True Summit by David Roberts

Storm, Rébuffat had sung the virtues of the cordée —the pairing of soul mates bound together by a nylon rope. Yet it seemed that Rébuffat himself, while treasuring the companionship of any number of loyal teammates, had never found his ideal partner, the man with whose destiny he wished to intertwine his own. Now Don and I discovered, in the example of Lachenal and Terray, what the cordée meant at its most crystalline.
    In one canny passage in Conquistadors (I think I learned it by heart), Terray analyzed that partnership:
    We climbed very much better together than either of us did apart. Our differing characters and physical aptitudes complemented each other, each of us making up for the other’s weaknesses.
    Lachenal was by far the fastest and most brilliant climber I have ever known on delicate or loose terrain. His dexterity was phenomenal, his vitality like that of a wild beast, and his bravery amounted almost to unawareness of danger. On his day he was capable of something very like genius, but strenuous pitches gave him trouble, and above all he was unpredictable. Perhaps because of his very impulsiveness and incredible optimism he lacked patience, perseverance and forethought. He also suffered from a bad sense of direction.
    For myself, I was the less gifted partner on any kind of ground; but I had more stamina and was stronger, more obstinate and more reflective. I suppose I was the moderating element in the team, but it also seems to me that I gave it the stability and solidity necessary for the really major undertakings.
    The apotheosis of the cordée came in 1947, when Lachenal and Terray made the second ascent of the Eiger Nordwand, the deadliest wall in the Alps. Terray had devoted a long and wonderful chapter in Conquistadors to this stunning climb. Don and I each read the chapter again and again.
    Inevitably, we began to identify with Terray and Lachenal. The analogy was not perfect, but close enough to allow our fantasy to blossom. Like Terray, Don was stocky and strong, with immense stamina. He was far more deliberate than I, and could wait out anystorm with a placid repose that it was hopeless for me to try to emulate. Like Lachenal, I was thin and relatively lithe. My forte in the mountains was the same as Lachenal’s, loose and mixed rock and snow. And, as Don once told me, I was the most impatient person he had ever met.
    We climbed together every chance we could get—on spring and autumn weekends at the Shawangunk Cliffs in New York state, in winter on the frozen ice gullies of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, over Christmas on ten-day trips into the high Colorado Rockies, where we made a number of first winter ascents. And in the summer of 1964, we locked fates on a two-man expedition to the unexplored east ridge of Mount Deborah in Alaska. That expedition—a grinding forty-two-day failure in the course of which several times we came close to getting killed—remains the most intense ordeal of my life. Near the end of that demoralizing journey, Don, with his Terray-like perseverance, still longed to head east through the Hayes Range in search of other mountains, while I wanted only to flee south to the Denali Highway and hot showers and cheeseburgers in greasy cafes.
    At some point, our identification with Terray and Lachenal took on a power that transcended mere hero worship. Like the kids I had grown up with, playing pickup baseball in the vacant lots of Boulder, pretending to be Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, Don and I started to share the conceit that we were Terray and Lachenal. We went so far as to address each other as “Lionel” and “Louis.”
    Passages from Conquistadors of the Useless, as well as other chronicles we could come across that detailed our heroes’ conquests, became canonic mottos on our lips. On the crux move of a route on Cannon cliff, for example, Don might shout out, “Guido, the sardine tin!” In M. A.