David Lama scouting Lunag Ri for his Piolet d'Or winning climb in 2018. Photo / Martin Hanslmayr/Red Bull Content Pool via The New York Times
The Piolet d'Or, or Golden Ice Axe, is alpine climbing's biggest award. But whether it honours or encourages risk is debated in the sport.
High on Lunag Ri in Nepal, Austrian climber David Lama started worrying that he might lose his toes. The cold on the 6,895 metre mountain was as bad as anything he had ever experienced.
Lama, attempting to scale it alone in 2018, could have ended up dead if he became pinned down in a storm with severe frostbite or was injured in a fall. A rescue would be nearly impossible.
Lama's digits never froze entirely, and he continued to the top of the mountain. The image of him silhouetted on the pulpitlike summit is the kind that climbers dream about. He said after the ascent that he had pushed near his risk-tolerance limit. For his climb, Lama won a Piolet d'Or — the Golden Ice Axe — alpinism's biggest prize.
But Lama wasn't present to accept the award at the Piolets d'Or ceremony in Ladek-Zdroj, Poland, in September 2019.
He had died five months earlier in an avalanche, while attempting to climb a new route on the dangerous Howse Peak in the Canadian Rockies. His two partners, American Jess Roskelley and Austrian Hansjorg Auer, also died in the accident. Auer, too, was being honoured with a Piolet d'Or in Poland, for a boundary-pushing solo climb of Pakistan's Lupghar Sar West (23,481 feet).
The dissonance between their deaths and the celebration of their risky solo ascents raised an uncomfortable question about the Piolets d'Or: Is choosing winners — and therefore losers — in mountaineering a bad idea? Elite alpine climbing already feels perilous; its practitioners' dying is a matter of course. But does handing out awards reinforce an unhealthy culture of risk in what is already a potentially deadly pursuit?
Giving the awards to Lama and Auer was like "having a drinking party for somebody that died of liver disease," said Rolando Garibotti, 50, an Argentine American alpine climber for over 30 years, during a phone call from Innsbruck, Austria. Garibotti is one of several significant climbers who wrestle with the implications of giving out prizes for climbs.
"There are plenty of alpine climbs where people walked away only barely with their skin," Garibotti said. "And none of those people and climbs, in my mind, should qualify for the Piolet d'Or. If we want to create a culture in which not so many of the top guys end up dying, we need to make some changes."
Garibotti's comment about top alpinists' dying is not hyperbole: Since 2008, at least seven Piolet d'Or winners, including Swiss climber Ueli Steck, have gone on to die in the mountains.
The 2021 Piolets d'Or, the ceremony's 30th anniversary, took place this past weekend, in Briançon, a center of alpine climbing in France. The event featured glittering trophies, acceptance speeches and standing ovations. The honoured ascents this year had greater margins of safety than Lama's or Auer's. But the spectre remained.
Christian Trommsdorff, organizer of the Piolets d'Or and himself an alpinist, said in a phone call from Greece, "Risk is not a factor in the selection process" of winners, meaning that climbs judged to have been too dangerous are not considered. "But it's part of the game," he said, referring to the intrinsic risks in alpinism.
The Piolets d'Or were founded in 1992 in France as a collaboration between Montagnes magazine and the Group de Haute Montagne, or High Mountain Group, of which Trommsdorff is president.
Risk aside, there has been debate over the years on how to judge climbs, which have a subjective quality as alpine climbers routinely debate "style," or how one gets to the summit.
Things came to a head in 2007, when Slovene alpinist Marko Prezelj refused to accept the Piolet d'Or. Later that year, he wrote an article in the annual American Alpine Journal, arguing that the awards foster an environment in which climbers are "encouraged to overstretch their capacity, to make use of performance-boosting substances, and to take inconsiderate risks."
So in 2009, the Piolets d'Or introduced a new format, honouring several climbs, all announced months before the ceremony. This satisfied many of the most vocal opponents in the "style" camp, but for others, like Garibotti, it failed to redress the fundamental problems surrounding risk.
