Above the Clouds Read online

  I DON’T THINK THERE’S A BEST OR WORST STYLE—OR WAY—TO CLIMB A mountain. The purest way is almost impossible, due to our limitations as a species in the natural world. Michael Reardon, one of the most prolific solitary climbers ever, said that if you set out barefoot, without knowing the way, and without any chalk or rope, you can consider yourself to be climbing; everything else is commitment. And each and every one of us lives with this commitment. Our ethics are the rules we impose on ourselves and apply to the actions we carry out, but they relate to the ethics of each individual; we do not impose them on others. While commitment is identical for everyone when it comes to races—and even then, there are judges, referees, and tests to make sure everything is in order—in mountain expeditions, the decision should be an internal, personal one.

  THERE IS ONLY ONE RAPID ASCENT I CAN SAY I’M ABSOLUTELY PROUD of, for having achieved total optimization. This is the Cervino ascent. Maybe it’s because when I was little, I had an enormous poster of this mountain in my room, or because the time in which Bruno Brunod had climbed it (three hours fourteen minutes) seemed like a dream, one I believed impossible to achieve. The ascent is a beautiful one, and I mustered enough motivation and patience to prepare for it.

  On August 1, 2013, I took my truck and headed to Cervinia in the Aosta Valley, and settled into the slope that unfolds at the foot of Cervino—Matterhorn. I had no particular date in mind to attempt the climb and no pressure to do so before moving on to other projects. For two weeks, I went to the summit almost every day, regardless of conditions, to get to know the mountain well, to see how the sun’s heat affected the stone it fell on by the hour, and to interiorize each of the movements I had to make to follow my path. In short, to get to know it until I had made it my home and felt like a part of it.

  Every morning I got up and watched the mountain from the truck window while I had breakfast, assessing any changes in the conditions of the snow and rock. At the same time, I sensed my body preparing itself. Even on the eve of the Sierre-Zinal race, which took place on the northern face of the mountain, I went up to the summit. At that moment, I wasn’t interested in any competition result or future project. The only thing on my mind was preparing myself to the maximum and waiting for the ideal conditions.

  On August 21, I felt like my body’s condition and the conditions on the mountain had aligned. It hadn’t rained or snowed for days, the rock was dry, the weather warm, and after nine ascents in the previous two weeks, I knew the route perfectly and was both physically and mentally prepared. I waited until the afternoon to avoid running into anyone on the mountain, and for the sun to have melted the ice from the night before and the rock to have more grip. When the bells chimed three, I left the bell tower’s shadow and carried out each movement to climb up and down the mountain in two hours fifty-two minutes, just as I’d planned.

  UNFORTUNATELY, I CAN’T SAY THE SAME FOR THE OTHER PEAKS I’VE climbed with the same intention of climbing them fast. I have not prepared as much or given them so much effort. I’ve always tried to do as well as I can, seeking the best conditions, but have never had the patience to wait more days than planned for them to be optimal. I’ve never worked so hard on a route that I made it “mine,” or been vigilant enough for my physical and mental condition to be one hundred percent. Of course, this isn’t to say that I’m not proud. While on Cervino, I learned to use the tools necessary to reach the summit as fast as my abilities allowed; in my other ascents, I didn’t want to waste so much time preparing or seeking that level of detail. I learned to go fast, even when I was in poor condition, like when I climbed Denali while feeling unwell—with no assistance and struggling against myself, I found out how far my body could go when it was rebelling. In all of my climbs, I have gotten to know myself better, and to know how fast I can go in different circumstances and with different levels of preparation.

