Denise Escande The Chibania

Everything went well yesterday. We were 35 (Esther – my wife - counted us). I read the plaque epitaph and everyone approved my text:

François ends his letter with this sentence which I make mine:

Denise, you love this valley where you had many Chamonix friends, youhave your place beside those who you loved.

September 2007

Jacques Alary and Anne-Marie Lochu

Denise "The Chibania" - Jean Fabre

Denise links with her leaders and particularly her guides were so strong that they had better speak of her as a mountaineer themselves, with first of all Jean Fabre:

   “Denise Escande ‘the Chibania’(an old lady in Morocco and Algeria)

Groucho "Escande"

   Denise did her first parachute jump when she was 65. In her youth (the 1930’s and 40’s), she had an upper-middle class education and above all played tennis. She claimed to have played with the famous champion Suzanne Lenglen (but I have doubts about the historic truth of this sporting encounter as, in all Denise’s stories, there was as one commonly says in Marseille, “much to take and much to leave”).

   In her forties, afflicted with a persistent “tennis elbow”, she gave up the “lobs”, “passing-shots”, “smash” and other “drives”. But as she was missing a passion, she decided to become a mountaineer. Well, the word is weak: let’s say that in her second part of her life, she married mountaineering (as a nun would marry God) and only lived for it. Nothing a priori predisposed her to follow such a path, particularly at a time when most climbers (those who did not perish at the bottom of a trough or with their skull smashed by a stone) have long since put aside their ice axe in their cellars.

   She came from a flat country, the Sologne, and none of her ancestors had the eccentric idea to hang oneself on rocks and putting pegs into them. Therefore one cannot suppose that she followed family example. Only eccentricity can explain her late and unpredictable calling.

   Small (her growth stopped irreparably at 1m55 – only just over 5 feet tall), she sweated, puffed, ranted and raved during the approach marches. Following a traffic accident, her right ankle had lost all mobility. In those days, ice climbing required a permanent twisting of the leg (the “front pointing” technique was introduced quite late in France), and such stiffness would have dissuaded most, but not Denise. On rock, on too strenuous pitches, one had often to hold the rope tight to allow her to take her right foot in both hands and place it on the desired hold.

   At a pinch, one could think that, not liking her trade as a real estate agent, she should have tried the movie. Indeed, she looked very much alike “Groucho”, the younger of the Marx brothers, to the point that she had, against her will, to sign autographs in Paris streets for American tourists convinced to have met their favorite comedian.

   But success in mountaineering does not obey true classical sporting rules (which differentiate it from pure climbing). You can be built like a Greek athlete, eat fish and cabbage every day, do push-ups, execute splits and never manage a significant climb. On the opposite, you see bean-poles, heavy smokers, bald men with dark rings under the eyes climb incredible walls.

   In High Mountains, moral qualities prove to be essential: determination, risk acceptance, survival instinct. A physical mechanism as oiled and superb as it can be will not function when there is a lack of will.

   So, if nature did not provide Denise with a body predisposing her to climbing (flexible, muscled, slender), it gave her an unfailing psychological strength. When the weather turned to a storm, when the “pianos” were brushing against your scalp, when heavy fog forced you to snuggle up in the snow, she knew how to find the tone and the right words to perk up the foundering morale of her companions (mainly men as Madame Escande – who did not stand ladies in the mountains, and not much also in the plains – always chose males to guide her on the great routes).

Harold "Afanassieff" - 1rst ascent Harold & Maud - Pointe Lachenal

Maud "Escande" on Harold & Maud

   Denise did not ignore fear, she was not sheltered from discouragement, but she faced dangers and dominated the most critical situations without a trace of emotion. There was elegance and nobility in the way she behaved at altitude. She seemed to never lose her optimism. When she climbed with Jean Afanassieff, the guide with whom she probably did her most difficult rock routes (the Philip/Flam, the Brandler/Hasse, the South face of the Fou), we nicknamed the couple “Harold and Maude” and one of their first ascents on the Lachenal Point was so baptized. Jean was the young man of the movie, depressive with vague suicidal desires. Denise was the grandma, boiling over with hope and joy of living.

