Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(53)
There is a pleasure in outdistancing one’s companions. It would be a saintly nature that did not feel this. Logan, like others, began to feel that the future was the big mountains—that was where climbing had to go. The days of significant achievement in rock climbing were over. The need for something conceptually interesting took him to what has been called the most difficult climb on the continent. In 1978 he did the Emperor Face of Mt. Robson in Canada.
“It was something everybody wanted to climb,” he says. “Yvon Chouinard wanted to do it—he said it was the hardest climb there was. And Jeff Lowe—it was his life’s ambition.” Logan says it without malice. He did it, they didn’t—it could have been the other way around. He’s like a great jockey who explains matter-of-factly that he merely had the best horse. It was some horse. Five or six thousand feet of extreme climbing. The last pitch alone, at the top, took them eight hours.
His business requires only eight months a year; the rest of the time he can do as he likes. “I feel like I’m on top again of the world of climbing. I’m very excited that there’s an activity I can be on the leading edge and push the limits of—that’s very appealing to me.
“There was a time.” Logan says, “when I climbed in Eldorado and knew every car that drove in, when every good climber in the country knew every other good climber. I can remember when I went into the Hiking Club looking for a partner, I was leading 5.7s and 5.8s, even some 5.9s. They said, ‘Get out of here, kid. If you could climb that well, we’d have heard of you.’”
He sits silent for a while.
“Wayne Goss is a commodities broker in Chicago now. Dalke is a drapery hanger in Boulder. Layton Kor is a bricklayer and a Jehovah’s Witness.” He pauses. “All of them finished with climbing,” he says.
Life
August 1979
The Alps
The great Alps link one in some way to one’s immortality.
—Hilaire Belloc
I once spent a night sleeping, more or less, beneath a huge boulder that formed a kind of cave in the mountains above Chamonix. It was at the base of the Dru, a legendary towering granite spire 1,500 feet high. I was alone, paying tribute. Sometime after midnight there was a distant sound: thunder. Slowly it grew closer and soon a tremendous storm began. The very rock above me seemed to tremble in the thunderclaps. I almost imagined it would be split by a bolt of lightning to reveal me, insectlike, at the foot of a towering, angry mountain god. The storm finally passed, but I lay awake until dawn. The Alps are famous for swift changes of weather. In the middle of summer climbers can be caught in blizzards, occasionally with tragic results.
It was in Chamonix that I first climbed, and learned to ski in St. Anton, famed places both, one in France and the other in Austria but each in the Alps, the great upper story of Europe. From the mountains, in all directions, flow mighty rivers, the Rhine, Rh?ne, Po, and Danube; a necklace of immortal cities lies in the surrounding foothills and plains: Nice, Grenoble, Geneva, Turin, Milan, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, and, stretching a bit, Venice. You are simultaneously in the center of civilization and the most majestic, thrilling wilderness.
It is essentially a geologic wilderness: fierce, jagged peaks in parallel series. The timberline is relatively low; above the trees typically are meadows that for centuries have been used for summer grazing. There are few wild animals.
The civilization of this rugged area is found in the many towns and mountain inns and huts. In the Alps, as in most of Europe, you eat well—it is part of the culture. Bread is still handmade, the butter is fresh, many things come from farms nearby.
Much has changed in this tumultuous century—the population has flowed into cities, with their hectic and somewhat artificial life—removed from the forests, streams, silence. But like a great island the mountains stand, safe from development, useless in the most noble sense.
These are the Alps. High up, near the sky. Walking a path far from anything made by man, the sudden sound one hears is that of a cowbell. A farmer’s small herd, here in the clouds, is just beyond the bend.
National Geographic Traveler
October 1999
Offering Oneself to the Fat Boys
I can’t remember when I started to ski powder—when I had to, probably. Like all hard lessons it left its imprint, a word that is a symbol, since the track of skis in untouched snow, their pure, solitary signature, is not the least of pleasures.
Among innumerable times, one that stands out in memory was when a doctor I knew from New York came out for a week to ski and said, Why don’t we meet on the top in the morning? That night it snowed. In the morning there was at least a foot and a half of fresh powder covering everything. The ride up was cold. Snow was blowing from the crest.
The doctor had an instructor, Dennis, lean and good-natured. The three of us stood on the Shoulder of Bell in Aspen. The run dropped like a stone through the trees below. Dennis smiled. It looked great, he said. He offered some advice, “Always start with your skis pointing straight down,” and pushed off.
They say that all men are subject to feelings of doubt at one time or another, but I remember thinking, Is he? He was going down like a leaf in a stream, bouncing from side to side over bumps, stumps, who knew what, snow flying from his legs. There’s no choice: he goes, you go. It was one of the runs of my life.