Could Gaston Rébuffat have imagined that one of his climbing routes would become a classic … of mixed mountaineering? Opened on the north face of Les Pèlerins, the Rébuffat-Terray has become a winter version, the Carrington-Rouse route. Right next to Beyond good and evil, the ‘Rébuffat des Pèlerins’ is a beautiful line of snow, ice and rock emblematic of modern mixed climbing.
It’s a misnomer to call this mixed route the ‘Rébuffat’. If the best-known climber in Marseille was the first to climb the dry rock of this route, with Lionel Terray, he must have been far from imagining that the same route would become a classic in winter.
In fact, this route is hardly ever climbed in summer (if you’ve climbed it in slippers, drop us a line!), but there can sometimes be a real queue in winter.
Chamonix wakes up. ©Ulysse Lefebvre
Departure by headlamp. ©Ulysse Lefebvre
A fine definition of modern mixed climbing
While remaining at a reasonable level of difficulty (difficult but not extreme), this mixed version of the Rébuffat is a series of ice gullies from the Col des Pèlerins (3275m). It takes all the skill of Rab Carrington and Alan Rouse to imagine how to place the tips of crampon points and ice axe blades on the sometimes very thin ice of this route. At the time, mountaineering equipment and standards were still far from today’s mixed technique. Today, after good dry-tooling training at equipped sites, it’s almost self-evident to hook