  I’m too impatient. I don’t know if that’s a virtue. I admire the approach of those who work hard on details, but I would never make the sacrifice to set a spectacular record or win a victory for the ages if I had to spend a year without doing anything else to achieve it. For example, my perfect fortnight was in July 2015. I began with an extreme ski descent of Mont Maudit and went on through a couple of days of nonstop activity in the Grandes Jorasses. After that, I did a vertical 1K race in Chamonix, then squeezed in a photo session that night with a sponsor, and the next morning accompanied Karl Egloff to help him try to break the time-to-ascend record of Mont Blanc, which I had set with Mathéo Jacquemoud two years earlier. The idea was to take it at a good pace along the paths and shortcuts I knew for 1 or 2 kilometers of slope until he began to get away from me, but since I’d been feeling good from the beginning, we went all the way to the summit together. Even though the snow conditions weren’t ideal and Karl wasn’t feeling great, we made it up and down in just over five and a half hours. That same night, Emelie and I went to the United States, first to run the Mount Marathon in Alaska and five days later the Hardrock 100 in Colorado.

  I BELIEVE YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE AND YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE MOST OF every second. I guess this impatience has led me down a self-taught path since usually, when I have wanted to go out and do some activity, I have never wanted to wait for a friend to be free or to expand my circle of acquaintances by going with someone new. So, my solution has been to go alone and learn by following the patterns of my mistakes and successes. That’s how I climbed my first routes over ice and rock, and how I completed the majority of my ascents. It’s a slower path than if you climb with friends or mentors, because with certain challenges you need a clear idea of the risks and shouldn’t doubt your abilities. When you go it alone, you integrate and consolidate what you learn more concretely, and you have to rely solely on your imagination to escape difficulties.

  Though I also have to admit that there comes a point where you can’t go any farther alone . . .

  Everest in

  Summer

  When I arrived in Rongbuk, I jumped out of the car and observed the mass of tents at the Everest base camp. Until then, I had always gone to the Himalayas in the off-season and had always been able to enjoy the solitude. That’s why, as I sat in my seat, my eyes almost popped out of my head at the small city of tents of every size and color that made up the camp. I could hear voices speaking in many languages and smell food cooked with African spices and olive oil. I got out of the vehicle that had brought me from nearby Cho Oyu, where I had been with Emelie all those months ago, and wandered around until I found Sébastien Montaz’s tent. My eyes weren’t yet accustomed to the landscape, which looked halfway between mountain and city. What I had seen eight months earlier, when I had been here for the first time, was still engraved on my memory.

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST 2016. WE HAD ARRIVED AT RONGBUK after two weeks, during which the agency we’d hired in Lhasa, the center of Tibetan Buddhism, to set up logistics on the mountain—a tent with a kitchen and eating area, a month’s worth of food, a cook, and the air and car trips from Nepal to Tibet—drove us a little crazier than we’d expected. They showed up with a new problem every day, and it wasn’t clear when we would finally leave. In the end, we were so fed up that one day we ran out of patience and went to the nearby Langtang Valley to let off some steam and escape the polluted city air. After a week—About time!—we could finally leave for Tibet in search of the thin mountain air we longed for.

  The journey to Rongbuk is incredible. The magnificent Buddhist temples of cities like Xigatse, in immaculate shades of white and gold, contrast with the surrounding parched landscape and the Tibetan Plateau’s endless miles of savannah, at an altitude of about 5,000 meters. The monotony of the land’s gentle undulations is interrupted only by its great lakes and the rivers that cross it. Strings of eye-catching prayer flags announce the proximity of a village.

  The road that crosses this region is perfectly paved, and after a few hours, we left the plain behind. The landscape’s undulations became more pronounced before we reach
ed the top of a hill and the magnificent ridge of the Himalayas appeared. An impassable barrier of white giants rising out of a brown and yellow plain. Straight from the flatlands to 8,000 meters. To the left, Makalu and Chomo Lonzo; to the right, Cho Oyu and Gyachung Kang; and in the middle, making its neighbors look puny by comparison, stands Everest. Between the rocky Kangshung wall of Lhotse and the snowy north wall of Nuptse, a perfectly proportioned triangle is drawn on the sky, painted white by the summer snows, with two parallel lines cut into it, dropping directly from the summit to the valley, the Norton and Hornbein Couloirs.

