In the old days, when I first started climbing, many good times at the crag would end with tired climbers swapping stories about that most famous of climbing legends - the famous French Alpinist, Hugo St. Legere. To those of us who had never met him, these were endlessly fascinating in their variety: St. Legere's secret ascent of the first 5.15 during WWII on the fiercely overhanging wall of a bombed out church in Dresden; his solo ascent of the Citadel in winter after both Michael Rennie and James MacArthur bailed, and the infamous "bicycle rappel" from the summit, where, faced with the loss of his Sticht plate, he improvised a pulley rappel from the ancient bicycle summit marker. Somehow the stories were always too short, and left each of us with an insatiable desire to know more.

In 1984, I finally had the opportunity to meet Hugo St. Legere at the Yosemite Camp 4 Bar and Grill. He was in the country doing a whirlwind tour of major free routes, which he preferred to aid using A6-A7 pro like CoatHangers™ and BobbiPins™, taking days where young turks took hours, and generally setting the climbing world on its ear.

I couldn't believe it when a tall figure with a balaclava crumpled around his neck took the seat across from me, announcing in a thick French accent "Bonjour, I am Hugo Saint Legere, ze famous French Alpiniste! Of course, you do not mind if I sit here, since I hear you have been looking at me for an interview, oui?"

I smiled and allowed that I had hoped to see him for a few moments in order to complete an article for the Telluride Daily "Mountain Smear", and he laughed, calling over the waitress to serve his favorite drink, the single malt whiskey, Laphroaig. Unfortunately, he made me join him in a glass, so the notes which follow suffer a little from the odd numbness which seemed to affect my wrist afterward. But spare me no thought - the doctors assure me my sense of taste will be restored by the end of the year.

St. Legere lit a thin French cigarette - dark paper, of course - and inserted it between those frost corroded lips that mark every top alpinist. His beard was more neatly trimmed than usual, and his hair had recently been raggedly cut by his hardly less famous partner, Iolaus Hercule, while the two were bivouacing in a hanging belay from "To Bolt Or Not To Be". Then suddenly, he had launched into a story, those narrow, sun blasted eyes glaring from deep sockets...

"Let me tell you my favorite climbing event. As you know, I am so famous, and so good, I often prefer to solo. It is very difficult to find partners who can deal with my greatness, or the grandeur of my death routes. So I often find myself alone on the high peaks.

"On this occasion, I had just completed a free solo of a new 5.14c mixed route in the Alps. It was 1954, and the weather was the fabulous mixture of sun, blazing cold, and the sort of mixed snow and ice storm that makes the life of an alpinist the glorious near-suicidal experience that it must be. I had just reached the ledge, where, because of my fearless daredevil spirit, I preferred not to clip in, that I might better enjoy the closeness of death. As I lit up a cigarette, I noticed that I was not alone up there.

"A little below and to my left was a wider ledge, and on that ledge was the most amazing thing that even I have ever seen in my years as the most daring Alpinist of all time. It was an odd sort of thing, like an aircraft, but shaped like a discus with a clear glass cupola on top. By the side of this thing were the aviators, wearing clear helmets and sunglasses to shield them against the conditions of altitude.

"Of course, you know I scorn the use of supplemental oxygen, and I suppose you might be surprised that I would wish to visit them. But I was alone in the mountains, and I thought they might need my assistance. So I rappelled and did a short pendulum to their ledge.

"I discovered that they were small, and really not well suited to mountaineering in many ways. However, their strength-to-weight ratio certainly had potential. I offered to take them on a tour of my new route. I lent them my spare harness but found them completely ignorant of even the most basic rappel and climbing techniques. They could not be restrained from altering the local gravity field, and claimed puzzlement at my outcries against this frightful elimination of the impossible.

"Eventually, I gave up in frustration, but they seemed curious about my desire to engage the mountains in the contest of life. They offered me the opportunity to travel with them in their aircraft to their country, where, they said, mountains taller than Everest were the norm, and where I could find more than enough gravity and weather to keep me busy. I laughed, of course, because the idea that there are enough peaks anywhere to satiate Hugo St. Legere, who linked seventeen peaks in the Himalayas with a hang-glider descent from each, all in the space of a single day, is simply absurd. Naturally, you laugh too at their naivete.

"So I told them that I must finish my route and be off. That there were many vertical feet of hunger and deprivation, of struggle against gravity and frostbite yet ahead this day. I let them know that they would be welcome to come to visit me any time, should they develop any expertise in climbing, and I gave them an autographed copy of my famous 'Death and Angst in the Snow", for which they paid me in some unknown scrip that to this day I have yet to find an exchange rate for. They got into their little craft, and flew away, taking my book, and a couple of carabiners that I later wished I had kept. If I hadn't spent so much time with them - I could have completed the route in a day. Unfortunately, I was forced to set up a bivouac in a raging storm, with little more than my spare harness and a pair of bandanas given to me by some grateful village girls before my departure that morning..."

I became so absorbed in the nasty, peat flavored whiskey, that I failed to notice when I stopped taking notes. And somehow I missed his departure. All that was left behind was the smell of French cigarettes, single malt, and an odd humming sound that died with the lights beyond the window.

I thought of my climbing partners, especially, John Bennett, legal advisor to "Mountain Smear", who would never believe I had been able to get so close to the unapproachable St. Legere. But I knew that disbelief would never stop me from recounting this story about the day that I met "Hugo St. Legere, ze famous French Alpiniste!" [footnote 1]

Footnotes

1. Many thanks to John Bennett, who is, in fact, Hugo St. Legere. Thanks also to Mike Schreck who helped me make up many of the other stories of St. Legere's greatness, which remain untold to this day, Bob Dest who put up with this silliness, Ken Nichols who might laugh when he reads it, Eric Redrup who started me climbing (so it's his fault), and all of those climbing journalists whose more serious and enjoyable work helped inspire this parody.