Mountaineering took a new and unexpected direction last week. It rejuvenated, it reinvented itself, it drew a leap in time that from now on will be a source of motivation for the generations that inhabit a future that is expected to be magical. It takes a world to break with what is established, to tear down the walls that mountaineering, its history, has built: there is always the fear of crashing, especially when errors in judgment are paid for with life. The scenarios do not change, but the way of observing them does. With a knot in their stomach, with hope, doubts and fears, the French Benjamin Védrines (The North Face athlete, 31 years old) and Léo Billon (High Mountain Military Group, 31 years old) started from Chamonix last Saturday with the idea to climb three routes of extreme technical difficulty in three legendary settings: Los Dru, the north face of the Droites and the north face of the Grandes Jorasses.
They chose severe routes, with an average of 1,000 meters of slope, mixed terrain of rock and ice, in the middle of winter… and they climbed them at full speed, but not in any way: they took maximum care of their safety, they did not use specific techniques to advance further. fast but randomly. They climbed according to classical canons, letting their enormous experience allow them to file time by time. It’s just that running on this type of complex terrain is something that has never been seen before. And doing it in 72 frenetic hours refers directly to a change in record only within the reach of true visionaries.
Their schedules break all records known to date. Only on the No Siesta route to the Grandes Jorasses (the most complex and intimidating of the three) they spent just 12 hours. The best known record was for two days on the wall and by highly respected pedigree climbers. “And the most amazing thing is that if we had found the route in good conditions, with more ice, and if we had not gotten lost, we would have reduced the time by four hours,” Védrines confesses in a telephone conversation. In three days of high-tension climbing, they only made one mistake: They both grabbed a frozen carabiner in their mouths and the cold ripped the skin off their lips. A nonsense that illustrates, however, his enormous capacity for concentration, his resistance to mental fatigue, the fear of suffering a fall, his fight once morest stress, the desire to finally escape the severity of a frozen, hostile world, a scenario forged by the myths of mountaineering.
Under Védrines, speed has taken on another meaning: his physical strength is simply disconcerting. With Billon, technical difficulty will have to be redefined: at the top of the current scale, it does not even change. Together, they are Terray and Lachenal, or its revised and updated version half a century later. Their journey into the unknown began last Saturday in Dru, where they climbed the Guides’ Route in 10 hours and freely, that is, without grabbing or hanging from the safety devices that they place to stop a possible fall. Nobody had climbed it freely before, much less in one day. Surprised by the ease with which they solved the first objective, they shot towards the north of the Droites. If they had planned to rest for a day, they changed their minds: they were not tired. The next day, it took them just seven and a quarter hours to reach the top of the Droites, leaving behind the demanding Rhem-Vimal route. So yes, they said that they might dream of completing the trilogy in just three days, that is, three days less than initially dreamed. Except that the Grandes Jorasses represent the most sinister and severe scenario of the massif. “We thought that, since everyone had spent several days climbing these routes, doing it in a single day would be impossible,” explains Védrines. He did not imagine (no one might) that they would have half the day left over.
Trilogies, like chains of ascents, are a classic in the history of mountaineering, and to date none might compare, in terms of daring, to the one signed by the Frenchman Christophe Profit in March 1987: in just 42 hours he chained the classic north faces of the Grandes Jorasses, the Eiger and the Matterhorn, linking both mountains through paragliding and helicopter flights. He climbed alone, without a rope. Keeping a close eye on his rival Eric Escoffier, determined to be first. His feat was the starting signal for the “fast and light” concept. Védrines and Billon have just added an adjective to the formula that remains “fast, light and (very, very) technical”. Védrines is a true addict to this type of climbs and started with them in the Vercors: “I always liked creating my own stories. “Free,” he acknowledges with a voice that does not denote any ambition, but rather naturalness. “We want to innovate but not for the gallery, but as a need of our own, we want to do things that we have not done yet. We pursue a certain progression, more difficult challenges that can stimulate us not only as athletes but as people,” he observes.
Professional climbers
And the need not to fall into the loop of repetition, into conformity, has led them to simply rewrite history: “Indeed, we have gone beyond what had already been done, and it is gratifying, but that is not it.” what fills us. What feeds us is the feeling of being on a plane in which we must face the unknown. And that progression depends on our imagination and passion. We don’t know where we’re going to stop. For my part, I hope to stop at the right time because I already feel that I am close to feeling totally fulfilled as a mountaineer; However, I still have many dreams to realize.”
That said, Védrines is convinced that the room for progression in mountaineering is enormous: in this discipline “there are very few high-level athletes. Very few people really train to tackle mountaineering projects. “We are at the genesis of high-level mountaineering, but there is a lot of work ahead.” Both recognize themselves as complementary: Védrines is a gifted athlete and Billon a climber of superlative technical quality. Together they add so much that they recognize that it would be difficult for them to find a better partner. At the end of the trip, at the top of the Grandes Jorasses, facing a descent as long as it is complicated on the Italian side, both recognize a fact that comforts them and helps them continue dreaming of new antics: they are not physically finished, they have physical margin and psychological. They are at the top of a stage that has given away an enormous handful of tragic and heroic stories, but that belong to the past. The new mountaineering is fueled by dreams, like yesterday, but also by hours of effective work. “The future promises beautiful things,” Védrines congratulates himself.
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