3

THE HATCHLING

Well, I must be dead!

A violent white light illuminates me, bathing the surrounding space. Soft yet harsh, smooth and enveloping. It is exactly what one would expect from eternity. I am regaining my senses, growing lucid. There is indeed a life after life. With all the risks I have been taking in my escalations and in many other parts of my life, my continuous gambling with death, I am frankly not particularly amazed to be here. I had always worked towards perfecting my solitary escalations, climbing up rock faces without ropes or safety mechanisms. I preferred to spurn the pollution of the safety net and experience the climb in its naked form. In this dangerous game I had striven to be the best. I had many escapades and had become a world record holder in a tough, extreme, but exquisitely benevolent sport. It brought me sublime moments, beyond time, beyond compare.

And now my posthumous life has begun! I think about the idea. Spiritually alive, I can appreciate my mortal end. If only I had known...

Being killed in a car accident would have left me with many regrets. God, none of us really ever have the death we truly deserve or yearn for. Barely any of us leave this world with honour, after a glorious battle — merely with the deflation of an end to an unspectacular everyday life, humdrum, flat and without zest. And we can only really be measured by the people who miss us. Me? I leave a wife, Nicole; three children, Julien, Hugo and Lucas; and some dear friends...

Fucking light!

Now it blinds me, irritates me, tortures me. This is purgatory perhaps. I also deserve this. For almost 35 years I have been pushing it. My death will be a personal tragedy for my parents — people without history, smooth and settled, too respectful of the established rules to leave any room for dreams. I was by contrast a turbulent child, a reckless person, ceaselessly tormented and driven by the spirit of adventure. A mother's heartbreaker, able at the tender age of 12 to climb seven floors of the building in which we lived. What made me do it? Well, it was always there and it had to emerge.

There are drives within us, predeterminations against which we cannot fight. Is there a gene which compels some of us to escalate vertical rock faces? Who knows what is hidden in our endless coils of DNA. But it was not evident in my parents, that's for sure.

Back then I didn't hesitate before climbing our housing block. I had baptised it the Cold Wing after one of the mythical summits of the massif in the mountainous National Park of Ecrin. Looking back, I believe that impish act was my fate. As a 12-year-old boy I had returned from school and patted my pockets to discover I had lost my keys and was locked out. But I knew that the window of our loggia seven floors up was never locked. There was an obvious solution to this dilemma. Let's climb up there! So up I climbed, floor by floor, until I was home. When my parents got in they were annoyed with me — the concierge had witnessed my break-in and reported me to them. I was in the doghouse for a while, my mother angry with me, not so much for climbing the building, but more for annoying the concierge who was less than amused by my mischief. I felt that my father, with whom I did not often speak much, looked at me in a different way from that day.

What had sparked this life-changing decision? Back in my childhood, climbing literature was hard to come by. I had discovered climbing through epic stories of famous climbers risking their lives to conquer great heights, tales which made my eyes redden each evening by the light of my bedside lamp. The heroism of these alpinists generated in me this imperious need to conquer, to overcome rationality until the irrational led me towards my dream of escalation. As a nine-year-old my inspiration was fired by a movie I had watched about an airplane which crashed near the summit of one of Europe's highest mountains. A pair of brothers, both top climbers, had decided to scale the huge and vertical mountain to see if there were any survivors. They intrepidly scaled the rock faces and battled the elements. It had everything I loved — they were courageous heroes and they were overcoming the odds and rescuing people in dire circumstances! From then on, I wanted to be a climber. Like all kids I wanted to be brave in the manner of Zorro or Robin Hood and climbing seemed to offer me that.

The blinding light loses its brightness. There's a shape. A soul. A person. Somebody bends over me. A voice.

"He's awake!"

Awake? It all sounds very earthly. This is the afterlife? Don't tell me it's the same old story about following rules, respecting schedules and speed limits... I really can't believe it. Are there rules in heaven? When I was alive, I fought a lonely battle against the politically correct — not being an individualist but simply a defender of our freedom to assume our own choices, to undertake without limitations the paths that we decide to follow. After passing over to the other side I will not allow someone to dictate the hour at which I have to get up! Heaven is a huge let-down. The voice, female, probes me for a reaction.

"Are you okay?"

The world around me gently emerges. I feel I am in an enclosure. A room? Light streaks through the room in glowing slices through a blind's narrow strips. On the right, a door. Above me, lengths of tubes, flasks and... a cobweb? It looks pretty weird for paradise. then it sinks in. It is not my time yet. Am I really alive? It sure looks like it. Apparently, I have to postpone my death... This is good news! But I am immediately scared. In what physical condition will I have to spend the rest of my life? The nurse bends more, touches my cheek, then says to me, smiling:

"We shall take care of the nose later! The surgeon has already spent more than five hours on your case."

How long have I been out of it? Hours? Days? I know that in the morning I had set off to Grenoble, something like that, but then there's a blank. With my nasty habit of not buckling my safety belt I must have smashed through the windscreen and broken my protruding proboscis yet again. I don't really care about that. I peer down and look over my broken body. I am much more afraid for my wrists, which were already little more than a fused bunch of crumbs. New fractures would surely reduce them to incapacity. Given the size of the plaster cast which entombs one of my arms, I am terrified. The nurse reassures me: my wrist is indeed broken but luckily it snapped cleanly and without the osseous explosion I had feared. The fracture, apparently, is precise, as if it had been cut by laser; and once I have recovered I shall not have any remaining after-effects. So much the better, I already have enough of those.

