Climbing Quote of the Week: Gaston Rébuffat

The great French alpinist and rock climber Gaston Rébuffat, born in Marseille, France in 1921 and died of cancer in Paris in 1985, was one of the best French climbers in the mid-20th century. He began to climb at age 14 on his home crags, the soaring limestone cliffs at the Calenques along the Mediterranean shore and Mont Sainte-Victoire, a limestone mountain often painted by Cezanne. Every summer he migrated north to climb in the Alps above Chamonix. Rébuffat became the first climber to ascend the six great north faces—Grandes Jorasses, Piz Badile, Petit Dru, Matterhorn, Eiger, and Cima Grande di Lavaredo—of the Alps. He was also a key member on the 1950 French expedition that climbed Annapurna, the first 8,000-meter peak ever climbed. Over his 50-year climbing career, he made over a thousand first ascents, including many in the Mont Blanc massif.

Besides being a prolific climber, Gaston Rébuffat, who had no education beyond high school, became a foremost mountaineering writer. He penned 20 books, which were translated into many languages; wrote a climbing column for the Paris newspaper Le Monde, started his own publishing house in Geneva; and wrote and narrated several award-winning films. I first read Rébuffat’s classic book Between Heaven and Earth in 1970, the year it was first published in English. His elegant lyrical prose thrilled my imagination with its reverant and lucid description of the mountains and climbing, while the stylish and excellent photographs of Rébuffat let me experience granite heights rising above glaciers, the ring of a steel piton pounded in a thin crack, and the swirl of snow and cloud on an alpine face. Lastly, part of Rebuffat’s legacy is a photograph of his lean figure standing atop a thin spire and silhouetted against his beloved Mont Blanc; a photograph that is currently racing into far-off outer space on Voyager I, where perhaps some distant alien will see that fragment of the human spirit.

This quote comes from Rébuffat’s excellent book Starlight and Storm, a recollection of his adventures on the great north faces in the Alps.

In this modern age, very little remains that is real. Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind and the stars. They have all been neutralized: the rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes so fast and makes so much noise, and men hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its colour, its smell and the way it shimmers when the wind caresses it. What a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet! Up there he is surrounded by the silence of forgetfulness. If there is a slope of snow steep as a glass window, he climbs it, leaving behind him a strange trail. If there is a rock perfect as an obelisk, he defies gravity and proves that he can get up anywhere.

Buy Gaston Rébuffat’s books:
Starlight and Storm Classic Rébuffat with stylish prose and enough adventure and excitement to keep your palms sweaty and your ice axe sharp.
The Mont Blanc Massif: The 100 Finest Routes This is more than a mere guidebook to climbing the Mont Blanc Massif. It's an inspiring compilation of words and photos celebrating the joy of alpine climbing.
Men and the Matterhorn An informative historical book about the history of climbing on the Matterhorn.
On Ice and Snow and Rock Another classic book about alpine climbing.

Photo above: Gaston Rebuffat aid climbing near Mont Blanc, France.
Photograph courtesy Pierre Tairraz: Between Heaven and Earth