Garibotti knows the danger firsthand. By his tally, more than 30 people he has roped up with have later died climbing. The Piolets d'Or twice tried to nominate Garibotti for the award, once in 2006, for a new route on Cerro Torre, in Patagonia, and once in 2009, for the first traverse of the entire Cerro Torre massif. Twice he refused.
Most shocking was whom the jury decided to honour in 1998: a Russian team that made the first ascent of the west face of the Himalayan peak Makalu in 1997. Two of the climbers on the expedition died in the process. The organisers introduced a new criterion after backlash that year, requiring, according to Trommsdorff, "that you have to come back in one piece."
The problem, in Garibotti's opinion, isn't that the awards encourage climbers to take more risk, but that in awarding risky climbs, they validate risky behaviour. "If you have representation of climbs that are reckless, there are going to be more reckless climbs," he said.
After winning a Piolet d'Or in 2019 with his Slovene teammates Ales Cesen and Luka Strazar, British climber Tom Livingstone wrote in an essay on his website that the award "plays on my human ego" in worrisome ways.
"I already have a devil on my shoulder at the end of a run-out" — a section of sparsely protected climbing that can result in dangerous falls — "who whispers, 'uh oh, you're gonna take a big one!'" Livingstone wrote. "I don't want another offering me a golden trophy." He accepted the award only because his teammates wanted to.
Of course, for many climbers, danger is a big part of the sport's appeal.
"We have to recognize that in traditional mountaineering, death is a possibility," said Reinhold Messner, 77, one of the most lauded alpinists of the last century. "If it's not a possibility, it's not mountaineering. The art of surviving is just that. It's an art."
Although Messner accepted the lifetime achievement Piolet d'Or in 2010, an award created a year earlier, he too dismisses climbing prizes as reductive. In 1988, he declined an honorary Olympic medal for becoming the first person to summit the world's 14 8,000-metre peaks.
"I was always against the idea that traditional climbing is a competition," Messner said. "Generally I am not for medals at all. The lifetime award — it's about respect."
Despite the detractors, many leading climbers are in favor of the Piolets d'Or.
Symon Welfringer, a 27-year-old Frenchman and one of this year's Piolets d'Or recipients for his first ascent of the south face of Pakistan's Sani Pakkush (6,950 metres) with his countryman Pierrick Fine, said the award "was one of my main goals in starting to go on expeditions" to the Greater Ranges.
"In alpinism we don't have that much recognition," Welfringer explained. "Nowadays you have social media, but it can be quite hard to make people understand how difficult and committing it is to open a new line."
Messner agrees that recognition helps nonclimbers understand the accomplishments of the best climbers and functions as a check on "charlatan climbers who only appear like great adventurers" in Instagram pictures.
Uisdean Hawthorn, a 28-year-old Scottish climber, is another recipient of a Piolet d'Or this year with his partner, Ethan Berman, for their new route on Mount Robson's Emperor Face, in Canada. "I think it's a good thing," Hawthorn said. "This ceremony brings climbers together to have a discussion. So I think anything that kind of does that is positive."
Hawthorn doubts most alpinists see the Piolet d'Or as a motivator, as Welfringer did in his climbing. He compared climbers to scientists doing years of research in an esoteric field: "They're not like, 'If I do this, I'll get a Nobel Prize,'" Hawthorn said. "They're just really into that weird niche thing, and they like it."
Trommsdorff agrees. "We're not pushing people to take risks — you don't need the Piolets d'Or to do that," he said. And, Trommsdorff said, the Piolets d'Or specifically removed mention of winners and losers in its revamped charter in 2009.
Many, like Hawthorn, appreciate this reframing. "You could negatively look at it as still an excuse to award the best climb in alpinism, but I don't really see it as that. It's more of a celebration of alpinism. If it wasn't a peer-judged thing, it would be completely different."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Levy
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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