When it was clear to everyone that he was the world’s greatest climber, he gave it all up and made a fresh start. Three years later, searching for a predator in the wild, he fell in love with an ant and convinced us that it was worth it.
In the autumn of 1968, Walter Bonatti arrived in Indonesia on a journey that would take him from Sulawesi to Java, from Komodo dragons to the crater of Krakatoa, via an interminable tiger “hunt” in the jungles of Sumatra. His photo reports, published in Italy by the weekly Epoca, were immensely successful and his popularity soared to new heights. Just a few years earlier, in 1965, he had put an end to his extraordinary mountaineering career on the Matterhorn and turned to something different. In those first three years as a photographic correspondent, he crossed the Klondike and the Yukon in the footsteps of Jack London, travelled in East Africa on the trail of Hemingway’s escapades, climbed the Peruvian Andes and sailed the Orinoco. Video cameras and colour TV had not yet weakened the appeal of large-format photography, and the world had not yet shrunk under the pressure of mass tourism. Of course, the epic feats of truly heroic explorations were long in the past, but people’s curiosity and fascination was stilled aroused by the allure of far-off lands. With his self-timer images of such forbidding places – which he mostly visited in solitude – Bonatti didn’t produce simple documentaries, but photographic stories with a strong, handsome and courageous protagonist. In this way, he inspired the dreams of readers both young and old, just like he had ignited people’s passions in the previous 15 years by climbing the sheerest walls of rock and ice.
His list of mountains was certainly outstanding: the Grandes Jorasses, the Grand Capucin, the Dolomites, K2, the Petit Dru, Gasherbrum IV, Rondoy North, the Matterhorn... In the 1950s and 1960s, while climbing the 8,000-metre peaks of the Karakorum and the Alps, or his beloved Mont Blanc or the Andes, Bonatti experienced triumphs and tragedies, exaltation and disappointment. Encountered in adolescence, the mountains had been his first source of adventure, as well as the cheapest. Indeed, for someone like him who lacked resources, these Alpine excursions were the only affordable option beyond exploring the flat horizons of the Po Valley. And mountaineering, a sport without rules, was perfect for an independent spirit like his. Struggling with wartime poverty and hardship in childhood, Bonatti grew up without really putting down roots. He learnt to make a virtue of self-reliance. It was a character trait, a spiritual need. But the mountains also enabled him to spread his wings. In 15 years of spectacular climbs, he won enough fame to be able to take flight once again, when he began to feel stifled by the human environment of those very same mountains. Loneliness, misunderstanding and envy were the inevitable price to pay for a man with such immense talent and integrity, and no desire to become entangled in conventions and routine. In his last years as a mountaineer, there were reignited controversies overshadowing the conquest of K2 in 1954, an expedition that had been marred by infamy and lies. It was time for him to change his surroundings and follow his desires elsewhere.
Extreme mountaineering also taught him to gauge his skills, to balance courage with humility, to use his imagination without losing concentration, to focus on details as a way of controlling the unpredictable. He knew that ultimately it is nature that decides. “Mountains are bigger than you. If they say no, you’re nothing at all.” Bonatti effectively transferred the strengths and skills he had refined in the mountains to his travels and search for new frontiers that could test his mettle. It was this (among other things) that connected his career as a climber with his vocation as a correspondent and explorer: his search for extreme situations, out of reach for ordinary mortals, where he could seek space, senso- ry experiences, introspection and freedom. “We’re frightened by what we don’t understand,” he wrote. “So I do my best to understand, and in that way I keep my fear under control.”
(Continues)
Opening picture: Walter Bonatti amid the glaciers of Mont Blanc, in a photo from the early 1960s.
© Archivio Walter Bonatti, Centro Documentazione Museo Nazionale della Montagna - CAI Torino.