Above the Clouds

by Kilian, Jornet

  At the end of that same summer, I began to compete in alpine skiing (it was still called this, before the name changed to ski mountaineering), and for years I forgot about Davo and impossible descents. My school folder was decorated with two photos, one of Kenenisa Bekele, who was winning all the races between 5,000 and 10,000 meters, and one of Stéphane Brosse in an alpine ski competition, about to take a new step, mid-ascent, eyes fixed on the peaks, perhaps anticipating the movements that would win him another race—the European Cup in Morgins, Switzerland, where I would eventually make my international debut.

  In 2007, Stéphane was retiring from international competitions, and I was just beginning to compete with adults. The French skier became a high-end spectator who came to cheer us on for the four days we fought to win the Pierra Menta. A year later, I decided to leave the Pyrenees and live in the Alps, and two friends—Mireia Miró and Laëtitia Roux—and I found a small wood chalet at the end of a road in the Aravis, from which we could walk out the door with our skis and climb the steep foothills of mountains like Étale and Charvin. Stéphane lived in a neighboring town, and this was also his natural terrain. I used to see him on the mountains, swift and precise, just as I remembered him from his glory days in the competitions.

  In 2012, I began the Summits of My Life project, and I wanted to talk to Stéphane right away since we shared a vision of going into the mountains quickly and always in motion. My first challenge consisted of crossing the Mont Blanc massif, skiing from east to west and summiting the main peaks; to do so I would have to tackle some difficult descents. He was a brilliant downhill skier. When he competed, you could see the difference in his descents, which he approached with sublime technique, and he knew how to read the terrain like nobody else. After putting his numbers away in a drawer, he carried out some of the most dizzying descents ever seen. Along with Pierre Tardivel, he successfully broke the record of the descent from Nant Blanc to Aiguille Verte without rappelling. Stéphane was the first to use very light competition equipment that allowed him to do rapid ascents on that terrain, opening the door to a succession of previously unimagined ascent techniques. For me, the project of crossing Mont Blanc was in embryonic form, but when I mentioned it to Stéphane, he told me it had been on his mind for some time. He unfolded some maps of the area on the floor and told me with total precision where we’d be able to cross.

  WE WENT OUT TOGETHER A NUMBER OF TIMES IN PREPARATION, AND he introduced me to the world of esquí de pendiente, or “incline skiing.” First, we went to the north face of the Courtes, the Barbey de l’Aiguille d’Argentière, the north face of the Dômes de Miage, and the Droites. Hardly saying a word, he gradually taught me to tackle those downhill slopes. I can’t say for sure that Stéphane was the world’s most sensible mentor. He always had some problem with the equipment, but his angelic technique allowed him to go down with only one ski or a broken boot, without anyone being able to tell the difference from when he was fully equipped. And in those circumstances, I had my hands full just keeping up with him.

  When the conditions looked good, we attempted the crossing. A few weeks earlier, we’d done a similar one in the Aravis, and we were feeling strong. We spent that week skiing in the area to finish assessing the conditions we’d find on the mountain. Our crossing ended in the worst way we could have imagined. After over twenty hours of happiness, as we looked for an entry point for the final descent, a ledge on the summit of the Aiguille d’Argentière collapsed, taking Stéphane with it.

  Vivian

  In the months after Stéphane’s death, I dealt with the guilt by bingeing on alcohol and taking insane risks in the mountains. Luckily, a few friends helped me to redirect those dangerous urges toward a more constructive kind of calm. These friends were Séb Montaz and Vivian Bruchez, who’d been recording us in the Aravis and on the Mont Blanc crossing, and also Jordi Tosas.

  Vivian and I had met only a few times before. Though we’d crossed paths when he was recording, we’d never climbed or skied together, and that was why I was surprised to get a call from him at the end of October in 2012.

  “How’s it going, Kilian? I saw you went to Chardonnet today. How’s the snow looking?”