  We were eager to merge with that white ocean, but before going into the valleys we had to stay a few more days in Tingri, one of the last villages before base camp. We always had to wait until tomorrow, even though we didn’t know what we were waiting for. When we finally managed to get to base camp, twenty days after leaving home, the impatience to get moving and go up the mountain was eating away at me. It was August 20, the same day Reinhold Messner had ascended alone and without oxygen in 1980, up this same slope, in the midst of a monsoon.

  We had arrived two weeks later than anticipated, feeling like we’d been wasting our time, and got to work straightaway to speed up our acclimation. No sooner had we arrived than I ran up to a peak 6,600 meters from base camp, and the next day, taking advantage of the summer heat, 7,000 meters up the North Col, in sneakers. The sun had softened the snow, and I managed to slide down on the soles of my shoes as if they were skis. I wanted to go out running or climbing every day, to put my physical state to the test, but Jordi Tosas wouldn’t stop telling me:

  “Be careful! It’s normal to be nervous and want to do more than necessary and go up quickly at the beginning of an expedition, but everything’s going to be decided in just two days at the end, and then you’ll need to have your batteries charged. You need to act like a sniper and not get stressed before it’s time.”

  WHEN YOU PREPARE FOR AN EXPEDITION, IT’S IMPORTANT TO GATHER the maximum amount of information before planning an assault on the summit. But there’s no need to exaggerate. If you spend too much of the day studying the weather and waiting for the perfect conditions, you’ll end up thinking that opportunities are passing you by, and that maybe you should take a risk every now and then and go on up. It’s difficult to achieve perfection both in your performance and in the conditions. In the end, you have to learn to set out without worrying so much and struggle along with whatever you get.

  We had been set up on the mountain for a week, and the forecasts agreed that there were only three or four days of good weather left before a storm took hold on the north face of Everest again, and if we didn’t make the most of that window, we’d have to wait until the snows passed and twiddle our thumbs for another week until good weather left the mountain in acceptable shape. Otherwise, attempting it would be suicide, climbing in a minefield of avalanches. In the Himalayas in summer, you can believe the weather forecast if you want, but the algorithms aren’t too precise when it comes to determining how much snow will fall. You must trust your own daily observations of the sky.

  We noticed we were waking to a blue sky bathed in sunlight practically every morning, and around midday, the clouds would begin their procession from the south and accumulate, building castles with enormous gray towers over the plains of Nepal. These fortresses would advance north until they collided with the highest peaks, exploding into storms. Sometimes, their rage was trained on the south face, and we had a great time applauding the fireworks of lightning on display for us at the camp, on the opposite slope of Everest. At other times, the clouds came to greet us, forcing us to wait in our tents until they passed, listening to the tap-tap of the snow against the walls. But it was rare for us to wake up in the morning and see more than 10 or 15 centimeters of fresh snow, which melted with the sun’s morning visit.

  Yet now the dark swirling clouds on the south face were getting ready to burst with full force on this side of the mountain. If Everest had to give us a dance, it should be before the light display of the storm began.

  Our base camp was in the middle of a rocky moraine between Rongbuk and the Everest glacier. We had intended to pitch our tents at the foot of the mountain, but the yaks carrying our equipment had decided to leave us stranded halfway there. We set up the four tents on a rocky slope, clumsily trying to pile the rocks into flat platforms. The place was so spectacular it was overwhelming. The moraine we were in was very large, with peaks up ahead of 6,000 to 7,000 meters, and behind us, a small ring of other peaks of the same height that we could climb with our skis some afternoon when we were bored. If the tedium lasted longer, we could always ascend Changtse, a friendly mountain at 7,500 meters, and go up along its north slope, knowing this would offer an impeccable view of Everest.

  The only disadvantage of our exceptional lookout point was that it was so far from the top of the world. Each morning we had to travel about 10 kilometers before reaching the glacier and starting to climb, and when we came back tired, we had to do the same in reverse. But at last we were on the mountain and could do something every day.

