28 Feb 2006 les Houches
Do you believe in luck? Much has happened here in Chamonix that begs the question.
In the last month the skiing has been excellent, like a parson egg. That is good in parts. As usual the ice climbing has not been bad either. But the real story of the last month has been rather different.
First let me put our little world of mountains in the context of the outside world. Politics came to Chamonix with Nicolas Sarkozy (France's minister of the interior), who was to be accompanied to the top of the Brevent lift with members of the PGHM (our mountain gendarmerie). The gendarmes were specially chosen for the photo shoot. Like Napoleon, Sarko, they say is rather small. The gendarmes were supposedly chosen to make him look large. Or so the smiling locals tell me. It is not necessarily a bad thing to have a Napoleon complex, providing this future European leader retains his grasp on reality.
The grasp on reality... David Irving was jailed for Holocaust Denial by the Austrian legal system this week. Irving is clearly potty, but so are the Austrians; we might as well jail people for believing in Father Christmas, Intelligent Design or Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Well, maybe.
In any case, the story of what has been going on in our other reality has been grim to say the least.
One of the advantages of doing even the simplest mountain climbs in winter is the absence of other climbers, so thinking, I set off with Enda and Simon for the Arete des Cosmiques in unusually powdery conditions. It was slightly more difficult than normal for winter. To reach the Arete you traverse under the south side of the Aiguile du Midi and continue along under the South East side of the Arete. Looking up we saw a pair of climbers on the wide (and usually skiable) couloir east of gendarme 3730m. They were moving together, probably with a shortened rope between them. The couloir is a sort of short cut leaving out the starting ridge. They were saving time, by accepting a risk that the couloir was not safe.
There is something going wrong with people's risk assessment this year. A week ago the death toll in the the French Alps for this season was already 35. Even the SNGM (Syndicat National des Guides de Montagne) have felt the need to advise their members to be extra careful in the current conditions. Some of the accidents have been the stuff of horror movies; on the Viaduct St Marie in front of my own house an old rap sling broke, the climber had just removed the back-up. In the cascade des Favrands, above the Mont Blanc Tunnel entrance, a popular local school teacher and his companion were buried under several meters of snow, and the police do not expect to retrieve the bodies before spring. Above Vallorcine a snowboarder had his legs torn off by an avalanche, and yesterday another boarder was helicoptered off from (probably) the same place just before nightfall.
In some cases the accidents are just the result of ignorance. That is sad. In many other examples there seems to be a seriously limited understanding of risk assessment. In any case, I do not believe there is such a thing as luck in the mountains. If you decide to play russian roulette, you have already accepted that you have a one in six chance of losing. If you lose, that is statistics, not luck. The same can be said of mountains. In making a choice, though difficult to quantify, you have selected what you think is an appropriate level of risk.
On the Arete des Cosmiques, Gendarme 3730m is a beautiful granite monolith, like a giant orange crystal that is turned by a nice little rappel. At the bottom of the rappel we should have seen the tracks of the two climbers in the couloir, but instead there was the striated detritus of an avalanche, and a helicopter completing its rescue mission. In our local paper the next day it was reported that one of the climbers was probably paralyzed from the waist down. It was predictable that the slope would be loaded. The OHM (Office de Haute Montagne) publishes the recent snow and wind reports (www.ohm-chamonix.com/HIV/HMCond.php) which have some predictive value; a week ago there was a huge dump of snow with strong westerly winds. The climbers could have reduced their exposure to risk by a number of means such as following the edge of the couloir, or using a long rope and placing the occasional runner, or avoiding the couloir altogether and climb the ridge.
At the end of January JC Lafaille disappeared on Makalu. Climbers in Chamonix said they were saddened by the news, but not surprised. The first winter ascent, solo, of the mountain was a huge prize, accompanied by a huge risk. The consequences of any mistakes were were extremely high. Jean Christophe had accepted the gamble, and probably there was nothing wrong with his assessment of the risk. He just thought that the prize was worth it. After all, there is no such a thing as luck in the mountains.
