In 1965 the famous Italian alpinist Walter Bonatti spectacularly ended his career of “extreme climbing” by pioneering the most direct route up the north face of the Matterhorn, alone and in winter. Many people ask why men climb mountains, and often by the most difficult routes they can find. In the account of his last sensational feat in this wonderful book Bonatti offers a reason, almost as an aside. As he settled in for the night on a tiny ledge surrounded by rock, ice, blackness and intense cold, he could see Zermatt and the life of the valley below him. It was a life, he writes, “perhaps easy and alluring to one who, like me, was suspended between earth and sky, but so banal and disappointing, a man had to run away from it and somehow finish up here.”
Bonatti started young. He recalls how in the summer of 1949, aged 19, he and a friend climbed the north face of the Grandes Jurasses in the Mont Blanc group by the hideously precipitous Walker Spur. They couldn’t afford balaclavas, and their knapsacks, containing a few apples and tomatoes, were army surplus. Their rope was frayed hemp and they’d made their pitons themselves from an iron bar. It’s small wonder that these days Bonatti is an opponent of “Himalayan methods” in the Alps — advance parties who prepare the way with fixed ropes and tents — just as he’s skeptical of the benefits of sponsorship. He prefers to use the methods that sufficed for his 19th century predecessors such as Whymper — boots, an ice ax, a hammer and pitons, a rope, and little else.
On his third attempt, Bonatti conquered the Grand Capucin, a granite pinnacle in the Alps whose east face had up to then been thought unclimbable. The Italian city of Monza erupted in frenzy on his return, but his mother, long a victim of high blood pressure, was overcome by the excitement and suffered a fatal collapse. Bonatti was 21.
At the age of only 23, Bonatti was chosen to be a member of the 1954 Italian expedition to climb K2. This was seen as an enormously important project, something that would restore Italy’s national pride after its defeat in World War II. In the event it led to controversy that would pursue Bonatti for the next 40 years.
The two Italians who’d been selected to attempt the summit set off to establish a final camp at some 8,100m, while Bonatti and a Pakistani porter called Mahdi were told to follow them and take up oxygen cylinders, spending the night in the summit pair’s tent. Progress for everyone was extremely slow at that altitude and as night fell Bonatti and Mahdi hadn’t found their colleagues and the vital tent. Because their dangerous position made any movement in the dark out of the question, Bonatti and Mahdi were forced to spend the night in a shallow depression they’d scraped in the snow. At dawn they descended to the original, lower camp, leaving the oxygen where they’d spent the night, as the leading pair had told them to do in their last voice contact.
Mahdi lost his fingers and toes to frostbite and gangrene as a result of that night. Later an Italian newspaper printed two articles that suggested Bonatti had secretly planned to reach the summit with Mahdi ahead of the other two, that he had somehow been responsible for Mahdi’s frostbite, and that he had used some of the oxygen himself (despite not having the masks to make this possible), causing it to run out two hours before the successful pair reached the peak the following day.
Bonatti felt that he had effectively been abandoned by the pair in the only available tent, and could well have died, along with Mahdi, as a result. When he sued the Italian newspaper for libel, a court hearing found entirely in his favor. Rumors persisted in Italian climbing circles, however, and the disillusion that resulted led him to embark from then onwards on a largely solo climbing career.
After he retired from climbing in 1965, Bonatti explored remote places around the world as a correspondent for an Italian magazine, returning to, among other places, Patagonia, where he had achieved sensational success back in 1958, though failing to conquer the steeple-like Cerro Torre.
He had seen some disasters happen. On an attempt on the Central Pillar of Freney on Mont Blanc in the summer of 1961, for example, four of his companions lost their lives, each in different circumstances, but all essentially by freezing to death following extreme fatigue.
The Mountains of My Life is a collection of accounts culled from Bonatti’s nine books, together with some other material such as translator Robert Marshall’s analysis of what actually happened on K2. It’s the detail, much of it poetic, that makes this book come alive, and no account of one perilous ascent is like any other. But cold is cold whoever you are, and sharing three dried bananas between four people brings home the brutal situation on an icy rock face at night, however celebrated those involved might happen to be.
Sometimes in daydreams I see the 21-year-old Bonatti on the summit of the Grand Capucin, eating an apple and laughing into the sun. He stands for youth, something that will never come to any of us again. And climbing is an activity appropriate to the young — not done for money, or even fame, but to assert that you’re alive, something done in the short space in a human life when it can be done. And looking back, the old mountaineer can think “I can’t do that now, but I did it once.” Climbing, in other words, is a consolation for mortality, and there aren’t very many of those.
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