I search my memory, hunting for any recollections that could explain how I ended up here. I strain but find no thread of the accident.

"Is the car destroyed?" I ask the nurse as she leaves the room. I guess the impact must have been terrible. A truck. or a tree? Yes, for sure, a tree. She half-turns and responds as she leaves the room.

"What car are you talking about?"

What does she mean? No car accident? If not — then what happened? I try to remember something, anything, but there is nothing except confusion and an overwhelming, stifling fear. I want to fall asleep again, to sink straight into the oblivion of unconsciousness.

Later on, the surgeon strides in, flicking through his charts. Although my mind is hazy I recognise him immediately. Dr Gérard Hoël is the man I can thank for putting me back together several times. We know each other well and I dare to ask him the truth. The uncertainty has been unbearable. I like to know where I have been when I wake up and I also like controlling the movements of my body. Having my memory kidnapped and getting it back in this condition drives me insane.

The good doctor smiles. The truth? There was no car accident. They found me at the bottom of a cliff, unconscious, poly-traumatised. The truth hurts more than my injuries. In 20 years of climbing, thousands of solo adventures including masterpieces among the northern faces of the Alps, I never had the slightest accident. Yes, I have fallen before from ropes, but never when climbing solo, climbing unaided with my bare hands. To discover that I had fallen solo is greatly disturbing. And to find myself so injured is also very worrying. Not that I am not used to it by now. I have had numerous nose-breaking minor falls and some hospitalising medium ones. This is 1993, the third time I have been badly hurt, the third time my bones have been severely broken, cracked, smashed.

Have you ever heard the sound of a falling body? It is unbelievable, a paroxysmal violence. It is absolutely incredible that a human being can overcome such trauma. I must admit that I have never heard any of my own falls. I only remember an endlessly long plunge — and then darkness. In those few seconds, memories rush into your mind, especially the good old ones, the ones you hang onto in life, the ones that condition you subconsciously to survive. But you need luck too: a lucky fall means life, an unlucky one means death or worse.

My wife Nicole, sits by the bed, recites the inventory of my fractures as if she were the French poet Jacques Prevert (the great Monsieur Prevert, not Pervert) while I stare at the ceiling. Nicole has seen me in this state before. In fact we first met when I was hobbling around in plaster from another bad fall. This time, my right kneecap, my nose and my left wrist are broken and the bone located under the cheek is totally ruined. It has been suggested to me plenty of times to undergo plastic surgery to salvage my long-suffering nose. Sponsors had even offered to pay for the operation. But after four successive nasal fractures, I knew a fifth one would occur, then maybe a few more. My nose, so often a crumple zone for my brain, is a lost cause. Moreover, with my wrists long since wrecked, I cannot absorb any more than a minor fall with my arms. That goes without saying. My face proves it.

Two guys enter the room. I have no idea who they are and guess they have wandered in by mistake. But it seems like they know me and they appear rather satisfied to discover that I am still alive. Embarrassed at my blank expression they stutter a few incomprehensible words before Nicole interjects at this awkward moment and explains. It is a rather silly tale.

Earlier that fateful morning, these two lads had contacted me for a climbing session. Teaching represents only a small part of my activities but I like sharing my passion with those who feel that same drive and attraction to verticality. We had gone to Cornas, in the vicinity ofValence, a beautiful compact limestone blade lined with nicely spaced modern hooks, but a temporary ban had prevented us from scaling it. Due to the ban that day it was impossible to appreciate the place where I had pursued my first extreme moves. Never mind, I thought, there are plenty of pebbles around Valence. So I searched for another cliff suitable for beginners. I knew a good one, though it had not been a particularly lucky cliff for me. It had gone pretty much unused since the advent of modern climbing and seemed to fit our modest needs perfectly. Its ways and passages were easy and offered little interest to me as an experienced climber, so this was the first time I had returned for about 11 years. But it was on this beginner's cliff, on September 29th 1982, that I had my second accident. For a long time, I held a grudge against my fears. But time has passed inexorably and I was no longer afraid of crossing this paved limestone which had given me a hard time years ago...

My decision to climb feels natural and logical. I glance upward to where the anchors of my abseil gave way 11 years ago. The cliff rises 20 metres from the ground, just six or seven storeys high, a piffling insignificance in comparison with the Verdon canyon — but it would be unwise to dismiss such a height out of hand. Ask my nose!

Height is indeed a relative thing, but beyond a certain point Newton's laws of gravity have little meaning. Death is the only constant. This holds true anywhere and at any time, apart from perhaps the odd miracle. During the Second World War an American pilot encountered the most incredible fortune when he walked away totally unscathed after a fall of more than 5000 metres. But another pilot was killed by slipping and landing on a patch of ice. Between these two extremes there is room for some logic: beyond ten metres, generally a fall proves fatal. Just ten metres! The human body can be a fragile thing. Remember to treat height with respect, because falling — whether it be down the stairs or out a window, or off a ladder whilst tending to the roof — is the second highest cause of accidental death after motor accidents.

