A Parting Gift
by Barry Blanchard

In the early summer of 1980 I quit my job in Calgary, the city of my
birth, and hit the road for Chamonix. I was 21 and planned on
catching up with Kevin Doyle over there; together we were going to climb
in the Alps until our money ran out. I had come to the Alps in awe,
burning in my ambition of becoming an alpinist, yet choking on my fear
of the range and the intimidation I felt trying to follow in the
footsteps of my heroes: Heinrich Harrer, Walter Bonatti, Reinhold
Messner ... John Lauchlin. Two weeks of ride sharing, Greyhounding, jet
planing, camping in the East End of London, hitch hiking, hovercrafting,
and train riding saw me stepping onto the platform in Cham (To this day
I still hear that conductor's voice, in my head, every time I enter the
Chamonix valley: "CHAMONIX MOUNT BLANC! CHAMONIX MOUNT BLANC!"). The pavement was oily black and slick with fresh rain. Concrete coloured
clouds inundated the lush forested slopes above me, yet occasionally I
caught glimpses of the black spires of the Aiguilles and the grey mound
of Mt Blanc. The oppositional forces of excitement and dread churned
through my guts like sparrows dodging canon balls.

Kevin Doyle is six months older than me and also a native Calgarian.
That June he was an obsessed climber, and blossoming bohemian, intent on
placing a lot of distance between his soul and the strict "baptist
religious bullshit" of his upbringing. I called him "Wally". My
Immediate task was to find Wally for he had the tent and I needed that
roof over my head. I marched through Chamonix central, my overcrammed
canvas and leather pack on my back, four icetools and a pair of SMC
ridged crampons reefed tight to the rear panel and my Galibier full
shank leather boots -and all else that I had failed to cram into the
pack- plumb bobbing in an old bowling ball bag clasped in my hand. A
special and beautiful girl had given me a baseball cap before I'd left
home and I wore it and it read:

RAY'S POWER TONGS, PINCHER CREEK, ALBERTA

I suspected that the path to Wally would start at the Brasserie National
and I asked for directions.

In recent times the "Bar Nash" has metamorphosed into a pastel coloured
upscale restaurant. Back then I thumped my pack down close to the window
and stepped into a smoky den of anglophone reprobate mountain climbing
culture, even in the a.m., for it was raining. Hell, this was where the
"Battle of the Bar Nash" that I'd heard lore of, even back in Calgary,
had been instigated and fought. Instigated by one of the Bludgeon Twins
shorting out the lights by twisting a one franc coin into a light socket
while the other Bludgeon threw a chair through the front window and
commenced brawling with the rival French. Asking around I learned that
Wally had indeed been there the night before and that he was believed to
be camping illegally, and for free, in the forest above town. I quaffed
a beer and left.

"Go big, or go home" -John Lauchlin

John Lauchlin, also Calgarian, had largely created the lifestyle that I
wanted. He was the hometown boy who had gone beyond being "good", he had
become one of the best, pursuing his climbing at a worldclass level; and
he was making it his profession: teaching climbing, raising money to go
on expeditions, writing about it, publishing pictures of it ... what
we've come to know as "walking the walk". And for me, John was
immediate, I saw his slideshows on the West Face of Mt Vancouver, the
SSW Buttress of Mt Logan, the first ascent of Slipstream. I heard him on
the radio, watched him on TV, mom clipped articles on him from the paper
for me. Harrer, Bonatti, Messner ... they had all quit hard alpine
climbing before I even started, and even though I'd been ignited by
their words I couldn't see them, talk to them, interact with them. I
could with John, and, as a matter of fact, there had been one time when
I wished that I hadn't.

