The French Alpinist and foremost pioneer of hard climbing in Bolivia is back in action. Alain Mesili, who wrote the only existing guidebook of any substance to climbing in the Cordillera Real, was released from imprisonment last year.Prior to this he had spent three and a half years in both American and Bolivian jails without any charge being brought against him.
Born a Parisian in 1949, Mesili was a political activist in France during the 1968 disturbances. Frustrated with the failings of the French Communist Party he left Europe in 1969 and went, together with a number of other leaders of the failed uprising, to Argentina. “We left to live other lives. At the time, when I started to discover Argentina and Patagonia, virtually no one went there.”
Mesili spent a year exploring Patagonia. He crossed the icecap and was probably the first person to trek around what has now become the Fitz Roy National Park. He also explored the Cordillera Darwin, crossing Chile at a time when Pinochet’s Austral Highway did not exist. Then came what appears to be a quite remarkable and, until the present, totally unknown event.
In December 1970 Mesili, with the now unfortunately deceased Basque climber, Ricardo Arzela, crossed the Paso del Viento to reach the Patagonian Icecap. The pair attempted the West Face of Cerro Torre (only previously attempted by Bonatti) and climbed about 500m before having to retreat due to excessive snow. They then turned their attentions to Fitz Roy. Due to the considerable publicity given in France to Lionel Terray’s first ascent, they knew the line of the original 1952 French Route on the South East Ridge/Face. However, they had no other information on the mountain. “There weren’t any maps. You had to go there and see for yourself. We didn’t have a good idea about what we wanted to do. We had a photo but there was no other information — it wasn’t in fashion then. We went to see what there was. We just had the French Route as a reference. It was very difficult to find documentation. In Buenos Aries when we asked they didn’t know anything.”
Unbeknown to Mesili, by 1970 Fitz Roy had received only two more ascents. The Argentinians, Comesana and Fonrouge, had made the second ascent of the peak in 1965 with their historic climb of the Supercanaleta on the West Face and, in 1968, Chouinard, Dorwort, Jones, Tejada-Flores and Tompkins had made the third via the South West Pillar. The fourth ascent has always been attributed to Dave Nicol’s Anglo-American team, which made the first ascent of the South Pillar in 1972. Arzela and Mesili started up the obvious line on the West Face — the Supercanaleta. Four days later they emerged on the summit. “We climbed the route free using pitons only for protection. There was a lot of wind. One night when we were sleeping on the ropes we were being blown about and spent the whole night swinging wildly. It was impressive.” The route they followed, took a ramp line up the left wall of the couloir before breaking out left to reach the easier, broken mixed ground of the upper North West Ridge.
Arzela and Mesili spent their fifth day on the mountain rappelling the 1952 French Route, finding big hand-made pitons. They then walked or rode horses to Calafate (in those days a small village of colonists) and subsequently travelled by vehicle a further 300km to ‘the big port on the Atlantic’ It took a total of two weeks to get out. “Very rarely were there any vehicles and we didn’t have any money so we couldn’t hire our own transport.”
Their ascent of Fitz Roy, unrecorded in all the ‘bibles’ that have been written on the massif was, therefore, the fourth overall and by a new route. If Mesili’s memory is correct in stating that the route was climbed without aid, then this would also prove to be the first free ascent of the peak as well as its first ever traverse.
Shortly after, Mesili arrived in Bolivia, where he began to climb extensively in the Cordillera Real, as well as exploring the less well-known ranges of the Apolobamba and Quimsa Cruz. “When I started climbing there, La Paz had three hotels plus a bar and it was three years since anyone had made an ascent of Huayna Potosi.” Now this mountain just north of La Paz is probably the most popular 6,000m peak in South America.
Mesili climbed a multitude of new routes in the ’70s, many of which were a generation ahead of anything previous achieved in Bolivia. Mesili’s main partner in the first five years was the local climber, Ernesto Sanchez (tragically, Sanchez was killed on Illimani in 1975), although he also did plenty of new routes solo, or with visiting foreigners including a number of well-known French climbers such as Anselme Baud and Georges Bettembourg.