The cliff is visible now. For a few minutes, while I am approaching the perfect place for this first lesson, images I had managed to evacuate from my memory surface again. I get flickers and flashes of that second accident, the one which should have killed me and almost ended my career. I remain silent, incapable of starting a semblance of a conversation with my students. For sure, they must have been upset by this silence, this distance, this stoic behaviour which most people would reasonably assume was either rudeness or meditation. Right now I keep my thoughts to myself and bury my demons. I cannot worry about pleasantries and I certainly do not think it is a good idea to tell them the truth. Quietly we arrive at the foot of the cliff. The guys take in the cliff in good spirits. I keep it positive though sober.

"Some consider climbing to be a dreadful activity," I explain, "Dangerous and complex. But climbing is a complete sport. Maybe the most complete one. The whole body works — fingers, arms, back muscles, abdominal muscles, calves, thighs. Flexibility plays an essential role by helping the body to stay stuck against the cliff and by exploiting the features of the rock. The mind is crucial, as the prospect of falling is part of a rock climber's everyday life. You can be in fantastic shape physically but you will fail as a climber if your mind is not focussed and resilient."

The students nod enthusiastically. I tell them that the main thing about climbing is to learn how to lighten your weight by using your legs as much as possible.

"Arm muscles will never have the power of the calves or thighs! The beginner concentrates on hand grips and quickly becomes exhausted by the effort. Never pull on the arms, but push on the legs."

Next I jump from theory to practice, and gaily demonstrate by climbing the first few metres of a nice and easy ascent, hands clasped behind my back. It's a happy visual demonstration of the truthfulness of my expert comments. The students listen attentively. But I decide to keep going, climbing a near-vertical cliff with my hands behind me as if I was climbing the stairs in relaxed contemplation. Why did I go further? I still wonder why. Might it have been my attraction to risk, as this has always guided my life? Was I just showing off? Was I trying to mock the cliff that had almost killed me ten years ago?

I cheerfully ascend to eight metres with my hands behind me, giving tips and explaining to them that this is the way it should be done.

"Because of the muscle structure," I state with authority, "pushing with your feet allows you to save energy, but the use of the hands is of course indispensable for balance..."

And then I fall, before the horrified eyes of my pupils.

My third accident had occurred in exactly the same place as my second one — the same fucking place! And once again I find myself broken and comatose in a hospital bed. Once more I awake groggily to a world I have little right to see. And for the second time, Dr Hoël bleakly predicts that for me, climbing belongs henceforth to the past.

I cannot help but muse at this déjàvu. Apparently the initial news the nurse gave me was referring to the fact I could keep my forearm. I nearly lost my hand ten years ago and was told then that further damage could result in me losing it. But the surgeon tells me that although its function is further reduced I will be able to use it again for basic everyday purposes. My other fractures should be fine apart from my knee. My knee, which already had a metal plate in it, is also badly broken and will cause me problems. He pulls out my X-rays and points with his pen to the permanent and very obvious damage done. The injuries I carried from my previous two accidents have been exposed by this fall and the prognosis is grim. He tells me that with these injuries I will not be able to exert the strength or the mobility I will need to climb again. He reminds me though that I am lucky to have emerged from my second coma.

I ask him if there is any chance that I might overcome these disabilities.He shakes his head and frowns sympathetically. More modest movements are possible, he tells me, and he is pleased with the results of the surgery considering what he had to work with when I was brought in. This man knows his stuff, but deep inside, I know that I will get up and I will climb again. It would have been easy to believe Dr Hoël, as it takes weeks to get out of hospital. But for me, getting back to the mountains is a matter of survival. I was condemned to being pinned to the ground once before and I managed to get back to my beautiful cliffs.

In retrospect, I realise that my stays at the hospital have always been the turning point of a new start. When faced with an end to my dreams I drew upon the deepest depths of my soul and summoned the motivation to go further, to dare to take on new and seemingly impossible challenges. Every time I have limped out of hospital I have been a little more handicapped but also a little more determined. In France we have a card which registers your disability and attributes a figure to reflect this. My rating is a so called 66 percent incapacity. I have disabilities, and limited movement due to my permanent injuries, plus feelings of dizziness from time to time. Technically I am disabled but I do not receive a disability pension from the state. For some reason officials have difficulty in understanding that the handicapped person I am and the Spiderman they see on TV is the same guy. I suppose I can understand that. And actually, I prefer this pension to be left for those who are unable to move even out of a chair. I am fortunate in that I can continue to seize the day and have fun, to continue to surmount this 66 percent misfortune.

Various friends come and visit me and horse around in the ward. Some assume I will quit climbing this time, given the prognosis, but also as a consequence of the emotional trauma of such a close shave. People often ask me why I continue, whether I have a death wish. I don't, I just love climbing. It's what I do and what I live for. It's my life.

It was always in my blood, even as a child. For a long time my favourite cliffs were made of leaves. My playground? Three sturdy trees which flanked our neighbours' houses. My friends and I climbed and clambered their craggy branches every day. We would go as high and as far as the branches would allow, sometimes sagging or bending to breaking point. We had even set up a Tyrolean traverse — that is, a pair of horizontal ropes between two high fixed points — thanks to the surplus in speleological equipment belonging to my friend's potholing father. Happiness then was just two steps away from my home. My neighbours' trees became little by little our Noah's Ark, our den, our home sweet home. Together, we shared the same taste for anticipated risk, the same need to believe in the alternative, the same fascination for the inaccessible, for overtaking one another, for competing. Without these three trees, I'm sure I would never have discovered escalation. What would I have become — a stuntman, a bowls player, a homeless drifter, a civil servant? Who knows? Chance meetings with people and even with inanimate objects sometimes lead you in radically different directions. But the important thing is to believe that we can influence fate, that we can achieve goals by recognising and grabbing these opportunities as they pass. What these things turn out to be or what path they take us on is rarely clear. Luck, adversity, uncertainty — the spice of life flows past all the time. I have grabbed at them and my scars are due to my errors. As much as we try, we cannot cherry-pick the best, the magic moments of exploit and success, while avoiding wounds, heartaches and failures. Positive and negative, all things unite to make us what we are.

