We spoke with the adventurer and mountaineer Lionel Daudet, author, among others, of “La montagne intérieure” (Grasset), the documentary by the YouTuber Inoxtag which is driving online counters crazy, in which he stages his ascent of Everest.
Lionel Daudet is a mountaineer. But also what we can decently call an “adventurer”. A purist, a fan of Herculean solo challenges. He opened a route on the Matterhorn in 1992. In 1994-1995 he made a world tour of twelve of the most difficult solo climbs in the world (Kenya, Patagonia, India, etc.). Then a few years later he continued with his “Vertical Odyssey”: 16 months on the steepest peaks in the world, from Greenland to Colorado. In 2002, he attempted the impossible: a winter trilogy (winter ascent, as if summer wasn’t hard enough) of the great Alpine North Faces (Grandes Jorasses, Matterhorn, Eiger) via directissimes (the most direct ascent route from the base of the wall to the summit, therefore the hardest).
Severely frozen, he was rescued but had eight toes amputated, as he tells us a little further down. He drew meditation from this The inner mountain, published by Grasset in 2004. Let us note a little later, in 2011, his Tour de France exactly : a tour of France, following the country’s border to the nearest meter, during which he was struck by lightning. Finally, he is the author of the book The mountaineer (Stock), a biography of the mountaineer Lionel Terray, in 2023. We suggested that he watch the video by the YouTuber Inoxtag which is a hit online (32 million views): “Kaizen”. We discover how the young videographer climbs Everest after a year of training.
Marianne : What was your first feeling after watching the documentary “Kaizen”?
Related News :