Hervé Barmasse: “Mountains teach respect and balance, today’s politicians need a mountain guide”
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«The first thing the mountain teaches you is respect. It is a question of dimensions, of course, but also of balance”. He weighs his words, Hervé Barmasse who carries mountains in his genes: raised in Valtournenche, in the shadow of the Matterhorn, fourth generation of guides, he climbed almost everywhere, from the Alps to the Himalayas, from Patagonia in South America to the Chinese Pamir , often opening new routes and climbing solo, the most dangerous experience, the direct confrontation – the man between the rock and the sky. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the famous inscription gnothi seautòn, know thyself, was engraved on the pediment of the temple of Apollo, in Delphi, on the slopes of Parnassus, in a vertigo of ridges and valleys. The original meaning seems to have referred to human finiteness compared to the gods and nature. Knowing is also being able to tell. The mountaineer Barmasse is a passionate disseminator of heights and the paths to reach them. He wrote about it in two books: The mountain inside (Laterza 2015) and Cervino. The legendary mountain (Mondadori Electa, 2021). He went on tour last year for meetings with the public on the theme Beyond the Horizon. Today he will still talk about the mountains, as a school of life, at the Nuovi Mondi festival in Valloriate in the Stura valley.
gWere the ancient Greeks right, Barmasse, do the mountains teach us to know ourselves?
“I am sure. Understanding your limits teaches you not to waste. First of all, life. His own life, that of his climbing companions. Then the resources. And then you can try to push them forward, the limits. Always with the awareness that we are not the masters of nature, we are guests. The respect that the mountain imposes on you is linked to balance by a direct thread. If you break it, you risk it».
The surrealist writer and mountaineer René Daumal, in his unfinished novel THEthe similar mountain writes about a mythical place where the high mountain guides rule. One of these is expelled and sentenced to live on the coast, far from the mountain, for having killed a small animal in an area where hunting is prohibited. The killing, in a chain process, causes an ecological disaster, the collapse of a street. Is the law of the mountain cruel?
«First of all, for family reasons, I like the idea of a place where the guides rule. The mountain, with its sudden changes, teaches us to make decisions. Today’s politicians would do no harm to follow a guide over trails and crevices. The point is that when you go to altitude it’s easier to see how everything is related. The mountain environment trains you to pay attention. Daumal’s literary parable makes us understand that in a fragile environment, a small gesture can have serious consequences».
Today glaciers, which Daumal himself defined as the inorganic entity closest to a living being, are indicated by many as the thermometer of the fragility of the ecosystem threatened by climate change. Another lesson from the mountain?
«I believe that interest in the mountains will grow in the next few years. More than 60 percent of the water we drink comes from the mountains. Now we are learning not to waste it, for example to make artificial snow on the ski slopes. Glaciers are not only beautiful but useful. And they are all retreating. Even Perito Moreno, in Argentine Patagonia, which some claimed was the only one growing, is showing signs of decline: a glacier is not measured by size but by the thickness of the ice. Legends placed dragons on the glaciers, the high mountains were seen as a deadly place, the mountaineers were looked down upon”.
But in antiquity the peaks were not often considered sacred: the Olympus of the Greeks like Kailash, in Tibet, still revered today by five religions?
“It is true. But there was a sort of religious fear-dread. The mountains were seen as places where heaven and earth meet but were also forbidden to humans. In Europe, after the ancient world, the view of the mountain becomes negative. Everything changes with the Enlightenment, when high altitudes become regions to explore, to understand. I hope the mountains teach us a new Enlightenment».
AND the desire to explore that leads you to open new routes, to climb peaks never reached?
«In opening a new route you feel an emotion, that of being the first human being to pass that part of the mountain. There is a teaching also in emotions ».
Do you like the atmosphere of the base camps?
“Not the crowded, over-organized ones. Assault mountaineering is bad for the mountain. I prefer to set up the tent in secluded places with my climbing companions».
How is your relationship with the Matterhorn, the first mountain of your life, where you often return? A fertile obsession like the Sainte Victoire for the painter Paul Cézanne?
“There is no obsession. The Matterhorn is a friend, an older brother. The approach is different if I lead someone on known routes or if I climb solo by opening new routes: in the latter case the attention is alert, a knowledge that deepens».
Is there any work of fiction, novel or short story, in which you found yourself, even if written by a passionate, non-mountaineer, I am thinking, for example, of An Alpine Idyll by Ernest Hemingway?
«I really prefer to read the realistic accounts of those who know the mountain well. I can cite Lionel Terray’s Conquerors of the Useless and Roger Frison-Roche’s Primo in cordata. They tell of a heroic period of mountaineering, the fresh air of adventure is breathed in the pages».
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