I've often thought that Hans Gmoser and Franz Dopf named the horrid
loose chimney system that they opened on the South Face of Mt Yamnuska
in 1952 the Calgary Route as a statement of what they thought of my
hometown. Now Cadillacs and cowboy clothes aren't, admittedly, for
everyone, but Franz and Hans must have truly hated Calgary then because
my vocabulary falls short in describing just how bad the Calgary route
is. In the fall of 1977 I was 18 and for about a year I'd been trying to
learn how to be a climber without actually approaching any real
climbers. In my mind John Lauchlin was the real climber and I was
largely pretending to be like him. Grey, who worked at the same sport
shop that I did, had read about as much on climbing as I had and even
gone as far as taking a beginners course. Grey and I decided to partner
up and attempt our first route on Yamnuska in late October, we chose the
Calgary Route.

Late in the day, after much chossy adventuring, we started up the final
200ft of squeeze chimneys that top the route. Problem was that Grey
could not figure out how to thrutch his 175lbs up the tight chimneys. We
settled on a system of me leading into the cold black night, and Grey
following by first tying a stirrup in one of our ropes and standing into
it, then doing the same on the other. We, of course, had no headlamps
and I led by feel stopping when I arrive at ledges and bracing myself to
anchor. I'd then take Grey's weight around my waist and the ropes ringed
me in bruises and my knees and hands took a shitkicking in the cold and
dark. It took Grey and I all night to get up the route and I
hallucinated far more powerfully and often that night than on any climb
since: I saw massive space complexes squatting out there on the dark
foothills of Alberta, then full legions of the damned shuffling by me
their heads bowed and hooded in burlap swaddle. Dawn was just breaking
when we stumbled, knackered, from the timber and collapsed in the ditch
beside the road. The Calgary Mountain Rescue Group was there, John
Lauchlin looked so professional in his full boots and european knickers
and guide's sweater. I felt like an impostor and an idiot in my blue
jeans and hiking boots all dirty and damn near defeated. Felt that I'd
been caught pretending.

John put down his pack and I remember noticing how clean it was,
nothing dangled from the outside. He asked me if I needed anything and I
said that I was very thirsty and he squatted on his haunches and dug a
red aluminum water bottle from his pack and popped the wire and stopper
sealing it and passed it to me. I guzzled half of the bottle in one go
and handed it to Grey. John's intense blue eyes were studying me from
behind his thick tear-drop glasses, I could feel them, my own gaze
diverted to the dirt.
"I'm sorry for making you be here." I said, looking up, meeting those
piercing blue eyes. He smiled and told me that he'd done exactly the
same thing on the Grillmair Chimney route once upon a time.
"No shit?" I chuckled.
"No shit." He laughed.
Those were the last words that I'd had with John before I met him and
Dwayne Congdon on a trail, in the forest above Chamonix, as I searched
for Wally.

Wally had told me, before leaving Calgary, that John and Dwayne were
going to be in Chamonix representing Canada at the Rassemblement
Internationale des Alpinistes, a biannual gathering of the best young
alpinists from around the world. When I bumped into them on the trail
with my tottering pack and bowling ball bag it was obvious to me that
John didn't recognize me from three years before and I didn't mind that,
hell I preferred that. They were setting out to run in the rain and wore
the embarrassing too-short nylon running shorts of the day. John was
five foot eight with the slight but efficient build of a dancer, the
sole physical hint attesting to his power as a climber was the extra
width plated onto his quadriceps and that only noticeable when he stood
sideways (I work as a mountain guide now with Dwayne and he looks like a
greyish version of what he looked like twenty one years ago ... slender
to the point befitting a crucifix). I'd stopped them by saying that I
was Barry and that I was from Calgary and I saw confusion wrinkle John's
brow and I knew that he was trying to place me, probably thinking that
he should know any Calgarian climbing in Chamonix that season.
"I'm meeting up with Kevin Doyle." I said.
"Oh, you're with Kevin." John replied, the wrinkles in his forehead
relaxing in realization.
"Ya, have you guys seen him?"
"Well, yes", John started, "he was in the Bar Nash last night drinking
... ah ... rather ... heavily. I think that the weather has him down."
From John and Dwayne I learned the true whereabouts of Wally and I made
my way to him and we enjoyed the rough, mauling and backslapping reunion
of two young friends striding into life's first grand adventure.