My friends and I knew by heart every branch, we had achieved again and again the same exploits, and our universe inexorably narrowed. Fortunately, thanks to relatives I became a boy scout. And scouting was a wonderful gift. In many ways it was the most important thing that ever happened to me and it supplied the perfect excuse to escape parental authority during the weekend. Generosity, dedication, maturity. Scouting, as a catechism, has all the necessary structure and discipline to reassure families. Too bad for my parents... it was precisely among the scouts that I caught the virus of escalation.

It was also here I met Pierre Jamet, the chief of the boy scouts. My contagion drew me and Pierre — my friend, my brother—into numerous batty childhood adventures during which, I have to admit, we took enormous and rather naughty risks. We climbed alone and often without equipment. We would jump on our bicycles and ride toward vertical masses of fallen rocks near our homes. We would often go up solo. Two kids climbing rocks as if they were trees, kids whose descent technique relied purely on motivation and raw instinct. Pierre and I attacked virgin cliffs, driven by the heroic stories of famed climbers, those deserving predecessors who had often made the ultimate sacrifice for our beloved activity. Everything we could climb, every wall or rocky 20-metre cliff, we named in reference to a mythical summit. Little by little, the neighbourhood of Valence became an Alpine-Himalayan conglomerate that geography teachers would have approved of. We invented a new mountain, invisible to the uninitiated eye but nevertheless genuinely redoubtable. The local muddy cliffs were part of our dreams and every Wednesday, every weekend, we used to don our big leather shoes and oversized knickers, and head out to tackle our summits.

Sometimes, we also went canyoning, lowering ourselves down waterfalls on our experimental ropes. This is a popular adventure activity today but back then it hadn't even been invented. We imagined we had to traverse torrents of water and stay, whatever happened, in the river. Like many kids we developed our own world where we imposed on ourselves a tough and punishing ethic, rough, daring and foolhardy. Even in the frigid winter, even when the temperature dropped to minus ten or fifteen, we would battle the closest torrent from home. We would wrap ourselves in three woollen pullovers and set off with sandwiches encapsulated ten successive times in plastic bags and trek towards the snow-covered banks of the gully. The torrent was so transparent that one could easily tell the bitterness of the temperature. Icy water streamed down our necks as we climbed a precariously slippery waterfall. Our hands turned into dead wooden clumps, swollen like those of corpses. Often we messed up, slipping in with a freezing splash. We had chosen to be there so we were happy to wade for hours in hypothermic rivers. Once immersed in water, the pullovers would swell and be transformed into makeshift armour weighing a dozen kilos. The first pullover, closest to the body, maintained a little bit of heat while the second provided a cushion against the third one which, most of the time, began to freeze, cracking with each single movement. Wetsuits had existed for many years but we trained to experience the biting cold of the big northern cliffs described by the heroes in our books. We went a little over the top in our enthusiasm. We were young and wild, so ambitious that nothing could faze us, nothing could quench our thirst for adventure. Life was filled with exploration and adrenaline.

As we improved, Pierre and I would climb cliff sides with growing confidence and daring. After school or during weekends, there were some crazy adventures upon the rocks. I remember one time we climbed up and were startled by a fantastic sight. I pulled myself up by gripping a hollow in the rock and — holy shit! I nearly fell. I was eye-to-eye with a huge and powerful bird, a flesh-tearing predator with a wingspan of two metres flapping at me in fury. It was petrifying! One minute climbing in delicate silence, and the next being attacked by a colossal bird of prey! She left the nest and I clung onto the cliff and gathered my breath, waiting for my drumming heart to stop trying to sprint out of my chest. Pierre and I laughed nervously and pulled ourselves up again. We tentatively peeped over into the hollow and had a look — it was a nest. And not only that, there was a giant 'baby' bird in this nest. Of course Pierre and I had disturbed the mother and she was simply defending her young. I took a close look. The baby had a hooked beak and fluffy immature feathers and was about the size of an obese domestic cat. It glared at me fearlessly with staring shiny eyes. The fledgling flapped about a bit as Pierre and I wrestled it into my backpack. I continued my climb up the sheer rock to the top of the cliff with this wild thing's head poking out the top of my bag, blinking, observing. When we got to the top, full of excitement, we took a photo with it, delighted with our trophy. In the photo you might be able to see its strong thick talons almost as big as my hands. Years later a surprised ornithologist would tell us it was an eagle owl, a rare and powerful bird and the largest owl in Europe. Apparently the eagle owl is only marginally smaller than a golden eagle and can even kill juvenile deer. Pierre and I admired our prize then climbed down and put it back in its nest. As wide- eyed kids, we were amazed. We would muster up the courage to return to the bird in hushed awe to follow its development. Of course we would be very careful to avoid its mother. We would visit the bird for two months until, one day, of course it had grown up and left the nest. In many ways this was a metaphor for ourselves. We too were growing and had to spread our wings, to branch out. We pushed our luck harder, took new audacious routes. Our skills developed further as we took considerable risks upon our local rocks.

