“Un pasteur” by Louis Hanquet is a documentary that is sparing in words, wildly poetic and full of emotion. The shepherd Felix is blond as wheat, and he breaks logs. At the same time, we hear the sound of his sheep’s bells, their bleating, the whining of the dog. Then he climbs the fence, and leans on his cane to observe his animals. The storm rumbles in the distance. He lights the stove, and reads in his duvet. But then they talk about the wolf. “There were big attacks on the Queyras side; one time forty sheep, the other twenty.” A white dot moves forward in the distance in the night, it is him, the wolf.
The next day, the rain falls heavily, and Felix goes after his sick sheep to nurse them. He drinks his coffee, distributes food to his dogs in four different places. Now the snow falls and the noise of the storm in the background, him in a yellow raincoat with a red backpack. He talks with his father. “There is less grass, the sheep no longer run. 2,000 sheep, it is not a good thing to have so many, there are some that continue to burden the mountains. We are always looking to improve things, it is essential to see things together and not each one on our own.”
Here comes the wolf again, having reduced a sheep to shreds. Felix makes a grave for it with heavy stones, and presents a saddened eye. The herd passes through the village, under a tunnel where its bleating echoes, then it is time for calving… Give a bottle to the lamb. The radio announces the attacks of sheep, more than 1,200. He notes in a red notebook the 17 ewes that lambed the day before. He has about forty left. Among the newborns, one will not survive, despite the massages and encouragement given by the shepherd. “Ouch ouch”says the shepherd, before taking off his woolen coat, to cover another lamb.
Another day, another sheep was eaten. “The vultures, it was a feast for them, they ate what the wolves left, 21 lambs were massacred, they hadn’t asked anyone for anything, it must have been a total rout,” analyzes a shepherd colleague of Felix. “We are dealing with a systematic slaughter, but when we have it before our eyes… It hurts even more with the ewe lambs, this is the next generation, the whole batch that was outside… It revolts me even more, our breeding method is pastoralism. We can’t leave them indefinitely in the sheepfold.”. Same old story. He falls with big stones, and this time a yellow bouquet that he has just picked, a nice touch… He writes a letter to his father, a former shepherd. “I started reading Pessoa’s poems, I feel like it’s about us”. And he recites slowly: “All the peace of a depopulated nature, comes to sit next to me, I have never kept a flock, but it is just as if I were keeping one, my soul is like a shepherd, it knows the wind and the sun, and it goes hand in hand with the season, I am a shepherd, the flock are my thoughts, and my thoughts are all sensations…” “I hope you don’t miss the mountain too much”, he concluded for his father.
With Guillaume Broust’s “Chronoception”, we follow the trail of four skiers and a snowboarder, Léa Klaue, on a summit in Kyrgyzstan. As a mantra, this five-part refrain: “a sound, a line, an idea, an emotion, an action”. We find ourselves on the Silk Road, at a crossroads of civilizations. “We are 6,000 kilometers from home, we are going to make a base camp and descend some beautiful faces,” says freerider Thomas Delfino. Vladimir Kommisarov, a local ski legend, explains that the place is difficult to access, but that the region is legendary. And hop! In the truck. Cigarette in mouth for the driver who, himself, uses and abuses the mantra «vodka-tank, no problem !».
Thomas Delfino overplays confidence: “If there is a road, it is because it passes.” Except no. The truck leans dangerously, gets stuck just as much… we shovel with the ice axes, because the shovels break. We deflate the tires. We pray a lot. The expedition becomes “very complicated.” “It’s a little more extreme than what we had planned,” recognizes one of the guys. Time “becomes a subjective notion”. The sensations are different. And now it’s time to walk.
An activity which, for Léa Klaue, “brings us back to where we come from and to who we are”. The portages seem endless. Helias Millerioux, one of the guides, is a philosopher: “When it’s hard, time doesn’t pass, and mentally it’s even harder.”
Finally, the targeted summit, Kyraj Asker, is not accessible “So we reorient ourselves towards valleys with pretty slopes, beautiful flat glaciers, an impression of paradise”.
It is difficult to access, there is no infrastructure, no one comes to this area, you need a permit. In short: “Welcome to Hell”. Fortunately, there is Jean Yves Frederiksen, alias Blutch, “the king of resourcefulness”and Helias, “a force of nature”both essential to the smooth running of the expedition. “When you’re at the top of the mountain, the emotion is there, that’s what you’re going to remember, and concentrate on riding.”. And the first turn “suddenly takes up as much space as all the misery we have known”Everyone says they come out of the adventure feeling stronger, and that they learn “to know others better at the same time as oneself” concludes Léa proudly.
“The dungeon of shattered gazes” is the other name given to the Grandes Jorasses. This is the documentary by François Damilano, “Esprit de cordée”. From a “unexpected harshness”with a haste that will be accompanied by the slowness of the march. François Damilano, high mountain guide, is accompanied by the scientist Etienne Klein, for this expedition. “We are linked, we are roped, we just have to agree,” said the latter.
In July, as every summer, the heat has transformed the mountain. The glacier is grayish, the permafrost has melted. There are chaotic scree. “You hear the mountain moving”, asks the guide. The degradation process is accelerating… In terms of climate, there is a 50-day advance on the season: the approach march“it’s a pile of gravel, and at 4000, the hyperdangerous zone, that’s the zone where we are” Etienne Klein said to himself «ravi» of this crossing, but it is not at all certain that he will return.
The researcher handles the paradox by climbing. “I didn’t like it, but I actually love it. The pleasure of mountaineering can’t be experienced in other situations. We saw things of a beauty that borders on the sublime.”
And then there is the fear that comes with moving forward. “Anxiety is fear of which we do not know the cause, there it was quite clear, I had the fear of my life”, said Etienne Klein. A stone crushed his foot, and afterwards he found that all the stones were loose. “I’ve never been so happy to be alive.” The storm suddenly catches up with them in the worst place. There, it’s no laughing matter anymore. Klein, again, to Damilano: “When the storm broke, I saw that you were afraid, your face changed, your gestures changed. We were going to see the devils.”
Damilano, himself, hearing the mountain crash, strangely “thought of the Ukrainians”. At the Canzio shelter, there is no turning back. “I understood how a mountain accident could happen,” unfolds Etienne Klein. “I fear that through the fault of a certain Damilano a form of addiction has been triggered. To exist is to go and be seen elsewhere, to see that one exists, and perhaps that one exists more,” he philosophizes. Then he evokes the ascending psyche dear to Gaston Bachelard, which provokes the idea that one is “expected up there, that we are eager for the objective to pull us, and that we are propelled upwards».
Moreover, Klein admits to having been clumsy in places, imprecise in his gestures, “but that elements of my identity that are unknown to the person have been revealed by these experiences”. He says it seriously: “I love the mountains and thought they meant me no harm, but during this crossing of the Jorasses, I had some doubts about this aphorism.”What he and many others are seeing is that global warming is making mountaineering more difficult. “What society needs is not the leaders, but the spirit of the team,” concludes François Damilano. He explains that he left with this client (Etienne Klein) on this sentence, precisely pronounced by this particular client.
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