London, 1956, 1st UK edition. 122 pp, 37 plates. Hardcover, No DJ, Fine.
One of the greatest Alpine books of all time: climbing the great six North Faces of the Alps: 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 recently 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.
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.
