(Posted Thursday morning. Discipline!)

I have lived a varied and somewhat adventurous life. If it ever flashes before my eyes, I’d have to be like, wait, this is all the same guy?

But I read about men in books, whose lives dwarf mine in their scale of accomplishment and adventure. There’s a certain feeling, a kind of envious horror, you get from reading about people like that. On the one hand, you wish you could boast of their accomplishments and experience some of their fantastic moments. But you’re honestly grateful you don’t have to go through their adventures.

One such book is Annapurna by Maurice Herzog.

Herzog was the leader of the 1950 French expedition which successfully summited Annapurna. It wasn’t the highest that men had ever climbed, but it was the first peak above 8,000 meters ever to be climbed to the summit, and it forever remains the only “eight-thousander” to be climbed on the first try.

Herzog led a climbing team of eight men, plus an emergency physician by the name of Oudot. The climbers were all world-class experts recruited from the community of Chamonix, a climbing Mecca on the order of America’s Yosemite.

The primary objective of the expedition was a mountain called Daulaghiri. Should that objective prove unattainable, Annapurna was the fallback option.

1950 is within living memory for many, but the world has changed so that the experiences of Herzog and his team are no longer possible. They had only crude, inaccurate maps, and they faced significant challenges just trying to find the mountains they intended to climb. They had some kind of quadrupeds, mules or horses. So they split up and ranged all over the countryside, scouting and reporting their observations back to Herzog. Daulaghiri wasn’t where they thought it was, but they found it pretty quickly.

Then they had to reconnoiter. People without mountain experience may not intuitively understand just how big a big mountain is. If you take a hike around Mount Hood to have a look at all the approaches to the summit, you’ll walk 38 miles. Mount Hood is a midget compared to Daulaghiri, and the terrain would have been untracked, steep, extremely rugged, and at an altitude that exacts penalties on the human body.

They ranged around Daulaghiri and had a look at everything. They didn’t like what they saw. There was one line that looked vaguely possible, so they tried it. And they beat a hasty retreat after one of them said, “this is not healthy”.

That left Annapurna, and they had only the vaguest idea where that mountain might be. Once again they ranged all over the place, scouting the highest ridges, trying to make observations. Finally one of them reported he saw a mountain peak over there somewhere, so they all went over there somewhere, and there was Annapurna. They soon found a line on the North side that they felt would be an assured success.

In the old days, when men set out to climb a really big mountain, they did it in “siege” style. That meant establishing camps higher and higher on the mountain, shuttling supplies and manpower to support a final summit push from the highest camp. In recent decades, siege mountaineering has fallen out of fashion, and the cutting edge is “alpine” mountaineering, where a small team or even a solo artist, traveling extremely light and fast, tackles the objective in a single prolonged effort without logistic support.

Herzog and his team besieged the mountain, establishing four camps. But even a hardened alpinist who sneers at that kind of thing would have to admit that expedition worked lightning-fast with a minimum of support. They didn’t have a safari train of Sherpas to haul their gear. It was just eight very stout, determined guys.

And they were in a hurry by this time. The Himalayas may be an icy wasteland, but the climate is tropical, and that means monsoons. Once the monsoon starts, the high peaks become unclimbable, unsurviveable. It’s just too much fresh snow; you sink into it up to your neck, and then it slides down and buries you. Herzog and his buddies had spent weeks of the precious climbing season just trying to find their objective. Now they were in a deadly race against time, climbing almost into the teeth of the storm.

And they made it. Herzog and Lachenal flew the French flag from Annapurna’s summit. Then, as they started back down, Herzog made a little fumble. The tiniest thing, but it put his life in danger and he panicked. Of course acute hypoxia and fatigue are well-known to cause fatal lapses of judgement. Herzog had what he needed to save himself, he had it right in his backpack with him. But he panicked and forgot. The monsoon hit that night, sealing his fate.

Maurice Herzog survived, thanks to the emergency interventions of Oudot. Herzog went on to be Mayor of Chamonix and lived out his life with great honor.

But he paid for that mistake on Annapurna. He would never be the same again.