The golden granite of Bonatti's Pillar passed through my hands that
summer; the blue, blue ice of Coutier's Coulior; spikes locked up in the
grey ice of Mt Blanc du Tacul's East Face, spikes that had felt the
hand's of Gabriele Boccalatte and Gaston Rebuffat. Kevin and I climbed
absolutely as much as our bodies, and the weather, would allow. When it
rained we traversed the stone foundations footing the railway bridge
until our fingers could not close anymore.

By the end of August Kevin and I had tallied eleven alpine routes
between us and had talked ourselves into attempting one of the top ten
routes listed in Gaston Rebuffat's hallowed guidebook, "THE MONT BLANC
MASSIF, THE 100 FINEST ROUTES". We'd settled on the 99th route, and that
made it the second most difficult in the book, difficult enough to be
considered a "Grande Course" alpine climb by the French, the North Face
of Les Droites.

Cornuau and Davaille opened the face in September of 1955 and it was
then the hardest route in the Western Alps. When Reinhold Messner soloed
it in 1969 the route had only seen three ascents (several days latter
Messner soloed the Philipp/Flamm on the "Wall of Walls", the Northwest
Face of Civetta, one of the hardest routes in the Eastern Alps,
finishing through lightning, hail and snow. The clouds of skepticism
that had enshrouded this young "madman" from the Tyrol evaporated and
all realized that, like Bonatti, he was something other, the next).

"We'll do it Blanch." declared my confident companion, Wally. Kevin
never did seem to suffer from the overwhelming feelings of inadequacy
and dread that could smother me. More accurately put Kevin did not deify
climbers like Bonatti and Lauchlin. To him they were just other men and
Kevin had wrapped his strong hands around the conviction that what one
man could do, another man could do, specifically that he could once he
was "fit" enough. Kevin would have it no other way (six years later, in
a tent on Mt Everest, he told me his story of having seen Lauchlin
struggle on a pitch on Yamnuska. Kevin realized then that his heroes
were human). There was a time when we use to say that if you really
wanted to get up something you would take Kevin to the base of it and
say to him "I bet you can't climb that" ... then you try to hang on. It
all has to do with heart and Kevin was long on that and knew that he
could bear as much, and fight as hard, as anyone. My mistake was in
assuming that my heroes had been gifted with superhuman heart at birth.
The North Face of Les Droites taught me that I too had heart, it was
there, but I had to have faith and I had to chose to use it.

Warm air surged over my face when I entered the Alpenrose Bar, it was
raining again in Chamonix. My sense of being foreign intensified with
all the french being spoken around me, then I saw John and Dwayne framed
into the centre of a crowded table, regiments of beer glasses, and two
steak sandwiches the size of my forearm, before them. I smiled and waved
and John rose and threaded his way through the crowd to get to me. He
bore an aura of electricity and raved to me about the MacIntyre/Coulton
on the North Face of Les Grande Jorasses, he and Dwayne had just done
the third ascent, in the best time, and blown the rest of the
rassemblemont away ("Bloody impressive that!" was how Nick Coulton
summed things up to me on a glacier in Alaska a couple of years later).
John asked, as he always did, "What are you and Kevin's plans?" I looked
down to my yellow Nikes, the ones that I'd stitched back together in the
tent so that I could save on my cash and stay here longer, my hands were
rolled into fists and crammed as deep as I could stuff them into the
pockets of my khaki "painters" pants (I'd climbed all our routes that
summer in those cotton pants). I did not want to say "Les Droites",
feared giving our ambition a name, because then it would exist in the
world beyond Kevin and I. The complexity and length of Les Droites
overwhelmed me and I could not break it down and hold it all in my mind.
I didn't want to jump in over my head and get caught pretending again.

