Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer

Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer

Author:Jon Krakauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Falcon Guides
Published: 2009-02-10T05:00:00+00:00


It’s a luminous fall afternoon in downtown Cham, and I’m sitting on the terrace of the Brasserie L’M, loitering over a strawberry crepe and a café au lait, wondering whether I might, given my limited talents, ever rise above the life of the terminally banal. Overhead, a nonstop parade of paragliders is floating across the sky, en route from one or another of the surrounding alps to a meadow a few blocks away that serves as the town landing field. When I finally get tired of the waiter inquiring every few minutes if I’ll be having anything else (“Or will monsieur be leaving now?”), I get up and walk to the meadow, which lies at the base of the Brevent ski lift, to catch a little flying action at close range.

In all of the United States, there are at most four hundred paraglider pilots, a number that reflects the sport’s reputation for being insanely dangerous. (Evincing a firm commitment to truth in advertising, the leading U.S. manufacturer of paragliders—Feral, Inc.—has for its corporate logo a skull and crossbones.) Neither mortal risk nor fear of litigation, however, has slowed the proliferation of paragliding in the Alps: At last count there were an estimated twelve thousand parapilots at large in France. And the zeal with which the French have taken up paragliding has nothing to do with some Gallic knack for avoiding accidents: Parapilots in Chamonix are forever crashing onto rooftops and busy highways, being blown into ski lifts, and dropping out of the sky like flies. Indeed, within half an hour of my arrival at the Chamonix landing field, I witness two paragliders overshoot the tiny meadow and plow into the trees, and see a third slam face-first into the second-story wall of an apartment building.

The swelling tally of paragliding mishaps, however, is unlikely to move the French to ban the sport from their ski resorts (as Americans have), nor is the annual carnage from climbing ever likely to lead to the curtailment of that activity. This despite the fact that between forty and sixty people come to unpleasant ends in the mountains above Chamonix in a typical year, and that the overall body count on Mont Blanc now totals more than two thousand, making it far and away the deadliest mountain on earth.

Interestingly enough, routine, lift-served skiing—an activity that few American practitioners think of as life-threatening—contributes to approximately half the annual death toll. There are eight ski areas in the Chamonix Valley, and their slopes include many runs that are no more challenging than the tamest trails at Stowe or Park City, but there is also a vast amount of lift-served terrain that blurs the line between ordinary skiing and hard-core mountaineering. Take a wrong turn, for instance, when you get off the lift on the Grands Montets or the Aiguille du Midi—two of the most popular places to ski—and you could easily wind up in the bottom of a crevasse, or buried under avalanching seracs, or skidding off a thousand-foot cliff.



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