  “Good. I went up the usual way. There’s quite a lot, but it’s pretty stable. I’d say the conditions are good.” I was trying not to make a mistake talking to someone who knew those mountains a thousand times better than I did.

  “And did you see the north face? Was it white or did it look icy?”

  “Mmm . . . well, I think it was pretty white. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but that’s how it seemed.” I tried to remember how it looked. I’d gone over it, but I hadn’t paid much attention.

  “Okay, thanks,” he said, and we said goodbye.

  After a while, I got a message. “Want to come and ski the Migot Spur tomorrow?” I replied yes without thinking twice, and we agreed to meet the next morning at the foot of the mountain. Then I realized I didn’t have any skis that were wider than competition skis, with the bindings mounted, and none of the ones I had were in very good shape. I looked for some boards and bindings I had lying around at home and went straight to the store to get them mounted.

  For me, Chardonnet is a special mountain. It isn’t as well known as the other peaks around Chamonix, but the fact that you can’t get to it by cable car, that it’s a totem rising up in the first row from the valley, and that there’s no particularly easy route to climb it make it an especially appealing challenge. Stéphane had climbed practically all of the possible routes and had told me it was his favorite mountain in the whole range. On the different faces of that mountain, after Stéphane, Vivian opened up a new world of possibilities for me, offering me a perspective that would change the way I saw mountains forever.

  Vivian wasn’t much older than me, but he had much more experience with esquí de pendiente, and with that kind of terrain. But he always considered me an equal when it came to making decisions, and he trained me just like my mother did when she made us find our way home. When I’m by his side, I always have a sense of safety and control bordering on serenity, since he distances the activity from extreme feelings, eliminating words like risk and fear from his vocabulary and replacing them with pleasure and happiness.

  After that descent of the Migot, there were others, and also repetitions, from the Mont Blanc range to Alaska and the Himalayas, but Vivian and I occasionally went back to Chardonnet. For a few years he’d been visualizing a line on the mountain’s west face, a face covered in spurs of red granite that offered excellent rock for climbing in summer. And letting his imagination play, he found it was possible to link some small snow corridors with strips of rock that ran from the summit all the way to the foot of the wall, almost completely continuously.

  At the end of December 2015, we made our first attempt. We made it onto the wall too late, and due to its multiple exposures, the snow changed consistency at different speeds, increasing the difficulty. The second time we went was Christmas. The mountain gave us the gift of a perfect day with blue sky and no wind. We were also alone in the valley, which is normally crowded. It must have been because it was December 25. While most people were at home carving a chicken or a turkey and simmering the gravy, we were out looking for answers on the east wall of Chardonnet, at almost 4,000 meters’ altitude. We climbed to the summit and made the descent on that face of the mountain in an interesting combination of snow skiing and dry skiing, a term Vivian came up with to describe climbing downhill with skis on your feet. When we reached a spot where the snow ended or dwindled so much that, according to logic, we should set up a rappel, we kept going down with our skis on, supporting them against the rock, and as if they were crampons or climbing shoes, we climbed down with the help of our hands or ice axes until we reached the next snowy stretch.

  While at first this technique helped us avoid taking out the rope and leaving things on the mountain, there came a point when dry skiing demanded so much concentration and imagination th
at the time we spent looking for and executing the movements was twice what we would have needed to set up a good rappel. It was probably a completely absurd exercise, since with difficulties like that, it’s faster and safer to put on a harness and abseil down, or sling the skis onto your back and climb down with crampons on your feet. In any case, it was our absurdity. In the end, isn’t it just as absurd to take a complicated route up a mountain when you could also climb an easier and safer way? And by the same token, isn’t it pointless to climb mountains in the first place?

  The path we’d opened up wasn’t the one Vivian had imagined, the one that had captivated him for a long time. We had to wait until the next spring for the conditions to be right to try again. Right after the last stage of the Pierra Menta, which Mathéo Jacquemoud and I won, I got another message. “Cheers, you’re an artist! Congrats! Do you feel like trying Chardonnet on Tuesday?”

