Archive for Eiger
Bernese trilogy [15h30]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags alpine climbing, Bernese Alps, Bernese Oberland, Bernese trilogy, Eiger, Heckmair, Jungfrau, Münch, Nicolas Hojac, Nordwand, north faces, Philipp Brugger, record, Schweiz, speed climbing, Stephan Siegrist, Switzerland, Ueli Steck on April 27, 2025 by xi'an
a journal of the plague year [lost September reviews]
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags Alaska, amazon associates, Banff Mountain Festival, book reviews, Bridal Veil, Charlet Moser, Daniel Defoe, Denali, Denali National Park, Eiger, fig-tree, film review, films, French Alps, German TV series, Greek mythology, Heckmair, homecooking, homegrown vegetables, jam, jelly, Journal of the Plague Year, Kandersteg, marmalade, MIchelin starred restaurant, Netflix, north faces, pepper, risotto, squash vine, Switzerland, Université Paris Dauphine on December 12, 2020 by xi'an
Read a (red) book I bought in Chamonix last January (sounds like last century, at the very least!) at the Éditions Guérin bookshop, The Bond, by Simon McCartney, translated in French as The Ghosts from Denali. It starts more or less like a traditional mountain climbing story, with a pair of cocky young climbers attacking a new and difficult route and managing the opening despite severe adverse circumstances, which is what Simon McCartney and Jack Roberts did for the north face of Mount Huntington in Alaska, having run out of food and facing the constant threat of collapsing seracs. It however turns into a inner introspection as McCartney gets stranded on the mythical Eiger Nordwand (just like many before him!) after his large group keeps breaking their Charlet Moser icepicks due to the cold (!) and end up being airlifted. He later manages a Winter climb of the Eiger and reunites with Roberts to attempt the south face of Denali, never climbed before. This is when the book takes off, from the sheer difficulty of the route to the amazing unpreparation of the climbers, to Simon’s cerebral embolism building up and bringing him a hair away from death, to the altruism of several other climbers on the mountain to bring him down from the death zone, especially Bo Kandiko, and to a trauma-induced complete break from climbing when McCartney got out of Anchorage hospital. This is gripping and moving and unbelievable. The book received a Banff Mountain Festival award and no wonder. The story told by McCartney is actually seamlessly completed by diary excerpts by Roberts and Kandiko, where they question their own involvement against the very real danger of dying from staying with McCartney, much more than giving up their own attempt against the deadly mountain. A terrific mountaineering book, truly. As a sad coda, Roberts died ice-climbing Bridal Veil Falls a few days before McCartney’s attempt to reunite with him.
Spent several evenings baking fig jam when returning from the Alps as the fig tree was full! And ended up with a total of 35 jars. Resulting into a full “marmalade closet”, as in the past weeks my mom home-made the same amount of peach jelly and my wife’s mom even more rhubarb marmalade jars. Enough to stand a whole year of lockdown, jam-wise. And ate some of the few but tasty peppers that grew in our garden, for the very first time, despite the welcomed tomato and squash invasion! Also ate a terribly greasy risotto in a supposedly highly noted restaurant…
Started watching Dark on Netflix, a German dark time-travel fiction. But while I enjoyed the complex story, the play of the young actors, and the appeal of watching a show (and a Greek play within the show, with Ariádnê and Thêseús of course!) in German, the endless paradoxes of time-travel and the duration of the series made me stop after a few episodes, the town of Winden keeping most of its mystery for me.
Les Grandes Jorasses, from 342 to 2 hours
Posted in Mountains with tags Alps, Anubis, Cassin, Dani Arnold, Eiger, Grandes Jorasses, Matterhorn, north faces, René Desmaison, speed climbing, video on September 7, 2018 by xi'an
Last month Dani Arnold, a Swiss climber, climbed the classic Cassin route of Les Grandes Jorasses [in my dreams!] in two hours (and obviously completely free-solo, with no protection whatsoever). This route was opened by Cassin, Esposito and Tizzoni, 1938, is part of the three great north walls of the Alps, with Eiger and Matterhorn, and is graded TD+/ED1, IV, 5c/6a, A1, for a vertical climb of 1200m. It is an extremely challenging and engaged climb, with almost no possibility to escape once started, and climbing parties often take more than a day to complete the climb. On his way up, Arnold passed nine groups of climbers. Here is another video of his in Scotland, when repeating for the first time Anubis, a mixed climbing route on Ben Nevis. (The title of the post is relating to Desmaison’s 342 heures dans les Grandes Jorasses.)
Ueli Steck dies on Nupse [Ueli Steck tödlich verunglückt]
Posted in Books, Mountains, Running with tags Bernese Alps, Eiger, Everest, Himalayas, mountaineering, Nupse, Switzerland, Ueli Steck on April 30, 2017 by xi'an
Ueli Steck was a Swiss climber renowned for breaking speed records on the hardest routes of the Alps. Including the legendary Eigerwand. And having been evacuated under death threats from the Everest base camp two years ago. I have been following on Instagram his preparation for another speed attempt at Everest the past weeks and it is a hug shock to learn he fell to his death on Nupse yesterday. Total respect to this immense Extrembergsteiger, who has now joined the sad cenacle of top climbers who did not make it back…
R/Rmetrics in Paris [alas!]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, andouille de Vire, Bayesian econometrics, Bayesian model choice, Bernese Alps, cmpfun(), Collège des Bernardins, compiler, Eiger, importance sampling, Interlaken, Meielisalp, Mittelegi ridge, Paris, R, Rmetrics, San Antonio, Switzerland, system.time, Thun Lake on June 30, 2014 by xi'an
Today I gave a talk on Bayesian model choice in a fabulous 13th Century former monastery in the Latin Quarter of Paris… It is the Collège des Bernardins, close to Jussieu and Collège de France, unbelievably hidden to the point I was not aware of its existence despite having studied and worked in Jussieu since 1982… I mixed my earlier San Antonio survey on importance sampling approximations to Bayes factors with an entry to our most recent work on ABC with random forests. This was the first talk of the 8th R/Rmetrics workshop taking place in Paris this year. (Rmetrics is aiming at aggregating R packages with econometrics and finance applications.) And I had a full hour and a half to deliver my lecture to the workshop audience. Nice place, nice people, new faces and topics (and even andouille de Vire for lunch!): why should I complain with an alas in the title?!
What happened is that the R/Rmetrics meetings have been till this year organised in Meielisalp, Switzerland. Which stands on top of Thuner See and… just next to the most famous peaks of the Bernese Alps! And that I had been invited last year but could not make it… Meaning I lost a genuine opportunity to climb one of my five dream routes, the Mittelegi ridge of the Eiger. As the future R/Rmetrics meetings will not take place there.
A lunch discussion at the workshop led me to experiment the compiler library in R, library that I was unaware of. The impact on the running time is obvious: recycling the fowler function from the last Le Monde puzzle,
[sourcecode language=”r” gutter=”false”]
> bowler=cmpfun(fowler)
> N=20;n=10;system.time(fowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
52.647 0.076 56.332
> N=20;n=10;system.time(bowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
51.631 0.004 51.768
> N=20;n=15;system.time(bowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
51.924 0.024 52.429
> N=20;n=15;system.time(fowler(pred=N))
user system elapsed
52.919 0.200 61.960
[/sourcecode]
shows a ten- to twenty-fold gain in system time, if not in elapsed time (re-alas!).
