Conquistadors of the Useless

Lionel Terray's book is a hidden gem. Terray was a well-rounded true mountaineer. He got his start in the French military mountain patrol during World War II. His unit would scale mountains in proximity to, but higher than, German camps and then spread machine gun fire in the camp's vicinity. Never really aiming at the camp itself lest they hurt someone. How French! This book is richly narrated and includes chapters on Terray's ascent of the Eigerwand, and Annapurna among others. If you read this book you may get the idea that there are some mountaineers who do have some common sense. Terray was satisfied at times to put up a second ascent (Eiger) rather than risk all on a daring first-ascent, which in those days was usually suicide. He was on Maurice Herzog's Annapurna team and luckily was not on the summit team , most of whom survived but with fewer limbs. I highly recommend this book. It's great armchair reading.

Lionel Terray was one of the great clasic climbers and this book captures the spirit of those days. The accounts of the climbs are very richly told, they are not technical descriptions but beautiful stories told by a man who devoted his existence to the mountains. Anyone interested in the sport of climbing can benefit from this book, not from the technical side but from the spiritual side and the historical value of the many first ascents by Terray.

If you have read my other reviews on many of the mountaineering genre you will find that I personally find it very hard to find a modern mountaineering adventure story. Mountaineering literature is so suffused with the quest for money, huge personal egos and quests for climbing garbarge strewn summits that there is little time to note the adventure. In old mountaineering books they almost never have enough money, they climb with holes in their socks and equipment that make modern mountaineers shiver. They also summit and do routes of incredible complexity and skill that even modern mountaineers find hard to match -- and they all seem quite happy to hang off the Eiger North Face on a single piton...! Terray fits this genre par excellence. He was famous in his day, but his name is not often mentioned around campfires today... (he is perhaps the French equivalent of Moe Antoine of Britain). He climbed some very technical routes with many first ascents, but throughout the book, the amazing thing is that he also does a lot of very hard climbs that most people, even in mountaineering circles have never heard of, nor want to undertake... Hence I believe the Title of his book -- the conquering of brilliant but largely useless summits. Terry offers great and nailbiting vignettes of his climbs all over the world. Starting with climbing the Walker Spur, the Second Ascent of the Eiger North Wall, and the French Classic climb of the first 8000-metre summit, Annapurna. Each chapter is a real page turner. When you are in the middle it is hard to put down... you can feel the tension build in some parts such as the numerous traverses on the Eiger, the uncertainty of route finding... the terror of the long run outs of rope... where downclimbing is about the scariest option one can think of.. The early work on the Eiger is well recounted and the rescue of the Cassin Expedition. He also covers a lot of ground on the climbing of Annapurna with no overlap with Herzog's classic. I was particularly impressed with the amount of bushwacking Terray and crew had to do just to get access to the mountain glaciers. They were using maps and entering valleys no outsider had seen. This raw adventure, lower than summit peaks with its route finding conundruns, waterfall climbing, backtracking down blind valleys, is supremely exciting. It is in fact a joining of the exploration genre with mountaineering. The other summits are just as stupendous but less known. Terray saw the South Ridge of Mt Hunter in Alaska and thought it the most beautiful he had seen. He had to climb it. While not high by Himalayan standards this Frenchman set a new North American standard with his long and arduous ascent. Also there is one of the most exciting (and rare) accounts of Alpine Mountain Warfare that I know. At the end of the war he was attached to the French Alpine Regiment. Despite his knowledge that the war in the Alps would never hasten the end of the war even a single day, he fought a

Let's face it, most recent mountaineering books are totally forgettable. Most have nothing exciting to report; they're just a way to pay for the next expedition. But Terray gets it all right here. Perhaps the greatest mountaineer of the 20th century (okay, maybe Buhl and Messner are equal), and certainly one of the greatest mountaineering books of all time. Forget the annoying Krakauers, and read the real McCoy.

The book is a treasure for the conquistadors of the useless, and I am one of them. Snip: (...)