   However, all those who had adventures in the mountains with the “vioque” (the old boot) (this is how we disrespectfully named her) complained of a major flaw: she did not stop speaking (from dawn to dusk, on paths, in refuges and even hanging on etriers with a 1000 m void below). The chatterbox did not cease to function except at the bivouac, when Morpheus took her in his arms, but then, alas, came from her nostrils snores of a boor. Only “Popo”, her equivalent in the Pyrenees could equal her verbal output.

   As the Marques d’Albertas or Claude Cogan, and before the era of Simone Badier, then of Catherine Destivelle, Denise Escande could be considered as an authentic female climbing pioneer.
   Notably she was the first one from the “weaker” sex (this expression being now obsolete) to climb the west face of the Drus, the Magnone/Berardini route and the second (after maybe Yvette Vaucher, I forget) to climb the Walker spur. At the end of her 60’s, no woman had an equivalent score in the Alps. She had climbed all: from the Bonatti pillar, the Poire and the West face of the Petites Jorasses. She had been roped with confirmed climbers such as Dominique Leprince-Rinquet, Robert Guillaume, Pierre Kolhmann, Eric Vola, guides as famous as Marcel Burnet, Jean-Louis Bernezat, Pierre de Galbert, Claude Jaccoux, or even Gaston Rebuffat.

Maud "Escande " summit Pointe Lachenal (note the fingerless gloves to hold well the rope while belaying)

Jean-hervé Colle 1rst ascent Harold & Maud

  I bumped into Denise at the end of the 70’s. I was not yet 30, but she was already 65. The older she got, the more demanding she became. She could not stand the old guides; she was a female Minotaur - she needed fresh blood, young climbing Adonis, from the elite (for purely sporting ends that is). She joined me in Morocco, her ego aroused by promises of tempting first ascents in the Todra gorge. At that time the site was desert. There were no 4X4, no spits, no fluo suits. We arrived at nightfall in a rough hut which was used as a tavern. The boss and his friends were sipping their mint tea listening to the frogs croaking. There were astonished to see us arriving at twilight, a young Rumi and a grandma, but nevertheless they did not infringe the Berber hospitality law: mutton tajin with stringed instruments music. I remember their derisive smiles, when I had tried to explain in “tamarzit” (le local dialect) the reasons of our venue in this “Ksour”: with the white haired lady, we shared that night the same room, unfurling our sleeping bags on heavy woolen carpets; there were of course no beds and the next day we would climb the rock walls putting in metal rods. For those mountain men, for whom getting back their lost sheep constituted the only justification for taking a risk in the djebel (if not one had to be mad!), my hokey pokey was masking a reality far more ”bawdy”: obviously I was sleeping with the Chibania” (this is how are named the old ladies in Arabic) and she obviously must be paying me handsomely for this service. The next day, after having seen the “Chibania” hanging in the overhangs, they came to welcome us at the top as if we were extraterrestrials.

   Maybe Denise became one of the local Marabouts and the “Chibania” route immortalizes her.

   I am pleased also to have guided her with Guy Abert on her last great route, the South face of the Gugliermina. She was 70. We had to spend two bivouacs, one on the way up and one coming down. The following year, I attempted to lead her on the Red pillar
of the Brouillard, but after the first pitches the storm forced us to a strategic fall back towards the Eccles hut.

   Denise continued to climb with other guides, Dominique Marchal, Vincent Couttet until she was 76. She passed away in May this year 2007 and gave her body to Science. 

   Requiescat in pace.

   Jean Fabre

   Guide de haute montagne

"Denise Escande 60 years of Baraka!" - Sylvain Jouty (Alpi-Rando)

Denise belaying Bernard Pégourié on a Machaby route - 1985

I now quote a few extracts of an article that our friend and « Bleausard », Sylvain Jouty wrote in January 1979 for AlpiRando magazine about Denise, titled: 

“Denise Escande 64 years of Baraka!”