Pierre, who was two years older than me, wanted to try something new. We had charted and conquered our phantasmagorical universe of Valence and needed to chart new lands. We were growing up so it was getting pretty hard to believe in our own Everests despite noble efforts. It was high time for us to burn our idols and to attack the big cliffs. This re-evaluation of our world marked the transition between childhood dreams and adult reality, with its many victories and also its disappointments.

Thanks to an article we found in France's first specialist climbing journal, Mountains Magazine, we began to apply the official principles of free escalation on a beautiful rock feature in the neighbouring department of Ardeche. The Chateau de Crussol is a ruined 13th-century castle sitting on top of limestone Crussol hill. Picturesque and imposing, the crumbled remains of this fairy-tale chateau are a dramatic blend of history and geology and an inspiring setting and challenge.

Armed with our 'topo' we resolved to attack and conquer this fort. At that time, these small composites of information detailing the precise route one should follow had no technical or rational aspects. Beyond the laconic quotations of every length and dimension of a crag, the lyric or even cryptic description of the route enhanced the charm of the adventure but made progress difficult and unpredictable. 'Go up to 20 metres by a smooth dihedral in order to escape on the left before the wall overhangs and then join a shield of exposed paving stones, where it is necessary to go back up quickly under the first very aerial overhang. And be careful, from this place, from that place, there is no way to escape...'

At times understanding these topos was like deciphering hieroglyphs or a treasure map. In the evening, at the refuge or comfortably seated on the bed, the topo reading was religiously performed. Mentally we struggled to make images of these foreboding but magic words.

Before the ascent, we lived a kind of wavering moment, a few minutes of indecision, hesitation, where we tried subconsciously to delay the fight for which we had prepared for weeks. Before leaving, we drank a drop of cold coffee. The air was fresh this day, the sombre sky gave the setting a gloomy and sulking hue. We entered the cathedral of climbing in meditation, as humble believers. Nothing, not even the squawk of a soaring bird overhead, broke this quasi-religious atmosphere. We spoke little. The hour was serious, grave. The more we advanced towards the face, the more it seemed as if we were about to get lost in an anonymous sky. I studied again the mysterious topo for the ascent, trying to match its sorcery with the vast wall ahead of us.

At the foot of Chateau de Crussol our simple climbing material was taken out of rucksacks and lay at our feet, still sluggish and dormant but staring at us in anticipation. It was too late to turn back now. The literature had not pulled any punches and we anticipated the toughest climb of our lives. This was to be our first 'professional' solo climb, the first time we would enter the realm of the pros. Pierre and I had climbed our own cliffs, cliffs that were not assigned grades by the climbing community. So we invented our own ratings. Due to the lack of comparable grades, we assigned our toughest passages scores of between three and four, six being reserved for the ascents achieved by the supermen of Alpine literature. With our discovery of these mammoth and professional climbs ofVercors, then rated ED (Extremement Difficile or Extremely Difficult), the top end of the scale at the time, we felt tiny in front of these vertical walls of white- grey limestone. Our muddy routes of Valence seemed so petty, so non¬existent, that the first contact with reality was like a frictional rope burn in the crotch. It was clear that heroism and imagination were not going to be enough. It was now necessary to play in a bigger schoolyard, one where you could not cry 'Stop!' when things went wrong. Once engaged here, you were on your own.

In silent contemplation we made our ascent. We attacked it solo, with only our hands and feet, though we carried a rope for insurance should we need it. The rope would not be a complete solution should we get into a sticky situation as there were no hooks in the cliff. Any escape by rope would require us to adapt. But once we had completed the lower lengths, we saw the truth. If this climb deserved the Extremely Difficult or ED rating assigned by the Alpine climbing community, then the most extreme of ours in Valence were without question Abominably Difficult'! Due to our lack of references, as we had climbed on our own, far from the vertical community of the time, we had developed a parallel system of quotations — but ours, it turned out, were sharply more austere. A rating that they would have assigned 5 by the French system would be 3 in our own. As our cliffs weren't on the climbing circuit we had no idea what level of difficulty they really were. Official French climbing grades start at 1 (very easy) and build up to somewhere around 9 (superhumanly difficult) with a, b or c designations and plus or minus signs adding further differentiation. I say 'somewhere around 9' as some of these climbs are actually impossible until proven otherwise. The toughest so far realised today is something around 9a+, and of course that was achieved with ropes. Few people can take on a climb of 7 or more, and that's with full equipment. The system is designed for equipped climbers and even fairly easy climbs without ropes can suddenly become very challenging. The parallel Alpine rating for the climb at the chateau was ED.

Halfway up the summit, having surmounted the major difficulties, we clambered onto a wide ledge to rest. Pierre had scaled this length ahead of me. I quickly joined him. Then, without a word, we exchanged glances and smiled. We had won the opening set. Our dream had become reality. We completed the climb with some strain but, in reality, little difficulty and then made our way carefully back to the bottom. Once our feet were back on terra firma we cavorted like the kids we still were. We had completed an ED! Not only that, but we suddenly realised that we were actually very accomplished climbers and hadn't known it!