I took heart and glanced to the ceiling and said, "Well, we're kind of
thinking about the North Face of Les Droites". John locked onto me with
his intense blue eyes and I felt his gaze drill on back to the far side
of my skull and he said,
"Do it, it is perfect for you guys."
"Oh man, I don't know if we're up to it yet."
"No. No way. You guys can do it. You know that Dwayne and I did the
"Waterfall" route on it in July , I know it and it is right for you." He
dropped his eyes to his browned leather hands and swept them up like
they were surfing a wave and said,
"The lower face is just like doing the North Face of Athabasca, and you
guys have done that, then you do Takkakaw Falls," his hands mimed
planting tools, "then you top it off with Cascade Falls," his palms
opened into a "so what" gesture, "it's just three pieces of Canada on
loan to France! All you have to do is put it all together in one day,
you can do it lad."

The Argintiere Glacier wore the crust of a recent snowstorm and Kevin
and I crunched on up following the tracks of a French guide and client,
the only other folks in the whole basin that September day, a
staggering change from July when there were hundreds and hundreds. At
the deserted hut we sat out studying the face and guzzling water all the
time telling ourselves we were drinking martinis on the terrace, shaken
not stirred. Later we piled grey wool blankets over us and tried to
sleep but it wasn't until years later that I could sleep before a big
route.

We strode into the cold at 10pm and the surface of the glacier felt
like firm plaster underfoot. A full moon bathed the whole of the basin
in a soft silken light. At midnight I pulled over the bergshrund
following Wally and the face reared in a sweep of silvery ice the colour
of the surface of the moon. Oppressive black rock buttressed over the
ice like a gauntleted fist holding fast to the hilt of a sword and my
jaw quivered with the fear of the hunted. I bowed my head and closed my
eyes and breathed, finally I pursed my lips and blew my fear out and
smacked an axe into the ice, the shaft resonated like I'd just planted
the axe in wood. The rope pulled me to Kevin and we decided to unplug
the leads to our "Wonder" headlamps and to solo on together by the light
of the full moon. It was time to go big.

The route unfolded as John had said it would, ropelengths of alpine
ice, cruxes of waterfall ice, immaculate granite, beautiful climbing.
Kevin fought through the hardest of it clinging to the edge of a
transparent WI5 curtain his body trembling in effort, salvation found in
a hidden piton tucked tight behind the fragile grey ice. One ropelength
from the Breche, the top of our route, I looked up to Wally and took an
icechunk right in the face. I heard the muffled and sickening crunch of
breaking bone and saw my bright blood splatter across the blue nylon of
my shell. I screamed and swore and worried that I was badly injured.
Then I knew that it was my nose and I worried about being scarred ugly.
"Oh man, that doesn't look so good Blanch", was all the condolence I got
out of Wally. Sixteen hours after crossing the shrund we topped out, my
arms hung at my sides like sausages, felt like I'd just benchpressed
twice my bodyweight about a hundred times, by midnight we were bedding
down in the old Couvercle hut.

The next day Wally and I tramped into our illegal campsite and my nose
was swollen and bandaged, but fine; and I felt light, like I was
floating. Tight beneath my sun baked skin I saw the pleated striations
of my muscles and I sat for a long time looking into the grass and up to
the trees and at my brown leather hands. Later that day Kevin and I made
a pact to climb in Yosemite the next year.

I saw John for the last time in December of 1981. I was attending an
instructors hiring clinic with the Yamnuska Mountain School where John
taught. He told me about the South Face of Gangapurna, I told him about
the Nose and the Salathe. "We'll have to get out some time lad" were his
parting words. Two months later John was avalanched over a rock cliff
trying to solo Polar Circus. Broken and bleeding he crawled down to the
next rappel and tried to descend from his ice axes, the axes pulled and
his heroic heart was crushed at the bottom.

That was twenty years ago now, yet not a week goes by that I do not
think about John. If we are all stars in the night sky John was a comet
that blazed across our twinkling and, all too soon, blazed on beyond our
horizons.

I still catch glimpses of his light.

Written by Barry Blanchard

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