New York, 1956, 1st Am edition. 122 pp, 37 plates. Hardcover Fine with Near Fine DJ. A handsome copy. (Reflection off plastic Brodar DJ cover shows on computer image, not when you hold the book.)
One of the greatest Alpine books of all time: climbing the North Faces of the Grandes Jorasses, Piz Badile, Dru, Matterhorn, Cima Grandes de Lavaredo and the Eiger. Rebuffat's books expressed the love that he had for the mountains, and even today are in inspiration for climbers and mountain lovers. This book was one of the first that compiled a list of great climbs to do, and these six north faces have become a goal for many great climbers, perhaps most notably Alison Hargreaves who climbed them all in one season.
French born Gaston Rebuffat was one of the great mountain guides of Alpine history and was a member of the French expedition to Annapurna in 1950. This book is a record of the ascent of the six great north faces of the Alps: the Grandes Jorasses; Piz Badile; the Matterhorn; the Drus; the Cima Grande di Lavaredo and the Eiger. Rebuffat also produced a film based on this book 'Etoiles et Tempetes' first shown in Paris in 1956.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, the race was on in Europe to score first ascents of the most formidable routes in the Alps and Dolomites. Buoyed by the advent of artificial climbing techniques (primarily the use of pitons), teams from France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Poland scaled the north faces of the Eiger, the Drus, the Matterhorn, the Grandes Jorasses, and other hallowed peaks, often pooling resources to obtain previously unimaginable success (and often tragedy), while the world below was ravaged by two brutal world wars.
Noted French climbing guide Gaston Rébuffat lived at the center of this crucial era in mountaineering history. Starlight and Storm, first published in French in 1954 as Étoiles et Tempêtes, is his personal account of a rugged and glorious time before Gore-Tex, when men, soaked and chilled to the bone, sang to keep each other from falling asleep (forever) during exposed bivouacs in sub-zero degree snowstorms. Rébuffat's love of the climber's life is evident with each turn of the page.
Known for his lyrical writing and his ability to convey not only the dangers of mountaineering but the pure exaltation of the climb, Gaston Rebuffat is among the most well known and revered Alpinists of all time. He rose to international prominence in 1950 as one of the four principal stalwarts in the first ascent of Annapurna, the highest mountain climbed at that time. Yet his finest feat as a mountaineer was to be the first man to climb all six of the legendary great north faces of the Alps - the Grandes Jorasses, the Piz Badile, the Dru, the Matterhorn, the Cima Grande di Lavaredo, and the Eiger.
With this elegant book, first published in 1954, Rebuffat transformed mountain writing. His insistence on seeing a climb as an act of harmonious communion with the mountain, not a battle waged against it, seemed radical at the time, though Rebuffat's aesthetic has since won the day. Through storms, avalanches, rock fall, unplanned bivouacs, and even the deaths of companions, we follow the Chamonix guide to the altar of his communion, on dark, icy walls that struck terror into the hearts of Europe's finest mountaineers.