Mesili’s more notable first ascents include: the Via del Triangulo on the 1,000m West Face of Huayna Potosi (6,088m) and Via de los Franceses on the same mountain, the latter the finest route on the East Face; Cabeza del Condor Directissima (5,648m) plus two fine solo ascents of steep goulottes on Wyoming (5,463m) and Ala Derecha (5,330m), all in the Condoriri Group; several difficult mixed and rock routes on Illampu (6,362m), Pico del Norte (6,050m) Huayna Illampu (5,956m) and Pico Schulze (5,943m); a multitude of technically hard routes on lower peaks in the middle of the Real such as Jankho Layaka (5,545m); several long and committing new routes on both Mururata (5,894m) and Illimani (6,439m), including the only ascents to date on the remote and dangerous East Face of Illimani — two so far unrepeated routes.
A number of his new routes are now considered to warrant an alpine TD+ or ED1 grade, though it is true that snow coverage was more extensive and climbing conditions distinctly better in Mesili’s day. However, Mesili’s routes pushed local climbers to new standards, as well as encouraging foreign Alpinists to visit and attempt hard new routes at high altitude.
His descents of Illampu and Illimani initiated extreme skiing to Bolivia, while his pioneering treks in the south west of the country are repeated today by an increasing number of adventure tourism companies.
Mesili worked with the Bolivian Alpine Club, instructing members in climbing techniques. He also had full access to archives which held the most extensive records on what had been climbed in the country and by whom. Unfortunately, in 1974 the DIN (Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional), the intelligence force of the country’s military ruler at the time, General Hugo Banzer, raided the Club’s premises, confiscated all its archives and arrested Mesili. He was released after three days but the files, which the DIN suspected to be political in nature and written in some sort of code disguising their true content in amongst substantial information on Bolivian mountaineering, were never returned and have been lost forever.
Mesili continued to travel the country and collect what information he could, originally for his own interest but then later for work that was subsequently published in Liberation, the left of centre French newspaper. Mesili also translated into French the works of the revolutionary, Che Guevara. He continued hard climbing throughout the early ’80s and in 1984 published what has now become the bible of climbing in the Real; La Cordillera Real de los Andes Bolivia (for many years unobtainable but reprinted with a new softback cover in 1996).
He planned to write a guide to the Apolobamba but in 1990 a single incident changed his life. Following terrorist attacks on the motorway that links the airport at El Alto with the capital and the murder of two Mormons, somebody bombed the US Marines building in La Paz. The marines were uninjured but a Bolivian policeman was killed. The attacks were blamed on the Zarate Wilka terrorist group (named after a rebel leader from the colonial times), which had launched a campaign against the symbols of US imperialism. Mesili was suspected of being involved with the bombing and his flat was raided by intelligence forces. They took everything including all his notes and records, the most comprehensive information ever collected on climbing and exploration in Bolivia. Mesili fled to the United States. “I went to Miami and had to learn English very quickly. I knew I was being hunted and that I was a suspect in the bombing. They called me The Jackal. They were mad.”
After four years on the run in America, Mesili was arrested and held in a series of jails before being transferred to Washington as a political prisoner. However, in 1995 the United States Government agreed to a swap with the Bolivian Government for a notable criminal. Mesili was brought back to Bolivia and held for two and a half years in the maximum security prison of Chonchocoro near La Paz. No date was ever set for a trial.There was great pressure from France to obtain his release and during the latter part of his stay in jail he was persuaded by visiting climbers to write an article on Bolivia for the French magazine, Vertical.
Then one day in 1997 his total innocence in the affair appears to have been accepted and he was suddenly released. Mesili now seems relaxed about it all. Commenting on his time in jail he said: “It hasn’t made me bitter. Someone once wrote that you need to have done three things in life; to have written a book, to have planted a tree and to know what it is like inside prison. I’ve done them all.”
He recently signed a one year contract with TAWA, running the mountaineering and trekking activities of this French adventure tourism agency that he previously helped set up in La Paz. Although much of last season was spent trekking with groups in the lowland areas, he guided Illampu twice and Illimani four times.
Recently he discovered a series of walls up to 500m high in the Santa Cruz department and has plans to go back in the rainy season to attempt some climbing.
He’d also like to do a second edition of the guide.Bolivia: a climbing guide Alain Mesili’s climbing guide to Bolivia, which will be published in March 1999 by the Mountaineers, Seattle, at $16.95 (and also available in the UK from Cordee), offers a selection of ascents on peaks in the four main Cordilleras: Apolobamba, Real, Quimsa Cruz and Occidental. It will be the only climbing guide to the country available in English.
INFO: Yossi Brain/Alain Mesili
Extracted from:
http://www.planetfear.com/climbing/highmountainmag/mountaininfo/mar1999/mtninfomarch1999.htm