  WE ASSUMED WE’D HAVE A WINDOW OF GOOD WEATHER FOR JUST A few days, so we decided to finish acclimating and try to attack the summit. The previous days had been intense, and my body seemed to be asking for a break, but I’m not very good at relaxing, and I agreed with Sébastien to do one last, high climb to finish off the acclimation before our definitive attempt.

  After dinner, we agreed to get up at five in the morning to start the ascent and went to our tents to get some rest. I got my backpack ready and fell asleep like a log as soon as I got into my sleeping bag.

  I awoke to the sun caressing my skin through the tent’s translucent walls. This is one of the nicest morning feelings, when it’s still cold outside and the first rays of light appear, getting trapped between the walls of the tent and turning it into a makeshift sauna after the inhospitable cold of the night before. But suddenly I was startled to realize that the sun shouldn’t be up yet. My sense of well-being vanished. I looked for my watch among the clothes I used as a pillow. “Damn it, ten past six!” I leapt out of my sleeping bag and got dressed in a rush. I didn’t even eat breakfast. I grabbed my backpack and literally set off running up the moraine. I don’t know if it was the fright or the adrenaline, but in any case, all the tiredness I had built up disappeared, and I ran as fast as I could.

  After half an hour, I was already halfway to the foot of the mountain, in half the time it usually took me. When the sun began to burn brightly, I slathered my face in sunscreen and, without stopping, looked for my sunglasses. I began to feel nervous because they weren’t on my head, or in my pockets, or in my backpack, which I tipped out onto the ground in a rage like an evil beast. Nothing. No sign of my sunglasses. “Fucking hell!” Without even thinking about it, I left my backpack on the ground and ran down the moraine to the tent. No sooner had I opened the zipper than there they were. Seven sharp! As I was about to dart off again, Sitaram, the Nepalese cook who had accompanied us, stuck his head out of his tent.

  “Breakfast, Kilian!”

  “No way, I don’t have time, Sitaram, I’m heading back up. See you this afternoon.”

  “Don’t run—it’s not good for you at this altitude!”

  I didn’t even have time to hear the last thing he said since I was already retracing the path I’d taken before. I kept going, this time with everything I needed.

  About three hours later, I saw Séb a few hundred meters away, heading up the wall of Changtse toward the North Col.

  “God damn it, next time you could wake me up!” I shouted, half joking and half serious, once I was close enough for him to hear. I felt great, but now it was late, and the snow was warming up very quickly.

  “Oh, I thought you wanted to sleep a little more, and I knew you’d catch up with me anyway,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “I think we’re too late. The sensations are good, but we shouldn’t push our luck. We’re going to
need it later on! If we go down now we’ll be able to rest, and tomorrow or the next day we can try again.”

  THE NEXT DAY, I WENT UP ALONE. MAYBE I WAS A LITTLE ASHAMED OF my mistake the day before, and mad that I hadn’t been able to acclimate above 7,000 meters, so I set out determined to overcome that altitude. My companions stayed at the camp to save their energy. I had the whole mountain to myself, and I smiled with a certain amount of selfish possessiveness. When I reached the glacier, I decided not to head toward the North Col for fear of the crevasses and chose a line on the right side of the northeast face. Between the spurs of rock and seracs that crown the North Col, there was a corridor with a slope that seemed steep enough to have shed the accumulated snow but not to slow down my pace. I decided to cross it. The conditions were perfect and the snow easily supported my weight, and a few hours later I left the sixty-degree slopes and came out onto the north ridge at an altitude of 7,500 meters. The snow wasn’t melting, and I found myself buried up to my waist.

  Every step required immense effort and precise choreography: I began by flapping my arms like a butterfly’s wings to remove the first layer of snow, then I lifted my foot to the height of my knee, planting it 30 centimeters ahead. As I watched it sink, I trod gently to compact the snow before putting all my weight on it. Sunk up to the waist again, I did the dance with my other leg. And so on, thirty times over.