The Magician's Glass by Douglas Ed; Ives Katie;

Author:Douglas, Ed; Ives, Katie; [Ed Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4940489
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2017-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

For those too young to remember, it’s hard to explain just how quickly sport climbing changed things. It was like a big bang. Moffatt climbing 8a in 1982 was a huge deal. In less than 10 years, six grades were added to the scale, culminating with Güllich’s 9a (XI), Action Directe. Things moved on much more quietly for the next twenty years.

Keeping up with that pace of change was always going to be tough and Albert was a little bit older than the new stars emerging. Wolfgang seemed quieter than Kurt, but was much more focused on himself, his career and training. That simply wasn’t what Kurt Albert was about. ‘Kurt was really smart,’ says Sandner. ‘He knew he had to live from his slide shows and contracts and he couldn’t compete any more with the top German climbers. So he decided to bring those free-climbing impulses to the big mountains.’

In 1987, with Gerald Sprachmann, Kurt did the first free ascent of the Swiss Route (IX, 7b+) on the Cima Ovest and followed that up with the first free ascent of the famous Brandler-Hasse (VIII+, 7a+) on the Cima Grande, both in the Italian Dolomites. The next year he travelled to the Karakoram of Pakistan with Güllich and Hartmut Münchenbach, freeing the Yugoslav Route on the Nameless Tower. From then on, each year brought another big, remote, difficult, free first ascent, from Greenland to Patagonia, from the Dolomites to the tepuis of Venezuela.

The freedom of those now-distant days in Oberschöllenbach could never have lasted, but the end was cruel. Ingrid, Norbert Sandner says, both loved and hated the lifestyle she experienced with Kurt and Wolfgang. A lawyer by day, Ingrid would come home at night to dirtbags from half a dozen countries sleeping on her floor. She moved out and married, but for some reason things – life – just didn’t work for her any more. In 1991, her husband, who was a friend of both her former boyfriends, found her in their garage asphyxiated by her car exhaust.

In the summer of 1992, Wolfgang Güllich crashed his BMW driving home from an early radio interview. Like Kurt, his life ended when his respirator was switched off. Like Kurt, there wasn’t a mark on his well-trained body. Norbert Sandner was there to see his friend die. He tracked down Albert in Yosemite to give him the news. ‘[Kurt] decided not to come home. He thought there was nothing to be done. He said, “It’s all over.”’

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