“Do you think the Wall of Hate is coming towards us?” Graham asked as we hung at a belay, a few pitches up Mermoz. See my previous post about the various approaching options in the area.
We grudgingly decided not to fight with reality, and (in true Graham Z fashion) “re-stoked” for another objective: the Argentina Route on Aguja Mermoz.įamiliar with this zone, having climbed on the West Face of Guillamet a week earlier, we opted to use the Geordani Ridge to access the West Face of Mermoz. This would require much walking on the horrible snow, however, and the warm conditions might present objective hazards. Ambitiously, we had dreamt of a long push up the California route on Fitz Roy. Stepping off the bedrock of camp, onto the Guillamet Glacier, we sank into mashed-potato snow.Īfter gamely slogging a few hundred meters, we stopped to reconsider our plans. We’d left our tent in pre-dawn darkness, but instead of the refreshing bite of crisp night air, we set out through a strangely warm, almost soupy, atmosphere. Graham and I called it quits on our single-push attempt on Fitz Roy, twenty minutes after leaving basecamp. But I’ll refrain for now, and simply note that experience is subjective there’s no objective metric of “adventure” and anytime we set out to map the frontiers of our own abilities, we do so with the smiling support of our predecessors. I instinctively want to make some self-deprecating comment here, about how our little adventures pale in comparison to the real explorers of days past. In the story that follows, Graham Zimmerman and I climb the Argentina Route on Aguja Mermoz. Along with four crewmen, he was lost while crossing the Atlantic between Senegal and Brazil. He pioneered many air routes in Argentina and Chile, and is remember as one of the leading pilots of his era. Jean Mermoz, the subject of the above passage and the namesake of a mountain in Argentine Patagonia, was a French aviator who lived from 1901 to 1936. May we all lead lives so rich, and leave behind a memorial so timeless. I can’t sufficiently praise this memoir, which remembers a lifetime of adventure and friendship in a style both haunting and celebratory. I’m not sure what message I’m trying to convey with this passage, mostly I just want to share something beautiful. Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind Sand and Stars, 1939Īs with my last post about Guillamet, I’ve excerpted a bit of this wonderful little book. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.”
Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple.
#Jean mermoz argentina full#
Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom. Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. “And yet we all have known flights when, of a sudden, each for himself, it has seemed to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality… Where there has come premonition of an incursion into a forbidden world whence it was going to be infinitely difficult to return.
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