  The next Sunday was the last event in the Skyrunning World Cup. I came in first. With time, however, I’ve learned that you have to leave rest until later, especially if you have a chance to spend a good day in the mountains. And the descent Vivian was proposing would be worth it.

  When we climbed the route we’d imagined we would come down by, we realized how beautiful the line was. It wasn’t an esquí de pendiente descent to be valued for how steep it was. Or for its length. Or for the trickiness of the dry-ski approach. Or for the climb. It was a journey on skis across an enormous mountain wall. The words ski and mountaineering carry all the meaning. It was a five-hour celebration of sensations that culminated in a sunset just as we reached the glacier again. We were slaves to movement who had achieved the fluidity to swerve down a half-moon-shaped stretch of snow in the middle of the red granite wall of a mountain.

  Everest in

  Winter

  When you think of Nepal, what comes to mind are majestic mountains, tropical forests, and rustic villages scattered across silent valleys. But my first steps there were permeated with insufferable heat, dusty air, the stench of pollution, and the racket of thousands of cars horns honking all at once. I was in the midst of all this, bewildered by the chaos, when Jordi Tosas and Jordi Corominas, who’d been waiting for me at the airport, grabbed me by the hand to rescue me and took me off to discover the enormous mountains. It was February 2012.

  We went alone to a valley on the border of Nepal and Tibet, and for four weeks we became part of the landscape of mountains that touch the sky, higher than the so-called death zone. We skied slopes covered in powder, climbed massive walls of ice, and walked across endless moraines to reach the highest points. We didn’t reach any summits, but on our journeys up the mountains and their walls, with every attempt and at every step, I learned more than ever before. I learned that simplicity is the hardest thing to learn in this world of inhuman dimensions, since it’s the purest form of commitment and discomfort.

  The expedition can be summarized quickly: three guys, three backpacks, three pairs of skis, a small tent, a spoon for sharing food, and one freeze-dried meal a day for the three of us. All this to spend a month in the mountains, where they taught me what the Himalayas were really like—solitary, distant, and deserted—where our presence left no trace but some footprints in the snow, which disappeared after a few hours, melted by the sun or buried under a fresh dusting of powder. They taught me that if you want to climb as simply as possible, the way the Jordis recommended, all you really need—to climb any mountain in the world—fits into a forty-liter backpack. I ended up filling that backpack to the brim with other treasures: the silences between the few words they spoke—you could fill an encyclopedia with them—and the idea that less is more, and doing something means nothing, but how you do it means everything.

  SOME MOUNTAINEERS ARE DETERMINED NOT TO LET THE SPORT evolve. They’re like a kind of mountain Amish who reject the technology offered by technical progress and the new equipment that lets us climb mountains more easily. These traditionalists won’t take cable cars to the summit or grab on to fixed ropes in the mountains to avoid plunging to their deaths. They refuse to rely on bottled oxygen, which would allow them to climb better, and choose to stay in a cramped tent eating freeze-dried food when they could be in a camp equipped with comforts like internet and delicious food. And all this just because they don’t want to be packed into a helicopter to get there!

  Once they reach the mountain, they’d rather carry everything on their backs than distribute it among some porters who live on what they earn from their work. But don’t these people go to the store in a car? Don’t they take an elevator once they get home? Do they light their nightstand with candles?

  I’d been hearing about these people for a while, and I’d even read about them. From time to time I’d run into one of them, but it’s difficult to tell them apart from everyone else since they blend into the rest of society well. Your physics or philosophy teacher might belong to this clan without you knowing. Or that computer programmer who uses strange words to talk about his job, or the supermarket cashier who scans the barcodes, or the guy who stops you in the street when there’s construction going on. You won’t know who they are until you see them refuse the amenities available on the mountain.