   “Do not tell her that she is a great alpinist. She would laugh at you or she could fall out with you, although she rarely gets angry. And she would be right in explaining to you that she climbs rather badly, solely as a second, that she does mountaineering for pleasure and that when it will tire her or when she is not be interested any more with it, she would stop. Maybe she will confide in you that the normal route up Mont Blanc which she discovered recently was more painful to climb that many hard routes, but that she discovered the beauty of Mont Blanc’s summit which no one ever told her about. Denise is anything but blasé. Listening to her, it seems that each route, each event, each souvenir is a pretext to a new wondering. She has an eagerness to live and to learn that many youngsters have lost. At 64, her youth of mind is staggering…

   Denise could have been more than a bright second, and she proved it when the occasion came up. ‘It’s Leprince-Rinquet who forced me to lead… He sent me on the South face of Marmolada which I led in 1954. At the Civetta, he had found an “easy” route for me which I did with a lady friend: the Castiglione on Torre Venezia… I found it harder than he had told me, particularly the last chimney. Luckily my friend loved chimneys and she led it. Of course we did not find the way down, so we abseiled, when I had never put a peg in my life then! Back at the hut, I told Dominique: this route is not grade III! He laughed loudly and replied: “I took one degree off on it all”. Dominique was not scared to test Denise and in 1961 he took her up the Ratti route at the Noire de Peuterey. Desmaison’s reaction when announced gives a good measure of this feat: “Who is the mad man who had the guts to take you there?”…

   Let’s admit, in order not to antagonize her, that she is not a great alpinist. At least she is an example. An example of what is possible to achieve when one has the will to do so. It also proves that the most difficult routes are not reserved to an “elite”, but if one has certain qualities and skills, providing one respect a number of rules, they are accessible to people who are not heroes. It proves that if mountains rarely forgive errors, they can show themselves to be accessible to those who want to truly know them… Maybe she would have been a good guide?

   ‘To be a guide you must have teaching skills and I have, I found out as I was a climbing instructor in “Bleau”. I shared the guys with Habib: he took the
strongest and I the weakest. But as I was a girl, I obtained from them much more than anyone else.’…

   Denise, a young miss of 64, summarizes her philosophy: ‘In all your life, you must have the Baraka.’ And I forgot, she just started parachuting and Delta plane!”

Denise 80 years old with Pierre Alain 90 years old at a La Tirelire party

Last guide and last climb: Michel Bordet

   Finally I will quote the words of her last guide, Michel Bordet, who accompanied her during her last, longest and most difficult climb with much love and to whom I and all Denise’s
friends and guides are so indebted for it:

Pierre-Yves Doré, a long time friend of Denise is distributing Denise's books amongst the members of the party, all old friends of Denise. Denise had donated all her savings to about 60 friends, but some could not get much as she had overevaluated the amount she had saved, but at least 45 got something!

   “There is a blizzard outside and I took time off to visit her at the Chamonix hospital where she has lived for some time now. Howling, at times she roars with hoarse fits of laughter, as now, in the full February season, she hears a helicopter landing: “Look! A thighbone again! Ha! Ha! Ha!” One must say that her lot is not to be envied… 90 years old; she just came out of 3 years confinement to bed due to repeated operations on an uncooperative hip. At the same time she was progressively becoming blind and now she is seeing nothing, even with the large magnifying glass that she always has near her hand.

   At times, her hip dislocates itself without warning, breaking the natural alignment hip/thighbone/shinbone-fibula; she freezes immediately, as a pointer listening to her body. She then executes some energetic moves with her leg and a muffled “clonk!” let us know that the operation of putting all back into the axis did succeed… Shrunk down in her armchair, an upright posture is now too painful. Of course after all those months in bed and this relapse… But she is holding herself on! In the small house she found – which seems designed for her – (EV: mine which I adapted for her heavy handicap and made it partially a replica of her chalet La Tirelire with the same retractable ladder made once again by Aimé Couttet’s brother) she found a way to make her bed up on a micro mezzanine, accessible only with a stone steep boarding ladder. It reminded her of climbing which she practiced so much. She grabbed the ladder sides as you start a climbing move, much more at ease in the move than in the simple upright posture.

