The Man with
the World’s Best Job...
Wordsmith
Kev Reynolds and A Passion Shared
I
t took me twenty-fi ve years to meet the
brothers Ravier. Twenty-fi ve years of letters,
postcards, gifts of books, photographs, maps and
information. Lots of information, generously
off ered, freely given and gratefully received. Twenty-
fi ve years during which I’d write to Jean and Pierre in
English, and receive their replies in French. Twenty-
fi ve years in which we’d half-promise to meet next
year – in the Pyrenees.
But we didn’t. I’d dodge the opportunity to meet
them face to face. Not being able to speak more
than half a dozen words of each other’s language,
our friendship was destined to remain one of
correspondence only. A friend at home would translate
their letters to me, while Jean’s wife Michèle would
make sense of mine to them. Face to face? It wouldn’t
work.
Or so I told myself. Coward that I am.
It was in 1981 when I fi rst wrote to Jean and Pierre
Ravier via the Bordeaux section of the CAF (French
Alpine Club), seeking permission to use some of their
photographs to illustrate my history of mountaineering
in the Pyrenees. Acknowledged as the fi nest pair of
climbers ever to operate in those mountains, I was
fl attered by their readiness to help in any way they
could. And long after my book was published, the fl ow
of correspondence not only continued but escalated.
They could not have been more generous in sharing
their love and intimate knowledge of their mountains
with me, yet I could not help feeling something of an
imposter. Me, little more than a stumbler and bumbler,
a recorder of other people’s adventures; I could only
scratch my head in admiration for what Jean and Pierre
had achieved since their fi rst major ascents as teenage
twins in the fi fties.
Born in Paris in 1933, they spent the war years at
their maternal family home in Tuzaguet, a small village
set among rolling meadows and trout-streams in the
Pyrenean foothills. Though it is Bordeaux in which
they’ve lived most of their lives since, Tuzaguet has
always been their Pyrenean base camp from which
the vast majority of their vertical adventures began. It
was from Tuzaguet that they were introduced to the
mountains with a family outing to the Néouvielle lakes,
and Tuzaguet that saw them off to create major routes
on all the main summits over the following decades. In
between, Jean climbed in the Caucasus in 1959, and was
with Lionel Terray on the fi rst ascent of Jannu in the
Himalaya in 1962, while in the 1970s the brothers took
part in two expeditions to the Hoggar Mountains.
But it is among the Pyrenees that their aff ections
lie, and on those mountains that they’ve made history
and gained the respect of their peers on both sides
of the Franco/Spanish border. Yet the respect and
admiration they’ve gained is not simply for their
climbing achievements, but for their moral conviction,
originality of thought and non-conformity that reaches
beyond the mountain environment. Life-long pacifi sts,
one night in 1960 the brothers climbed the twin spires
of Bordeaux cathedral and hung a banner between
them protesting against the Algerian war, while down
to earth, their humanity led to making their business
premises available at night to rough sleepers, of which
Bordeaux has many.
In his book, At Grips with Jannu, Lionel Terray wrote
of Jean that ‘I doubt whether I have ever known a
higher degree of unselfi shness than [he] exhibited –
almost to the point of saintliness. If one of us was cold,
Ravier took off his anorak and gave it to him. When he
noticed that rations were short, he suddenly produced a
loss of appetite, so as to make his share available to the
others. His is a spirit of the most extreme sensitivity
and I am sure he fi nds living in this egotistical and
brutal world extremely diffi
cult…’
winter 2018 | Outdoor focus 3