  On that trip to Nepal in 2012, I got involved with two members of this cult without fully realizing until it was too late: Jordi Tosas and Jordi Corominas. And ever since then, I’ve been part of that band of loonies. I noticed the first symptoms of my abduction when I caught myself uttering the words of the gurus in this sect—words like “We shouldn’t adapt the mountains to our needs but work on our abilities to adapt ourselves to the mountains.” Now that I think of it, maybe going against evolution is the perfect way to evolve.

  SOME YEARS LATER, IN 2017, WHEN WINTER WAS ALMOST OVER, I was set to return in a few weeks to the Himalayas. Since that previous summer, I’d been thinking about the areas I needed to improve to be more efficient and, as Jordi Tosas put it, to become a sniper. The first change I needed to make had to do with the upcoming trip. It was essential for it to be short, so as not to waste my energy or motivation on travel, and to achieve this, I had to work hard on the logistics. The China Tibet Mountaineering Association, which grants mountain-climbing permits, and the other agencies involved in the trip all needed to understand that tourism wasn’t my goal. I didn’t want to visit Kathmandu and make little stops along the way, visiting landmarks and slowly acclimating. What I wanted was to get to the mountains as fast as possible because I would be already acclimated.

  Acclimation was the second point I needed to work on. Based on my experiences in previous years, I had designed a protocol that consisted of my spending three hundred hours at a high altitude before the climb, either training or sleeping. The training was very intense, since in the morning I went out to the mountains near my home on the Norwegian west coast on skis from four to ten, then in the afternoon I ran intensely at a high altitude for an hour. After this, I was so beat that the dizziness lasted a couple of hours. The morning training prepared me physically and also mentally, with the goal of feeling comfortable on the mountain. The great difficulty of high mountains is not feeling good because the conditions are so different from day-to-day life. I had to prepare my body and mind to feel a certain level of comfort in situations that might arise. This is what we usually call accepting compromise, which just means coming to terms with the uncertainty of what might happen.

  When you’re in an uncertain situation, you need to be able to control your emotions, even find a way to eliminate them, and let reason and instinct lead your actions.

  MY HEART WAS BEATING HARDER. PUM-PUM, PUM-PUM. NOT FASTER, but with greater intensity. Each stroke made me tremble, as if reminding me I was alive, that my heart was there, working to keep me in the world. My legs wanted to move forward, but I didn’t know what was happening; something was preventing them, slowing their pace, maybe waiting for a sign that could be translated into an excuse to turn around and go back to flatter terrain.

  I felt fea
r and desire at the same time. I slowed my pace, inspecting the wall up ahead, examining every centimeter so precisely that I felt my hands sweat inside my gloves, as if they were already gripping the ice axes. I would have paid money to have already begun to climb, but at the same time, navigating that unknown ocean in the shape of an icy stone wall was what I feared most. For days, I had fantasized, imagining my body as it climbed. I was fully motivated, and there was nothing I wanted more than to be doing it. But paradoxically, instead of accelerating, my pace had slowed down. My senses, highly concentrated, searched for the tiniest signal, seeking a final excuse to quit with a clear conscience, convinced that this wasn’t a defeat but rather a victory for experience and good judgment.

  With my brain a battleground between rational and emotional urges, I gradually approached the wall. I stopped for a moment at its base, where a small crevasse opened beneath me. It was time to make the final decision. Which of the warring sides would win? My instinct for comfort or my acceptance of compromise?

  I drove the two ice axes in and began to climb.

  Though I hadn’t reached the point of no return, since I could still retrace the meters I had climbed, I knew there was only one possible direction: straight ahead and up.

  The ice slope became progressively vertical, and I climbed at a constant, melodic pace, fluid and calm. A first vertical section took me to a short, more comfortable area where I could rest my forearms, which were beginning to accumulate lactic acid. As I stretched my arms to relax them, I looked down: about 80 meters away I could make out my footprints in the snow, zigzagging until they reached the wall; farther down, the thread diminished and disappeared at the end of the valley.