   Climbing is how I met her. It was through a friend, a guide who “fobbed” her off on me as one does drop a hot potato: she was 72 or 73… I discovered that I was the last of a long list of mountain guides who took her everywhere in the Alps…/… she had developed a science in motion saving which was quite extraordinary. Useless to say that the term “free climbing” did not mean anything to her: she held heartily on pegs and quickdraws pushing on her legs without taking notice of any ethics. It must be said that she was from “the great days” of aided climbing when any means was good to get to the top of a route. In this way she had taken all the pegs out of the Bouclier du Gerbier (a mythical 400 m route in the Vercors) which her leader had to himself fully equipped (it was like that then: you did not leave a trace of your ascent, without speaking of the price of the pegs, preposterous for those climbers more or less broke). She had acquired a sense of energy economy which made her always find the right move even in the worst situations. But when I met her, it was her final days and compared with all those great routes she had climbed, her last years as a climber were only a last resort to fight the irreparable ravages of time.

   To best describe her character, her last adventure was when she decided to stop climbing at 75 and to make the great complete Sahara traverse with Jean-Louis Bernezat, THE French specialist of the topic: a first which lasted two months! A Sahara that she knew well, as she had led a mixed team of 60 climbers and walkers in the Hoggar, two years after the end of the Algerian war… Mid way, a young German lady member of the team broke her hip falling from her camel in the middle of nowhere!  "But I, I fell at least 3 times from my camel and without any damage!" she told me laughing. “Those youngsters are too tense! You must just let yourself fall like a bag!” But later she admitted that she had gone with two bags full of Di-antalvic, a powerful pain killer to take the brunt. Six pills a day! Maybe she was exaggerating a bit,but there in a modern hospital, they gave her a miserable one pill a day, in the evening…

Happy and smiling - Photo Pierre-Yves Doré

   During her climbing days, she used to swallow regularly Voltarene pills, an efficient analgesic… She had a large stomach, the grandma! But her frame was somehow busted, all twisted, eaten away by arthritis.

   “Do you realize? All those years I patiently worked out my treatment and here, they take everything off me! “They say that I take too many drugs!”, “but I counted! I take 11 pills per day: more than before!” Grandma is discovering power relationships… The nurses here prefer the quieter…“customers”, those who accept their dependency without baulking. But I see clearly that week after week her condition does improve. The atmosphere also: she succeeded in softening them…

   Or also her last bivouac when she was 84 or 85, I forgot. She was still living at La Tirelire when she was coming down to Chamonix, her small chalet, in which she had put all her savings and from where she started to walk on paths all around. But that year, the works on Planpraz station did totally turned over the scenery and lost in this huge construction site, at nightfall, Denise could not find her way back home…
Undeterred, she saw a plank lying around; she rolled up in her polar fleece, used her rucksack for a pillow and spent the night so, remembering all the bivouacs she had spent in the mountains. This was her 57^th!

After having been a bedridden invalid for three years - those were her own words - she decided to quit Paris, where she lived, to move to Chamonix in this small house which was as if it had been designed for her, “La Poupée” (the doll). When she had just arrived she thought it normal to do her shopping to the local supermarket. She was shaky and unbalanced, walking on crutches and could have been knocked down by a feather… All of a sudden, she fell on the curb of the pavement and wounded both shinbones. The wounds became infected. Home care, nurses whom she treated haughtily couldn’t
cure them: then they talked of sending her to a “specialized unit”…

   One day, I found her in this small house among an incredible mess of papers and files of all kinds, brought from Paris in two large refuse bags… I found myself recruited as her private secretary without noticing it. And those visits which I made by genuine affection she succeeded in paying me for them, cunning vixen she was, to ensure my regularity instead of giving alms!

