“Here, look at this,” Augustin says. He points to a yellowed, framed engraving between the doors to the men’s and women’s. It’s entitled “Val d’Anniviers 1878.” It’s hard to tell from which angle it was drawn. I recognize the peaks, but they’re coarsely sketched with brown ink, pointier and rougher than in real life, as if the artist unconsciously associated them with the crooked teeth in the mouth of a wolf. A reflection of the zeitgeist, I realize, in which the mountains must have been a hearth of dangers and local superstitions for the valley’s dwellers.
At the top are the names, in the same faded ink: Cervin, Dent Blanche, Garde de Bordon, Pointes du Mourti. The glaciers bulge out of the valleys, mightier and longer than in the twenty-first century. The reservoir of Moiry doesn’t exist yet. Where it is today, the drawing depicts a desolate, U-shaped valley, from which the glacier curls like a split tongue. And on the right, on what must be the west side, is another valley. Higher, with more rigid contours, smaller, but there it is. At the end of it, a dark, sharply crosshatched peak. A horned summit: a bull, a devil. The inscription above it says “Pointe Maudit.”
“That’s it!” I call out. “You see? It looks exactly the same here as when we saw it from the Rothorn, don’t you think?”
“These old names are pretty amusing. Cervin is now Matterhorn, even in the French-speaking cantons. And Gabelhorn is now Obergabelhorn.”
“But that basin, it seems to open up right above us, right over Grimentz, just like the map says. Weird, this engraving clears up more than all those pictures on the internet.”
I keep looking at it. The Maudit seems indisputably hostile. Something about the way the peak has been rendered larger than it really is, and the way the summit seems to lean forward, or how the valley, whose name isn’t mentioned on the map, seems to be full of shadows.
“What do you think? Should we just go?” Augustin asks. His eyes reflect the subtle fascination I see every time he thinks up a new project, a fascination that is the seed of obsessive possession.
“With zero information?”
“Old-school. We take some bivi gear and I can take your spare helmet from the trunk, which will save us a trip to the outdoor supply store. We search for a way up along the stream that comes down from the valley and climb that mountain, without any route planning. Should be cool, right? Like we’re pioneers.”
It does sound enticing.
It’s his kind of plan. Augustin’s heroes are the Edward Whympers and Geoffrey Winthrop Youngs of this world, erstwhile alpinists who performed their heroic virgin ascents without any trails or Gore-Tex gear.
“MeteoSchweiz says there’s only a chance of some local thunderstorms in the afternoon, so we could bivouac,” I suggest. I notice I’m getting excited. “Would make a big difference, if we leave the tent in the car.”
“And when we’re up there, we’ll decide on the best route. Neither of us knows anything about the Maudit. Where in the Alps can we still pretend we’re first-ascenters?”
“You sure you don’t want to go to the Jorasses?”
“We still have loads of time for that. There probably really is a misprint on the map, but there’s no way the Maudit could be higher than eleven five, twelve K at the most. If we set out from the bivi day after tomorrow and leave early, and if it isn’t too difficult, we can be back in the early afternoon. Evening at the latest. We’ll wind our way to Italy after that.”
That was the plan in a nutshell. Unprepared but determined, sure of our abilities, invigorated by the brief but intense bond that is forged between climbers during a delicate enterprise high up in the mountains, even if they aren’t friends in real life. Such a bond goes deeper than sea-level friendships. You pledge yourselves to each other’s lives, make a binding oath that, even in the most unthinkable circumstances, you will come back down together and alive.
It’s unfortunate that neither of us had a good command of French and therefore didn’t know what Le Maudit means.
??*
If this were a fiction, a sequence of increasingly confusing diary excerpts would now follow, detailing the approximately fifty-six hours that our expedition to that forlorn, forsaken place lasted. That’s the classic approach in these kinds of stories, because authors think that the tone of the firsthand narrative adds a dimension of realism. But it is in fact completely unrealistic for two reasons.
First, alpinists never take a diary in their backpack. Every ounce counts. When you frantically maneuver your way up a ninety-degree dihedral, eight yards above the last bolt, while your muscles are pumped full of lactic acid and the weight on your back pulls you further and further down, you thank yourself for chopping the handle off your toothbrush or for removing the labels from the zippers. I once had a mountain guide who always took a mass market paperback to kill time in the huts or bivouacs. When he’d read a page, he’d rip it out and use it as toilet paper. Wiping your ass with Tolstoy! Talk about efficiency.
The second reason is that you simply lack the time to write. A bivouac up in the mountains is time-consuming, cold, and uncomfortable. The only thing on your mind in those circumstances is staying alive, keeping warm, and preparing yourself as efficiently as possible for the next day’s climb.
So a diary entry is a no go. But I do have the photos.
[I uploaded them after all, Sam. I didn’t trust myself to be able to fully recall what happened up there without them, because my recollections were still confused and fragmentary. I thought the photos would at least trigger something. And fuck yeah, they did.]
They’re taken with the GoPro. I rarely shoot video in the mountains because I’ve noticed that photos have more impact and do a better job of representing their scale. The photo report of the Maudit consists of sixteen pics, all taken on the first day, during the approach and in the bivi. Of the climb itself I have none. The battery was dead by then. [And my iPhone? I hear you think. Yes, it was still working, but from the moment we entered the valley we lost the signal, so we had no way of calling the emergency services. And by the time the GoPro’s battery went dead, I was so busy keeping myself alive that taking pictures with my iPhone never even occurred to me.]
The first pic shows a barbed wire barrier in front of what looks like the beginning of a steeply descending trail on the densely wooded slopes above Grimentz. A yellow sign says accès interdit and Augustin is posing in front of it with a silly grin on his face, his rolled-up sleeping pad buckled to the side of his North Face backpack.