1952 French Patagonia Cerro Fitz Roy First Ascent Expedition

France🏔️ 3 Peaks

Guido Magnone

Guido Magnone was born on February 1, 1917, in Turin, Italy, before his family emigrated to France when he was a child. A gifted athlete who competed in water polo for France at the 1948 London Olympic Games, Magnone graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris as an accomplished sculptor. Taking up rock climbing at Fontainebleau and the Mont Blanc massif at the relatively late age of thirty, Magnone applied his immense athletic strength and artistic vision to the most sheer, unclimbed granite walls of Europe. In early 1952, Magnone joined the historic French Patagonia Expedition led by René Ferlet. Faced with the vertical granite monolith of Cerro Fitz Roy (3,405m) and violent Patagonian gales, Magnone and Lionel Terray forged a daring technical path up the south buttress. Utilizing expansion bolts and piton aid on sheer granite flakes, the duo reached the virgin summit on February 2, 1952, completing what was then considered the most technically difficult mountain ascent on Earth. Returning to the Alps in July 1952, Magnone tackled another legendary 'impossible' problem: the 1,000-metre vertical West Face of the Petit Dru (Face Ouest des Drus) in the Mont Blanc massif. Climbing alongside Lucien Bérardini, Adrien Dagory, and Marcel Lainé, Magnone established the celebrated 'Magnone Route', employing bold pendulums and expansion bolts to breach vertical granite that had defeated previous generations. In May 1955, Magnone joined the French national expedition to Makalu (8,485m), successfully reaching the summit as part of the team that placed all nine climbers on top of the world's fifth-highest peak. Magnone later served as president of the French Mountain Federation (FFME) and founded the Union des Centres de Plein Air (UCPA), dedicating his life to introducing hundreds of thousands of French youth to outdoor adventure and mountain arts. He passed away in Clamart, France, on September 24, 2012, at age ninety-five.

France🏔️ 3 Peaks

Lionel Terray

Lionel Terray was born on July 25, 1921, in Grenoble, France. Raised in the shadow of the French Alps, Terray developed an all-consuming passion for extreme skiing and high-angle alpinism from early childhood. During World War II, he fought heroically against Nazi occupation forces in the Battle of the Alps as part of the Compagnie Stéphane ski-troops, winning the Croix de Guerre. In Chamonix after the war, Terray formed an invincible climbing partnership with Louis Lachenal. In 1947, the duo made the celebrated second ascent (and first French ascent) of the dreaded Eiger North Face in Switzerland. In 1950, Terray was chosen as a lead climber for the French Annapurna Expedition. When Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal staggered down from the summit severely frostbitten and snow-blind, Terray and Gaston Rébuffat mounted a selfless rescue, sacrificing their own summit ambitions. Trapped in a 7,400-meter crevasse overnight in sub-zero blizzards, Terray gave up his gloves and warm clothing to nurse his comrades, later organizing the grueling jungle litter-carry that saved their lives. Over the following decade, Terray became the premier expedition alpinist of the 20th century. In 1952, he made the audacious first ascent of Patagonia's granite needle, Mount Fitz Roy, alongside Guido Magnone. In May 1955, on the French Makalu Expedition led by Jean Franco, Terray and Jean Couzy forged the normal route up the North Face and Makalu La, reaching the 8,485-meter summit on May 15—the fifth-highest peak on Earth. Terray's leadership was so flawless that all nine members of the expedition reached the summit over three consecutive days without injury. Terray continued his global conquests with the first ascents of Peru's terrifying Chacraraju (6,108m) and Taulliraju in 1956, Nepal's monstrous Jannu (7,710m) in 1962, and Alaska's Mount Huntington in 1964. In 1961, he penned Les Conquérants de l'inutile (Conquistadors of the Useless), universally acclaimed as the greatest philosophical mountaineering autobiography ever written. On September 19, 1965, Lionel Terray died tragically in a climbing fall on the Arêtes du Gerbier in the Vercors at age forty-four. He is buried in Chamonix, forever remembered as the soul of pure, noble alpinism.