Mountain landscape - Europe

Grandes Jorasses and Dent du Géant

I’m not a climber but I’ve enjoyed collecting what I feel is a fairly decent library of climbing and mountaineering literature. One book that firmly sticks in mind is French climber René Desmaison’s autobiography ‘Total Alpinism’, which includes an account of his and 23-year old Serge Gousseault’s climb on the 1200m-high north face of Grandes Jorasses, a harrowing epic of a 2-week journey up a new route on the Walker Spur that took place in the year I was born (1971) and which resulted in the younger climber’s death on the mountain, and a subsequent rescue for Desmaison, but not until after 4 more bivouacs on the face. 

The Desmaison / Gousseault route on Grandes Jorasses is behind the steep slopes on the left-hand side of the image. This terrain leads up to the snow and ice-covered summits of Pointe Walker and Pointe Whymper on Grandes Jorasses (the high points on the left-hand side) with Pointe Croz, Pointe Hélène, Pointe Marguerite, Pointe Young in front. Left to right then hints at the stunning terrain of the traverse between Grandes Jorasses and Dent du Géant (aka Dente del Gigante in Italian, or Giant Tooth), which consists of a series of narrow jagged ridges, pinnacles and snow arêtes that form a natural frontier between France on this side and Italy on the other, with over a kilometre high drop on both sides. Included in this border is Aiguille de Rochefort and Dôme de Rochefort, only one of which is visible, and beneath the peaks lies the highly crevassed slopes of Glacier des Périades (on the left) and Glacier du Géant. The remarkably pinnacled Les Périades ridge comes in from the left underneath Grandes Jorasses, leading up to Mont Mallet.