After our first success, the entire Vercors Plateau from Archiane to Presles became our playground. Nothing would worry us, not even the sight of a 300-metre solo at Presles assigned ED. A bunch of hikers passing below us could not believe their eyes. Extreme rock climbing was reserved for serious people, experts, not for snotty kids! To shock the old farts we would smile and arrogantly dispense with the rope. Pierre and I would show off before horrified and agape faces. We would get extra kicks from winding up the older generation. Authority was something we had little respect for and climbing was a fine outlet for our teenage rebellion.

Time marched on. Pierre and I enjoyed some magnificent times in our numerous hair-raising adventures. Our climbing progressed, evolved, matured, and our bodies grew taller and stronger. And then one day, out of the blue, Pierre made a totally unexpected announcement. He had decided to join the police force! Pierre? Of all the people. I really couldn't believe it. And I was wounded by this move for it was true treason. Pierre explained he wanted to be a mountain cop, not a normal one, but still it was the antithesis of what we had stood for. I was baffled by this. At school Pierre was a very smart guy but he did not have the ability to shut up. How could he possibly become a cop and put up with superiors? Could he endure stiff regulations and being told what to do by some power- crazed Hitler? Apparently so. After all we had lived through together, I was lonesome, abandoned and brimming with recollections. We had always been together, spurring each other on in our adventures, challenging and competing with each other. Suddenly there was no one to climb with. No one to laugh with and to team up with against adversity. At the age of 17, I thought it was a bit early to live on memories. History could not stop here — surely this should not signal the end?

Pierre and I had the occasion to see each other again, but a misty embarrassment had settled between us, for once a play is over it can ruin the story to ask for another act. But we had lived too many intense and sweet moments to fall out, so the separation was harmless, smiling, amicable. We both knew that it was useless to maintain a flat and desperately commonplace relationship. It had been a love story where we would replace embraces with risk taking, sexual ecstasy with equally orgasmic spurts of adrenaline. The parallel may seem excessive, but the trust and closeness you find when you entwine limbs with your lover also exists when brothers put their lives in the hands of one another. A good relationship does not suffer mediocrity. And on reflection I could not begrudge my best friend his decision to follow a true profession. But still I did not feel the need to pursue anything else. Everything I wanted to do was just as clear. Magazines were full of beautiful successes on the cliffs of Provence, wonderful places crying out to be explored and enjoyed. So I carried on by myself.

Being fortunate enough to live in southern France I discovered Buoux and the incredible Verdon, the Mecca of rock climbing! The Verdon Canyon is rightly known as the most beautiful in Europe. The canyon itself is the second largest in the world, 20 kilometres long and 300 metres deep. Verdon is absolutely stunning and its infinity of escalations gave me a timely boost. Due to an absence of fellow fighters, climbing solo became the only means to continue my passion. If, luckily, I came across another solitary rock climber, we would team up to work difficult passages. Otherwise I roamed solo up the easier routes of the cliff. A short time later, I attacked the top-level ways trailblazed by the pioneers of the era, mainly the imaginative routes of a young and emerging Patrick Edlinger. I got to hang out with other young climbers, teenagers or lads in their early twenties, many of whom are famous names today. I would join Edlinger, Patrick Behrault, Eric Escoffier, Jean Christoff Lafaille, Christophe Profit and numerous other climbers in tackling great cliffs. These guys all went on to do great things. Sadly a lot of them are no longer here. Some fell, some never came back. But I admire them for the way they lived — no compromise. So many people in this world are just surviving, but these guys lived full lives even if those lives were cut short.

I was changing and so were the times. The 1980s saw an explosion in adventure sports, with an emphasis on fun rather than heroic exploration or sticking flagpoles in the ground, since Man had more or less charted the extremes of the world. Escalation caught on as a sporting activity with real growth at both professional and grass roots level. The first escalation competitions had already begun, awarding medals and trophies to the exciting new sportsmen who were reinventing free-style rock climbing, climbing rock faces in the open air free of any outside or material constraints before judges and audiences. It was quite ironic that I should follow this emerging sport whilst entombed in casts and bandages in my hospital bed with bones broken literally from head to toe.

Brushed aside from the podium because of my successive accidents in 1982, I did however have the occasion to participate — without proving unworthy in some top international matches — but my history was bound to lie elsewhere. The competitions, though fun, felt artificial to me. The rules and regulations imposed to give a framework for judges and timekeepers, and the influx of prize money for me and many other climbers, diluted and distorted the sport. Of course some climbers thrived on it, and climbing as a competitive sport is well established today, and has undoubtedly helped the sport grow. It must be said though that few observers, apart from seasoned climbers, can appreciate the technicalities on which the competitions are based. Although I flirted with competitive climbing for a while in the mid-eighties I felt the setup to be sometimes stifling and largely subjective. For me, climbing was not about racing or competing — it was about freedom and self-expression. It sounds idealist, perhaps, but I guess I am just from another generation of climbers. As climbing became more popular they added more rules and regulations and it became more like a sport than a pursuit. It was no longer about adventure. I did not want to compete against others, but against the cliff. Against myself. Alone. And with my life in my hands.