   Luckily, the Chamonix hospital had a bed at the right time, but they did not keep her for long…

"Radio Denise" describing a climb - Photo Pierre-Yves Doré

   But the “old one finally snuffed it!” Forgive those rough words, but that is what she used to say: “I do not manage to snuff it” she had been saying that for quite a while. “The old one we will have to use a gun to get her under” her old climbing friends were laughing and saying quite some time before. She laughed at herself, with a raucous and uproarious laughter, but us, the younger ones, we would not have dared, so impressed by the old lady and her endless stories… Denise was an inexhaustible chatterbox! She had seen so many pretty amazing things as we say. Starting from her older brother, Robert, a brilliant polytechnician, who presented her as the “village idiot”. But she had for him an unwavering veneration which came from their kids’ games and hunting parties in the Sologne’s forests. Rough games and school of endurance formed her which she found afterwards with her many rope companions when at more than 35 she discovered mountaineering.

   Soon she became a breadwinner and life challenges achieved to forge a character and a sense of duty…, unfailing, exceptional in many ways.

   The “village idiot” did quite well after all.

   Sacked in 1961 from the family leather factory which went bust, she went for a six months trip from Ceylon to Nepal, in the Langtang valley.

   She then committed herself, a bit by chance, to a career of an estate agent which allowed her to live her passion. Because her loves were reserved to the mountains which she discovered late and which she explored back and forth all the rest of her life. And more than a collection of routes, often of the highest level, it is the company of alpinists and mountain guides which she was seeking, finding again with them the roughness and complicity of her childhood games, looking for the esteem and affection of her climbing brothers. And esteem… she deserved it every time, for every route, for her fortitude in the greatest routes, for the unfailing confidence in her leader, for her rigor in action and her permanent generosity. As for affection, maybe she did put a ban to it when during her adolescence she was betrayed by the man she loved, her father, who abandoned them, her and her mother… She never fully recovered from it, preferring to fight and battle to the sweetness of a love life, so preserving her youth candor hidden by her fits of bad temper and her irreparable quarrels.

   From Paris to Chamonix, from Chamonix  to Paris, but much further also, to the UK or Nigeria… she succeeded in forging lasting friendships, those which link people through time and over continents.

   Fed up with the old people’s home which she had selected in Paris to end her days, and also with the other residents, she decided, when I met her for the first time, to move to Chamonix, to lay down her arms and wait quietly get to the other side…

   Well “quietly” is not the appropriate word…

   Denise fought to the end, against her pains from the bedsores she got after falling in the Chamonix streets. She soon left the Chamonix hospital to go back to “La Poupée”. Then it was Praz Couttant, this “death place for old people” as she was saying, where all the needy ones of the valleys around went. Ruled by Doctor Mol (or something like that) who as his name suggested, offered the image of an absolute uncertainty. Soon she took a distinct dislike of the man and to avoid his sight, she managed thanks to much stubbornness, to be accepted in the re-education center of the Plateau d’Assy reserved to the top athletes!

   It was at the moment when at last her repeated requests to alleviate her pains were accepted which by the fight and battle it meant, she maintained herself alive, stopped – I understand better now the doctors’ restraints – it is at that moment then, when she was given powerful drugs that she let go in a no return sleep…

Requiescat in pace’”

Michel Bordet

Guide de haute montagne

Morning of a very cold bivouac below the red chimneys - Walker spur 1962 - Eric, Cabri, Habib and Denise

The plaque we had sealed on the Chamonix cemetery wall is beside the one placed several months before in memoriam of Vincendon and Henry who died tragically on top of Mont Blanc in 1956. Vincendon, a guide trainee, was from Paris and Denise had climbed with him in Fontainebleau. Henry was a Belgian from Brussels.

External Links

Claude Barbier and Denise - French site of Claude Barbier

Camp to camp Harold and Maud route description

Michel Bordet Web site

Jean Afanassieff on Wikipedia

Panorama vidéo of Afa on top of Everest & 1rst ski descent with Nicholas Jaeger from above the South col

Appendix - Her climbs