A Personal Memoir
I was twenty-one years old, fresh out of St. Stephen’s College, and I had already crossed the Himalayas on foot. Mont Blanc, I told myself, was practically a day trip.
That summer I was three weeks into a three-month circuit of Europe on a Eurail pass and five hundred dollars — money rationed like water in a desert. I had just been admitted to law school. But before the law could claim me, I had unfinished business with mountains.
I had earned that right. In 1974, on the White Sail expedition, I had climbed to 5,000 metres in the Himalaya. The following year, as Deputy Leader of the Lahul-Zanskar expedition, I had led a group from Manali to Kargil over Rohtang La, Shingo La and Pensi La — more than a month of serious high-altitude crossings with mules through genuinely dangerous terrain. On the top of Shingo La, at 18,000 feet, a snow leopard had killed one of our mules in the night. I had seen what mountains could do. Mont Blanc was 4,808 metres. I had been higher. I rolled into Chamonix with the quiet confidence of someone who does not yet know what he does not know.
What I needed was the basics: ice axe, boots, crampons, one jacket. I planned to climb in my jeans. At the gear shop I met Randy Jones from Colorado, who was planning the same climb the next morning. Then a Dutch father and his teenage son appeared with identical plans. The four of us looked at each other with the natural recognition of people heading to the same place, bought a rope between us, sorted a few essentials, and made our plan. We had known each other for perhaps an hour.
The Dutch father had watched with quiet amusement as I assembled my kit — ice axe, crampons, one jacket, and a plan to climb in jeans. He said nothing. He had been on enough mountains to know what that meant, and perhaps he assumed I would find out for myself.
The next morning we took the cable car and then the rack railway, and from the upper station walked straight toward the Goûter Hut, a small distant shape on the ridge ahead. We arrived in time for dinner. The price for the night nearly finished me — on my budget, the refuge fee was a serious assault. I paid it, wincing.
But the evening had something in store.
The Dutch teenager had altitude sickness. Not mild discomfort — the real thing. He sat pale and miserable at the dinner table and announced with total finality that he was going nowhere. He had been dragged on these expeditions by his father for years and he was done. He wanted no part of Mont Blanc, or any other mountain, ever again. His father was mortified.
And then, quietly, things began to fall into place: this sullen, grounded, altitude-flattened Dutch teenager was exactly my size.
He lent me everything. Thermals, proper mountaineering trousers, gloves, the lot. I had arrived in Chamonix planning to climb in jeans and left the hut better equipped than anyone on the rope. I accepted this without much analysis. Sometimes things just work out.
At one in the morning we left — Randy, the Dutch father, and I — moving in silence up the snowfields, headlamps cutting small cones of light into the dark. The valley had disappeared beneath cloud. Above us the stars were extraordinary, the way they only are at altitude — not decorative but structural, as if holding the sky in place.
I had expected the altitude to be nothing. I had been higher. But there is something about the Alps at night — thinner somehow, less sheltered than the great Himalayan valleys, the wind finding you without apology. My lungs registered their objection. I noted it and kept walking.
By the time the sky began to pale we were on the final ridge. The Bosses arête at dawn is one of those things that stays permanently in the eye — a narrow spine of snow and ice with Italy dropping away to the left in a vast, clean fall, and France somewhere below the clouds to the right. We moved carefully, the rope between us taut and honest, the wind coming at us from the Italian side, cold and indifferent and entirely magnificent.
Then the ridge flattened. We were on the summit.
We embraced like men who are embarrassed to embrace but cannot help it. We stood for fifteen minutes and looked at the Alps spread out below in the early morning light — France, Italy, Switzerland, the whole bright geography of Europe — and felt what you feel on summits, which resists language but not memory.
We were back at the refuge by midday. Exhausted, elated, briefly immortal.
This is where Randy and I made our one entirely avoidable mistake.
We looked at each other, we looked at the price list, and we said: no. We had already paid for one night at these prices and we were not doing it again. We would walk down to the valley. It was the decision of people temporarily insane with the endorphins of having just climbed a mountain. The train station was far below us. We were already running on empty. None of this registered.
We set off.
The descent that afternoon remains, half a century later, one of the more prolonged physical sufferings of my life. The euphoria burned off within the first hour. What remained was a fatigue that went into the legs and stayed — not soreness but depletion, something structural quietly removed. We kept moving because there was nothing else to do. The light began to go. We reached the valley near sunset, both of us finished in the most literal sense, unable to walk another step. And there was nowhere to stay.
Then we saw the farmhouse.
We knocked. A French farmer opened the door. He looked at the two young men on his step — wrecked, filthy, barely upright — and showed no surprise whatsoever. He had seen this before. He would see it again. Climbers had been crawling down that mountain and knocking on his door for years, and he had made his peace long ago with what that meant. He brought us in, fed us, and gave us warm beds for the night. The smell of wood smoke. The sound of silence.
I have stayed in a great many places since 1976. I remember that farmhouse more clearly than most of them.
I left Chamonix with something more than a summit. I returned several times over the years. The valley had got under my skin — as it does with most people who find their way there. But I never forgot that first time: twenty-one years old, five hundred dollars, and a pair of jeans I nearly wore up the highest mountain in the Alps.
The mountain was more generous to me than I deserved. I have tried not to forget that.
I had worked hard to be ready for that mountain — two Himalayan expeditions, real altitude, real terrain, real risk. But I had also been arrogant. I arrived in Chamonix thinking the Himalaya had taught me everything. It had not taught me humility. I had walked into that gear shop prepared to climb the highest peak in the Alps in jeans and a light sweater. In the middle of the night, stepping out of the refuge into that cold, I would not have lasted a hundred metres. The mountain would have punished me without hesitation, without apology. It was the Dutch boy’s altitude sickness — his misery, his refusal, his borrowed gear — that stood between my arrogance and a serious mistake.
What I know now, looking back across fifty years, is that the pieces fell into place the way they were supposed to. Randy at the gear shop. The Dutch boy’s altitude sickness. The farmer’s open door. When it is meant to happen, it happens. Every mountaineer knows this: you can be the best-prepared person on the hill and the weather will still cancel your summit, the conditions will still turn, chance will still have its say. I was twenty-one and I thought I was making it up as I went along. I was not. I was just showing up for something that was already arranged.
— P.S.B.