Regardless of any preferences, my accidents put competitive climbing or indeed any climbing off the menu for quite a while. For me, my falls were moments transformed into slices of life, providing a real catalyst of energy for future climbs. The first time I had a really bad accident was due to a lack of experience. I was near Aix-en-Province on 18 th January 1982 and I descended a cliff from a ledge by rapidly sliding down my rope. Instead of securing my rope through a carabiner I laced it through a nylon webbing anchor. An indestructible 19-year-old, I was having too much fun and speeding the way a boy racer does with his new set of wheels. The nylon rope was secure and strong enough to hold my weight, 50 kilograms at that time, but unfortunately it split with the excessive friction and heat of my rapid and carefree descent, and my descent to the bottom accelerated somewhat. With a snapped rope I free-fell a full 15 metres. How did that day end? With a fracture of the right radius, fractures to many bones in the right carpus, a fracture across the bridge of my nose, a shattered right calcaneum resulting in an osseous infection which could easily have led to amputation of my foot. I was unconscious for about 30 minutes and my friends rushed me to hospital. I was in a bit of a mess and stayed in hospital for a while, undergoing three operations. Fortunately I landed on flat earth rather than rock but, still, it hurts a lot when you hit the ground that hard. I was not pleased with the outcome but it could have been much worse. Looking back it was a rather daft descent with a predictable outcome. Oh well, I was young then...

I staggered out of hospital partially entombed in two big fat plaster casts — one on my right hand and one on my right leg. My twisted nose would have been in a cast had such a thing existed. It was in this ridiculous state that I met my wife. One of the things I remember about this fateful meeting is that she had a dog and it was barking like mad when it saw my casts.

It took me a while to shake off my plaster casts and four months to get back to climbing again. I loved climbing so much and it never occurred to me to quit, though naturally I learnt a little more respect for the cliffs from my fall. I was just getting back into the swing of things, and nearly as good as I was beforehand, and then — fuck! Accident number two — and this time it was much, much more serious.

Only six months passed between my first and second accidents. On 29th September I was up a cliff again in Cornas, near Valence, climbing free solo and enjoying the pure mountain air. A few climbers approached the cliff I was climbing accompanied by some instructors I knew. The instructors shouted up to me and asked if I could fix their rope at the top of the cliff as it would take them some time, time better spent on their climbing lessons. I descended and they gave me their material and I went up again free solo to the top of the cliff to secure it for them. The steel expansion bolt at the top was not placed very close to the cliff edge so I needed to hook it to a carabiner, through another rope, and then another carabiner. Since it was easier than climbing down free solo, I made my way down on the rope towards the climbers, taking care not to descend too fast. The knot in the rope they had given me was poor, but crucially I hadn't noticed and neither had anyone else. Unbeknown to me the instructors had given it to the boys when they explained how to tie knots. The lads had done one of them incorrectly and I hadn't seen the error, assuming that what I had been given was safe and secure. At the time it seemed to be correct, and my rope felt solid and well anchored into the cliff. Well, it wasn't!

This fall was especially bad because I fell headfirst. I dived like a stricken Superman towards hard rock, my hands splayed out below me trying to minimise the impact with the rocks — rather foolishly. Wrists and head hit solid rock first, my wrists were utterly smashed and my head absorbed much of the rest.

Barely out of hospital, I was rushed back there again, being tended to by the same doctors and nurses. I spent five days in the blank, dark void of a deep coma. I had a badly fractured skull, and had closely avoided the amputation of one of my hands; both of my wrists and forearms were reduced to crumbs, my pelvis was smashed, an elbow and a knee were virtually destroyed, the bones of my face sustained numerous fractures; and I suffered a totally crushed nose, which was the third impact point of my rapid touchdown. In addition, the right ulnar nerve, which commands two fingers and the thumb, was ruined too.

When I regained consciousness and lucidity one of the first things I asked the nurse was whether I would climb again. They didn't want to tell me. Eventually I got to talk to Dr Hoël, the surgeon who had saved my left hand. For him it was obvious: he had never seen such a wrist injury that had not led to either a major or total loss of function. In many cases the patient would have lost the hand completely. The right hand was also very badly injured and would never be the same again. I would be disabled to some degree for the rest of my life. Some functions could return, but it was possible that my hands would be largely ornamental fixtures. Most of my other injuries would heal though my elbow and knee joints would not be able to support vigorous sporting activities in future.

I stared at my snapped and shattered bones on the X-rays, metal pins and rods holding everything together. The damage was obvious. I digested the news soberly. To be honest I could not feel too disheartened, terrible as this news was. Even though they were telling me that I would not climb again I was very grateful that I had survived. I was alive. I could not be upset about anything after being given this second chance at life. What worried me more was being unable to do simple everyday things.Being confronted with a life of disability was frightening. The prospect would spin around my cracked head as I lay there completely useless and helpless. I couldn't use my hands and of course I couldn't walk. My voice was reduced to a hoarse, high-pitched whisper since in my coma I had been given a tracheotomy. The pipe had been removed but my feeble wheeze could barely be heard. It was horrible and unbelievably frustrating. I would have a problem in my fucking room and there was nothing I could do and nobody could hear me to assist. Imagine it. You cannot walk. You cannot use your hands. And you cannot even talk — just make pathetic whining noises and get pissed off.

While Patrick Edlinger was creating a stir on television, hanging by just one arm from the overhang of a cliff some 50 metres above the ground, I was lying prone in a bed in Grenoble Hospital stoned out of my mind on medication. I spent two months in hospital. I had six operations on my hands, elbow and knee. Pins and bolts were rearranged as they battled to restore the use of my limbs. When you are lying there for weeks on end you lose a lot of weight, a lot of muscle, and your balance goes out of the window. I recovered slowly but steadily and finally the day came when I could totter out the front doors.

