conversation from the night before. When Ueli asked me about training and nutrition for long-distance races, I took refuge in the certainty of my answers to get the uncertainty of what would happen later off my mind, when we would trade the comfort of a sixty-degree slope for the challenges of a vertical climb. Ueli wanted to know if our pace was good, and I told him not to worry, that he was a great runner, that many professional runners would love to have his twenty-second place in the OCC (Orsières-Champex-Chamonix), the UTMB’s 56-kilometer sister race.

  “
Don’t you believe it,” he answered. “I got there an hour after Marc Pinsach, the guy who came in first, at eighteen percent of his time. I’m not a runner, but I want to train to get faster, and I also want to run hundred-kilometer races.”

  I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was imagining what that could bring to his future mountain projects, and I encouraged him, saying that judging by how he was running on this trail, it wouldn’t be hard for him to do long distance if he applied himself and trained well.

  “You know what?” he continued. “I don’t buy it, that idea that you can improve just by climbing and doing mountains. A lot of mountain climbers just climb and don’t train. If they have some free time, to give you an example, they use it to do an interesting climb, but it doesn’t even occur to them to go running or go to the gym, and they don’t do any anaerobic exercise. I know if I want to achieve all the projects I have in mind, I need to train really hard in all those activities so I can be successful at the riskiest, most difficult climbs.”

  It’s not easy to find someone like Ueli, not just among mountain climbers but among athletes in general, who took disciplined training so seriously. Every day of the year, he followed the guidelines of an Olympic trainer, and it was interesting to observe the similarities and differences between his activity and my own.