Thin and corpse-like I got home and weakly stepped up to the doorway. I extended a geriatric hand but could not even turn the key inside the lock. My wrists, especially my left one, were completely stiff. They would not straighten and my left hand would droop limply. I couldn't move it or do anything with it at all. As time passed it did get a little better but not that much. I tried to lift a small pan of water and I couldn't — not a big pan, just a small one, the sort of thing my young kids could manage. I was totally bemused by my pathetic body. Holding a mug of coffee would require an intake of breath and my wife would have to go next door to get the jars opened. I was as frail as an old lady and it was difficult to adjust, especially mentally. What would I do with the rest of my life? I survived, but for what? How could I earn a living to support my family? These were deep and troubling questions.

But soon after I got home I realised that I still wanted to climb. Even if my ascent from now on would be a boulder for ten-year-olds, as placid as a flight of stairs, then why not? Despite my disabilities I still had a passion for climbing and I was determined I would climb something. Anything. So I looked for something to climb, something easy.

I wandered around my neighbourhood and not far from my house I found a brick wall. It was modest in height, only two-and-a-half metres tall and it snaked two to three hundred metres along the boulevard. I rubbed my hands along it, feeling its texture, its soul. I felt an affinity with this wall, and decided there and then that this would be my challenge. My plan was not to climb it but to cross it horizontally, some 50 centimetres above the pavement.

At the beginning I could only cross two or three bricks before falling off, such was the weakness in my wrists. The problem was that when I let go with my right wrist to reach across, my left was so weak that it was impossible to hold on. Time and time again I would fall to the pavement, but it was good — I felt a little bit of progress each time, even if the progress could be measured in mere centimetres or less. And every day I had a new target.

It took me two months to get across just a metre or so. Two gruelling months, but I managed it. I would carry on trying to cross more sections of this wall. Bit by bit I made my second metre, then my third. And finally, one day I managed to traverse the whole wall — all two or three hundred metres of it. It had taken me two years of immense effort and dedication but at last I had done it. And when I reached the end of that marvellous wall, my strength for climbing was more than restored. My self-imposed rehabilitation had in fact led me on a journey to a point where I actually felt stronger than I did before. I bore the scars of my brush with death and my wrists were still gnarled and irregular like tree branches, but my strength, balance and coordination were restored.

In actual fact, crossing the entire stretch of that wall would be very challenging even for the fittest able-bodied climbers. On reflection, it seems easy to assert that my misfortune and the resulting adversity forced me to reach deep into my heart and find the motivation and direction for my life. But over those two or three years of successive accidents, hospitalisations and recuperations there were moments of physical and emotional pain, and there was only the present tense: a torturous world of doubts.

And so, with the wall behind me and after a gap of two years due to injury, I took to my cliffs once more. My appalling accident, as with the one which preceded it, occurred during the descent and not during the actual escalation itself, as many people often think. Both times my rope, literally my lifeline, gave way. Is it because I have been betrayed twice by ropes that I have chosen to escalate with nothing but my fingertips? Is it because paradoxically I feel safer relying on myself, rather than on so-called safety devices that have twice failed me in such a spectacular fashion? I have not the faintest idea, though when I think about it this may supply a plausible explanation.

I had fought long and hard to get back on the rocks and I greatly wanted to avoid plummeting to the ground again on the end of a frayed rope. I was ready to dive right in and make up for lost time, more than two lost years when I ought to have been approaching my prime. At the tail end of 1984, I achieved my long-held target, L'Abominable Homme des Doigts, a fearsome route up an unforgiving rock face. From my starting point halfway up the cliff in a little cave I pushed up this very challenging route free solo. The difficulty in climbing it is almost as tough as translating it effectively into English. The name of this very, very tough climb is something like The Abominable Finger Man (told you). L'Abominable Homme des Doigts was a 7b+, the highest level for free solo at this time. I felt very pleased to have reached what was at that point the pinnacle of free solo climbing. I continued to push it as far as I could as a free solo climber, finding new challenges.

The following year, I opened up a new and tougher 7c variant, L'Abomifreux (The Abominable Ugly) on the same cliff. It was indeed an abominably difficult ascent and really tested me, especially since I had to improvise and experiment as a pioneer of the route.

Four years after that, on this same rock face, I achieved an even more extreme solo version yet, L'Abominafreux (The Even More Abominably Ugly). This climb was an 8 a.

As a conclusion, in 1992, I combined the three routes. I did them all solo again, but this time I would start as I had in prior climbs at the cave halfway up the rock face, climb up one route, descend to the cave, and instead of setting foot in it I would link it with the next climb. Thus L'Abominable Homme des Doigts, L'Abomifreux and L'Abominafreux were all combined without rest into one incredible climb. It was my own free solo trilogy. An 8a ascent, a 7c descent, then a 7b+ ascent! This new combination was designated an 8b. It was certainly the first 8b ever achieved without a rope, and as far as I know, even today many years later it remains one of the most extreme solo climbs ever completed anywhere.

I had succeeded in taking a beautiful revenge on fate. I had not only climbed again but I was climbing an 8b free solo! And it was with the same belief and training that I recovered and climbed once again, despite my third big fall in 1993. The following year I would start climbing buildings.